Chapter VI: Part THREE: I (1)

“Darling, are you quite sure you’re comfortable?” asked Eva over the telephone.

“You mean, because I don’t like a long-winded talk over the telephone?” I demanded.

“Something of the sort,” she admitted. “Well, then, now that I know you, too, are in a comfortable chair--I do think our expeditions from one party to another on New Year’s Eve were so productive of what you might call evil consequences that I must talk with you. And you are in one of your crotchety moods and won’t come down here. If you would be sensible and draw up a comfortable chair--or have you?”

I acknowledged that I was in a splendid chair. “What did you mean about evil consequences resulting from the New Year’s Eve parties?”

She was prompt. “You wanted to look at all sides of the prism; so you should wish to talk Nick over, now you’ve been out with the two of us in conjunction. By the way, Nick has changed his opinion of you.”

I said that this could only be pleasant news, since according to her account, recently given me, he had disliked me intensely. He had said to her that I had the remains of the great predatory nose of the Middle Ages; it was small but beaked, short and yet gave the impression of being too long. Eva reported that for once he had been clever in the way he put it: he had said that I was too small for my nose and my nose was too small for its type. “He really was delicious!” she had exulted. “Of course you don’t care what he says about you; and it is so seldom that I get the chance to quote him to any effect. I mean, he’s a man of few words. Sure you don’t feel badly over it?” I reassured her, and heard the rest of it. He had said that all things about me were just off something: my eyes were just off hazel and my hair was just off red; and that to wear my hair in a long and heavy bang was just off the right style for me, being at times too young for me and at times too old for me. “And, Dinah--” had then said Eva on her own account--“and this is my reason for telling you at all, darling--he said that all of this would be, merely, amusing, if your fingernails weren’t so often broken by the keys of your typewriter. I’ve implored you to give more time to beauty shops!” lamented Eva, sincerely grieved.

I asked lazily: “At what part of the evening did he change his mind, Eva? Because I remember that on the way to one or the other of the orgies I overheard him say to you that my head was too big.” I remembered, too, that Eva had flown to my defence with “She isn’t conceited.” “I meant her skull,” he had said; and had had the grace to flush when he saw that I had caught him out. “It was a joke,” he had said lamely.

Eva’s voice came over the telephone, clear and sweet and excited in retrospect. “Don’t you remember--” We went into every incident of New Year’s Eve during which our moods had varied with the tricky weather. The snow that with a gentle but deadly persistence swirled against my windows served to detach my attention from the mechanical carrier of Eva’s voice: we might have been once more in the taxi--Eva and Nicholas and I--on our way uptown to the afternoon party which opened the prolonged festivities of the day.

The park was white and phantasmal, the trees weighted with ice, immovable, no longer part of New York; it was silent. But from the sidewalk there rang out on the frosty air the cries of children who snowballed each other. The taxi went muffled in a world of little treble voices; and through the early winter dusk the street lamps now pricked the way.

Nicholas’ spirit was cleansed by the sight of his city. He said: “When we come back, the lights in the windows will give us the silhouette.” He sat peacefully, a smile on his lips and glory in his eyes. I wondered that Eva did not see that this was pure delight. I wondered if he had it in him to love Eva as he so evidently loved his birth-place. “It’s magnificent,” he said, as if to himself. “There’s nothing like it.” For these white buildings were children of the womb of Manhattan. He peered through the twilight to miss nothing of the serrated mass, and I understood that his mind did not see that it was twilight, unless it was a twilight of the gods. His mind was crowded with the city of the future, austere, immense, but springing from the growth of the town and of man’s necessities, as all great architecture does.

Leaning back with her half-smile, Eva said with forbearance: “How can I be sure that you admire me, when you cling to your city? I am not of your city.”

He turned to her. “Admire you? Why--never before in my life was there the absolute! You’ve the great gift of beauty, Eva.”

She sighed gently. “No other gifts, Nick? I think I should like you to add the greater gift of intelligence.”

Laughing, he tightened his arm around her shoulders. “That isn’t worth a tinker’s damn beside your lovely face.”

She said: “You’ll spoil my coat.”

He glanced at me. “Isn’t Eva’s idea of sentiment an oddity?” Of her he enquired meekly: “Where are we bound for? I cling to my old-fashioned notion that I feel more comfortable if I know the name of my host or hostess. The other night--don’t you remember?--Molly Underhill screamed at a young man with a powdered face who was running as fast as he could to the centre of the gathering ‘Whose party is this?’ And the young man lisped ‘I’m thure I don’t know. I was bwought here by thomeone.’”

“Don’t be foolish,” said Eva.

He openly admired her. “Do you know, Eva, you can speak like a gangster--out of the corner of a rigid mouth! You have so many accomplishments.”

But Eva disliked being teased. She walked into the thickest of the party well ahead of us; and Nicholas was indiscreet enough to follow. I was to find, in the course of the night’s festivities, that he watched her with the same teasing smile on his lips that already had put her in a defiant mood.

The visiting Englishman was holding forth to a circle of cheerful spirits. “Do you know how to live, you Americans?” surprisingly asked the Englishman of these proprietors of the latest luxuries in the world. “Or do you live? Did you see the flea circus?”

Charles Glidden, owning to having seen the flea circus several times, requested to know if this chain of thought were kind. “Freye Remsen bought one--in a glass box--named Emma. Emma dropped her party manners in the home; the next morning she bit him.”

Freye Remsen’s eyes filmed with embarrassment. “What was wrong with that?” he asked.

Glidden enquired: “What do you object to?”

Freye Remsen floundered: “The way you said it----”

“Did Emma bite you?” Winnie Conant shrieked. “Simply answer that.”

“Well, yes,” acknowledged Remsen. “But what does that signify?”

The editor of “Walhalla” interrupted eagerly: “I’d like you to write an article on that for my magazine. Not over three thousand words. And--” he hastened to qualify his enthusiasm--“we don’t pay much.” He embraced the group in a flourish of an extraordinarily large cigar. “I think it will be splendid. Perfectly splendid. So typical of certain aspects of American life. Treated fantastically, of course,” His eyes danced. He had a way of speaking in a series of exhalations.

The party foamed. One ran across one’s friends and said inane things because in the presence of allies one rested, and encountered one’s enemies and said sparkling things because if one were not pyrotechnic it would look as if the last book had not done well. Outside the windows, shut behind their own drawn curtains for their own parade, everyone in New York pushed themselves through forced revelry.

Eva said in my ear: “Will you keep your eye on Nick?”

“What is he apt to do?” He looked peaceable enough.

Her funny frown, which furrowed her wide brow and would never wrinkle, was bent upon me.

“Trying to get rid of him?” I asked.

“You are so unaccommodating,” she then sighed. “Of course I’m not trying to get rid of him. But--you wait and see!” With this hint, she walked off. I came upon her later on at the moment when Nicholas himself spied her and turned on her so brilliant a smile of joy at sight of her that she herself laughed. “Nick--you old dear!” Eva’s love-making, half the time carried on amongst her friends, could as well have been conducted on the sidewalks, so impersonal was it. Sweet as honey, her eyes soft, she stood looking at him as a fond sister might.

He said to me: “In another minute she will disappoint me. She has a way of throwing cold water in a fellow’s face.”

She said impatiently: “You see, Dinah? All I want is to speak to Spencer Mapes; he’s arranging for Henry Pepperel to interview me.”

People coming in struggled with those who were leaving. Snatches of talk were cast upon the air and bounced back from the assault of other glass bullets. As if evoked, Spencer Mapes bobbed up, and, being an opportunist, utilized the accident of finding himself within hearing distance of Nicholas. He said to Justo Zermonte: “I think your idea for a caricature of Eva Litchfield is good. But do explain it again?”

Zermonte demurred. “It sounds so foolish; but I see her that way. I should do her with her neck elongated, and her mouth without human emotion, and her eye--just one eye showing--and looking, looking, so watchful for those who make a move towards her. I should take all humanity out of her. It would be the only way to do her--you see?”

I turned in order to inspect Eva as a stranger might. She would sail away, over the surface of a lovely reflecting pool, if one made a sudden ardent movement. Across the lovely reflecting pool of her absorption, she went away from Nicholas to lean on the piano and meditate. Her eyes were cast down, and her pensive pose, her lashes resting so quietly on her cheeks, might have hidden any line of reaction. With his incredible sinuosity, Spencer Mapes reached her side. I heard him say, as if she were protesting something that had offended her: “Hold on to yourself!” But I knew, as he knew, that she was pleased because she did not wish to be anything but the swan that sails away. I smiled at him, and for an instant his heavy-lidded eyes flashed amusement. Then once again he was bending solicitously and murmuring to her. “You see what is happening already? Your husband’s people are sapping your belief in yourself. But--forgive me? I had no right to say that. They are your people, now--so far as they will let you go with them. However, I can’t help remembering that I had much to do with making you--starting you on your career----”

She said nothing. She retained her charming pose.

“To see you treated as an experiment in sociology----” He seemed to hesitate.

I glanced swiftly at Nicholas Van Suydam. His high-bridged nose might be indicative of arrogance; it might be the outward sign of that inner spiritual necessity which urged his mother to live on in Washington Square, to drive behind a pair of horses, and to mope over Chinatown now lying along streets named for the branches of her family.

I thought that he had made up his mind to say nothing about an incident which must have affronted him. Or possibly he had not overheard. But his eyes were more brightly blue than ever, and this I took for a danger sign. On the mantle of the snow, which as we started downtown no longer fell but lay in unbroken white, he must have seen Eva’s head as Zermonte would caricature her. The picture so close to his mind’s eye that he was unable to see around it to Eva herself, he said with a forced gaiety: “We used to have storms like this when I was a boy. In those days, they used to last a long while; but this one may be slush by morning.” He expected no reply.

We had been accompanied downtown by Charles Glidden, who sat facing us and glancing indifferently from one to another. We were cross, and said little. I do remember Glidden wandering through a maze of words unlike his usual precision. “I was thinking of life. It’s quite a building, in itself--life. Take Eva: I’ve always been curious to see what Eva would do with life. She makes such interesting experiments.” And I remember that Eva cried out: “Stop it!” It was bitterly cold, and the still air bit and scratched at our lungs as if filled with the sharp white stars glittering above us in the hard blue sky. So still was the world on this eve of a fresh new year that we heard the snow snapping under the feet of the pedestrians. The taxi encouragingly labelled “Heated” barely melted the powdered snow clinging to our feet. Eva leaned forward and dragged at the front window. “Can’t you turn on more heat in here?”

The taxi driver’s head protruded from his great coat collar, and craned to blink at us. Clouds of frozen breath shot from his nostrils, and from his mouth as he opened it to reply. “Sorry, lady. It acts up like this when it’s cold weather.”

She at once began bewailing her fate. “Shut the window, can’t you, Nick? You might have noticed that it was open.”

The taxi bumped over unyielding heaps of snow pushed together by the street cleaners; we heard the rasp of their wooden shovels. “I must say, Nick,” she resumed, “that in so far as climate goes your town is awe-inspiring. If it were April, this heater would boil us alive. I don’t see why anyone wants to live in this town.” She glanced around at him. “Why don’t you defend it?”

I said to myself: “He may perhaps be a fool?” For he put a consoling arm around her and murmured: “There! There! The poor girl is cold!”

She lifted her eyebrows at Glidden, who looked interested but only as if he were at the theatre. She sat very stiff and unyielding, and said unreasonably that she saw Nicholas considered nothing beyond the city of New York.

His face close to hers in the comparative darkness of the taxi, he said softly: “Wrong! I care for you. But you’re such a cold-blooded young fish----” I watched him curiously: he must have wondered at the strong tug of everything of which he disapproved. His roots were deep in the soil of Washington Square: what matter that his flowering might come in the little house around the corner? He met my gaze, and said: “She’s prettier when she’s tranquil; isn’t she?” I began to like Nicholas Van Suydam.

“You see?” cried Eva tragically. She was looking at Glidden; she seemed to think that he was on whatever side she might select. He was leaving us, ready to make the perilous passage of the slippery sidewalk to his door; and he paused and looked from Eva to Nicholas with it plain on his face that he had started none of it but that he saw no reason why he should not enjoy the spectacle. I have never seen another man with so profound an interest coupled with so complete an indifference. The treacherous sidewalk was, in his eyes, quite as human in its attempt to upset his equilibrium, as Eva and Nicholas at internecine war.

Nicholas had recovered his poise. In fact, looking back, I think I never saw him wholly lose it. In his control of even his sudden flares of rage against Eva he was disciplined; in this he showed his kinship to his mother. He said, now, that he was hungry, and asked where they were to dine, and when. “Oh, Nick, darling!” she exclaimed. “You can’t possibly be hungry! We shall be nibbling at sandwiches all night!” His reply, that sandwiches were not food, brought forth a statement which she appeared to consider an explanation of all that bothered her. “You’re a Dutchman,” she let fall, definitely final about it. But she added--Eva always added: “So many things are more important than the question of food.”

The taxi waited at my hotel, the door still shut, while they argued it. “I can tell you this, my girl,” he propounded, “food is basically the most important thing, for on its supply and general excellence hinges what you have in mind.”

“What have I in mind?”

“Work!” He grinned at her. “To that, I’ll add love. And I should like to ask you how either work or love would go on, on a basis of artistic victuals?”

“I’m leaving you,” I interrupted firmly; for Eva was asserting, on a higher key, that he was a Dutchman. I left him saying firmly: “And what’s the matter with that? What’s wrong with Dutchmen? Who started this city, I’d like to know, if not Dutchmen?” Through the now closing door of the taxi I heard her, “I’m tired of hearing about it.”

I went draggingly through the lobby of the hotel. The desk clerk hailed me with the abominable optimism of those who see the old year out: “It cleared up for the New Year, didn’t it, Mrs. Avery?” I plodded past the desk, my storm shoes flapping and my spirits going down into the melted snow with which by now they were filled. I took the elevator up to the new heights of Nicholas Van Suydam’s city. The curtains were drawn back, as only an occasional venturesome bird peeped in. The view at night was extravagant; spangled with lights heaped in pyramidal form, the city might have been the scene of Cinderella’s party. But, my mind inflamed by the supposititious plight of those of us who were encroaching strangers, I ran across the room and pulled the curtains together. Within the short space of time since my return the weather had again changed; a few flakes of snow, large as feathers, blew against the panes. Weather--and women, Nicholas would perhaps say, and be correct in saying it--changed with no apparent reason. Man was foolish to worry over either. Let storm, meteorological or human, come when it would, but let man keep his safe course.

I admonished myself: “James Pomeroy would say that living on the thirtieth floor is making a queer bird out of you, Dinah Avery. Get back to normal and hurry to the next party.”

But I was so late that when I went by for Eva they had gone without me. The desk clerk had telephoned to several cab stands before one of the wheeziest vehicles still in the business pulled up at the kerb, stalled its engine, started, and ran over the kerbstone and shuddered. Dubiously, I entrusted my life to it. The wheels spun industriously, but the short distance to the establishment of those two babes in the wood known as the Little Metcalfs took nearly an hour. The drifts were high and in the side streets would remain without the guiding shovels of the street cleaners until another day. It was a hazard, to get across the sidewalk when eventually I arrived. Snow banks gleamed under the light from the opening door of the house. I climbed stairs, fought through guests massed in the narrow hall, and stamped my own contribution of snow on the rugs in Yancey Metcalf’s gay bedroom. Another braving of the hall, where a misstep would precipitate a broken body down the well of the stairs, and I was in the large studio and already distinguishing Eva’s laughter. The studio was filled with her friends; and she hugged to her heart the desire to believe that humanity meant what it said.

Spencer Mapes met me; the glass of egg-nog that he pressed on me might have been brewed in the warm friendliness of his smile. I found myself seated with Eva on a black satin puff in the centre of the floor. We were telling Mapes that we did not like egg-nog and would take punch the next time. A very short time after, I heard one of us say to Mapes that the punch was so weak that we should like more. The Little Metcalfs flew about, picking smouldering cigarette butts off their rugs, rescuing glasses that bade fair to tip over on books which people plucked from the shelves. We wondered what they meant to do with the books; after the third glass of punch no eyes saw print. The room turned slowly, then faster, and we told each other that we were sleepy from the cold outside. Mapes murmured solicitously: “Don’t you girls want to go powder your noses?” We knew that he wished to get rid of us; but even the recalcitrant I had no intention of getting rid of him. And Eva giggled. “There’s Nick--and he’s tipsy!” Nicholas was shaking cocktails that no one had time to drink. A pretty woman said, her voice blasting one of the dead calms that occasionally fall on the best party: “Lucullus Kahn reminds me of a fawn with fleas.” We watched her husband scamper madly to her, his face a knot of apprehension. But Lucullus Kahn remained unmoved.

Spencer Mapes dropped down on the puff beside us. He looked sadly at Eva and said: “You poor little fish out of water!”

She said to me: “Do you remember what Nick called me?” and began to cry bitterly.

Mapes said again: “Don’t you girls think it would be a good thing if you went and powdered your noses?”

We told him that this was the last hope of all men who yearned to get women off their hands. Smirking at him, we pulled out our vanity cases and fixed our noses.

Bright fragments of the human race shifted, turned, twisted into tangled groups and rearranged themselves in patterns of craziness. A large police dog bounded from one forgotten glass to another, rapidly lapping the contents. And Eva caught sight of Nicholas once more and shrieked with laughter. “Nick! Nick! You’re gambolling! And it doesn’t suit you in the least!”

He said: “Didn’t you want me to be a bohemian? All right! I’ll be a bohemian--part of the way.” He appeared to be sober enough to know the point at which invariably he would stop; and at once demanded to be told how long she meant to let that fellow Mapes hang around. The agitated clinking of ice in the cocktail shaker which he still held made a tintinnabulation of ghostly menace. When we left, in groupings that had come about casually, even the police dog was tight; he lay on his back in the middle of the floor, ridiculously smiling.

Many people found themselves in one taxi. Nicholas enquired with resignation “Where now?” We said that we were on our way to Florence Quincy’s. “We can’t,” we assured him, “fail to show up there.”

“Why not?” he demanded to know.

We said piously: “Because we always go there on New Year’s Eve.”

Someone argued with the taxi driver: “Buddy, how about speeding up the old bus?”

The driver said on his own sad note: “Say, listen! It may be Noo Year, an’ de cops is slack fur de night; but I ain’t one er youse souses what gits let off. I got my fam’ly ter t’ink about.”

The taxi ran in and out, weaving, between the posts of the Sixth Avenue Elevated. We heard Spencer Mapes say that it would help us if we stopped at one of the all-night Coffee Pot stands.

Nicholas said: “So you’re here again? The bad penny. No: what I think you are is the dark angel.” He wagged his head.

Eva cried: “Oh, please?”

We climbed on high stools and urged the attendant to hurry with the coffee. We decided that the attendant looked as if he took his drinks from the Nedick Orange Juice stall on the corner, and laughed heartily. Nicholas counted the assortment of Eva’s friends reflected in the mirror behind the coffee urn, and counted us as we wavered on our high stools. The attendant apathetically swabbed the counter as we spilled our steaming coffee. It was all in the twenty-four hours of a day; and what to him was a snowy New Year’s Eve but extra slush on the floor? Nicholas asked him: “How many of us do you make it?” The man was not interested; he would check the bill by empty cups. “Strange!” observed Nicholas. “Very strange! In the taxi there were so many legs and arms that I feared we’d brought along the entire party.”

Someone down the counter chuckled--a fat man’s chuckle. We discovered it to be our taxi driver, telling about us to a friend who occupied the adjacent stool.

Mapes suggested to Eva: “Another cup wouldn’t hurt him.”

She said in a stricken voice: “I never before saw him like this.”

Mapes reassured her: “His sort of old stock, one might say, do everything to excess; they think it their privilege, don’t they? You remember what you told me he said about food?”

She leaned over to me. “I wonder, now, if I told him that?”

“Of course you did,” I scolded her. “The thing to find out is what you may have neglected to tell him.”

Our poet chanted: “I never saw such an amazing youth as this stage decorator chap! Look here, young Guy--were your parents Little People?”

Young Guy pouted. He did not know how to take this poet. Always, he had dreamed of meeting real poets. And this one was bald-headed, and his eyes danced mischievously. “Are you guying me?”

The poet went into ecstasies. “Hear him, now! He puns by way of starting the New Year right. Young Guy, where thou goest I will go: you will never lose me.”

Said young Guy: “Aw, shucks!”

The poet rolled his eyes to where heaven must be lurking above the embossed tin ceiling of the Coffee Pot. He said devoutly: “Thank God for this marvellous New Year’s Eve!”

Aghast, someone--I think it was I--said loudly: “It’s the New Year already! Listen!”

And the city blew up in hideous noise.

Throwing loose change on the counter, we rushed to the sidewalk. The trodden snow splashed our ankles as we jumped up and down and added our noise to the screams of every whistle in the harbour. We forgot our driver who still conversed in the Coffee Pot: he seemed, all at once, to be a sort of Father Time who came on the stage to cut off the head of Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight. We commandeered a cruising taxi whose driver left his hand on the throttle of what the poet said thankfully was the most raucous horn in the world. “Never take your hand off that horn?” he implored the driver. “It enables you to stand out from the mob. You want to stand out from the mob, don’t you? Of course you do. It’s the ambition of every intelligent being.”

“Aw!” said the thug-like driver. “Can’t a feller enjoy hisself when he gets the chanst?”

The poet cast a benign smile on all in the taxi. “All human beings together, on this glorious occasion!”

Eva held tightly to her husband’s arm as the crowd of us, refreshed by the combined effects of the coffee and the long drive uptown to Sutton Place, crossed the sidewalk in front of Florence’s house. “I know I’ll have pneumonia,” she predicted. “But maybe not; we have the health of whales.”

He wondered, Nicholas said, if we did truly have the health of whales, which were warm-blooded animals in the wrong element. There was question of how to get into the living-room where, presumably, Florence Quincy stood to receive her guests. The man who had arranged to interview Eva, Henry Pepperel, wedged between two stout females and endeavouring to salvage what was left of his superior poise, called out to Nicholas: “You’re an observer, too, aren’t you? Do you fancy Miss Quincy is leaving me here, impaled, you might say, because I once interviewed her?”

Eva no longer leaned on her husband’s arm. She stood alone and sufficient unto herself. She said: “Watch me break through!”

Henry Pepperel crooned: “Oh, but you, Miss Litchfield--you can accomplish the impossible, naturally. You are one for whom crowds make way.”

One of the stout females advised her not to believe him. “He’s always kind until he starts writing his interview.”

We stood in the hall whence a stair with a delicate iron rail spiralled to the drawing-room floor. Behind us, amusingly, a fountain leaped from the wall and fell tinklingly into a shallow basin; and young Guy played with the startled goldfish and for the first time seemed at home. Nicholas still had Pepperel to contend with; into his unwilling ear the great interviewer dished up what he had found out from many years of the game. “Isn’t it imbecilic,” he confided, “that they don’t want to be interviewed unless it’s a grossly flattering spiel you turn out? And yet, they die like flies if you don’t beg them for interviews.”

I judged from his face that Nicholas was in a better humour. On the drive uptown Eva’s manner towards him had been intimate. She had enquired playfully: “Didn’t I see you--the chaste and elegant you--kissing Molly Underhill, down at Yancey’s?” He had rejoined that he regretted it. “She’s kissing everyone. But I’m sure it wasn’t Molly I kissed. Are you sure it was?” She had laughed, and had called him by her most passionate term of endearment: “Nick--you old dear!” He had been so pleased, so cheered, that I suspected this was nearly all he ever got from Eva.

Men and women shoved through the front door, stormed the stairway, and fell back on the little hall. I was washed up by this human wave to the slight protection of a console, and found that again I was pressed close to Nicholas. I told him: “I do feel like the wrath of God. I know now why men pulling out of a spree just pitch in and get drunk all over again.” I pushed my bang off my forehead, and heard myself say with deep emotion: “Oh--hell!”

Bill Metcalf came to lean against the console, and found me in possession and looked the other way. “I’m apologizing,” he said simply.

“For what?” Not that I cared.

“Yancey says I tickled you, down at our party,” explained the chastened Bill. “Yancey says she never saw anything so disgusting. She says you howled, and rolled up in a ball.”

I became indignant. “Why shouldn’t I roll up in a ball? I happen to be ticklish.” Out of a pensive pause, I added: “I don’t remember a thing about it.”

Bill fretted: “The point is, I don’t see why in the mischief I wanted to tickle you. I wish I could understand how I came to do it. It never entered my head to want to do it.”

Yancey, her vividly pretty face distorted by her resentment, bore down on the more or less homely faces in the hall. She started in at once: “What a night! Dinah, our place is all but demolished!” The big Englishman had sat in a newly upholstered armchair, and the armchair had creaked, had groaned, and had finally collapsed in the backbone of its structure.

At this stage, I appear to have wailed: “If it were only a chair that had been wrecked on the beach this night----!” I seem to have gone further, and to have confided to them all that I had a weak character; for here I was, at the tail of the evening and ready to drop with fatigue, and nothing could induce me to go home before this party broke up. In an effort to meet him half-way, I said to Nicholas: “This is how we keep it up. Don’t you see that we can’t help it? Why, then, come down hard on Eva?” I was indignant when he hit back at me with his idea that we did not keep it up; he had noticed, he said, that we were dropping by the wayside. The wayside appealing to me at this moment as a tempting deathbed, I leaned more heavily against the console and sighed: “I can’t follow out even a feeble thought.”

Someone laughed; it was James Pomeroy. He asked about the state of my soul; but it was my legs which were in a bad way, I told him. “What you need is to confess to me,” said Pomeroy. “What are your secret sins? They must be black, for I’ve never caught you out in one.” I said that we must have reticences. But I was studying the reticences of Nicholas Van Suydam, who stood amongst us and was not of us. His frowning concentration on the problem of Eva had been intensified by my remarks; he stood in thought, his eyes the only sign that he recognized our swarming presence.

Pomeroy said in an undertone: “I wouldn’t offer a penny for your thoughts: I know them. If you will study the life of the outsider, why don’t you take it lightly and get some amusement out of it? Watch how I do it--for instance.” He had brought to this party a young girl, Priscilla Swords, to whom God had given a face and called it a day, according to Molly Underhill. Her widely smiling prettiness made us uneasy, so that we had huddled away from her. Pomeroy said to her: “Darling! Act pretty for the ladies?”

Priscilla said sweetly: “It’s such a nice party, Jimmie.”

He said to me: “You see? It’s beautiful ingenuousness that redeems the casual stranger in our midst. Van Suydam hasn’t beautiful ingenuousness.”

One could never tell whether Nicholas had overheard what he was not supposed to hear, or whether from association with Eva he arrived at the same point in his cogitations that we reached by talk: he had a disconcerting way of chiming in. He said, now: “You’ve given me an idea, Dinah. Eva can’t help it. Therefore I am taking her home.” He pushed his way to the stairs, and was lost to our sight in the beehive of the second floor.

“I might as well go too,” I announced; and relinquished the console.

It was dreadful, upstairs. Florence, allowing all to kiss her, found time to tell me that she wondered what life was all about. Charles Glidden danced with a cream-coloured siren and, whilst clasping her with splendid histrionic ability, stared with his customary detachment at the various piquancies of the crowd. Molly Underhill languished in the arms of the young boy who had wanted her never to stop talking. Winnie Conant danced with her Addis, and called out to me: “I feel immoral!” I stood in the doorway feebly repulsing a powdered youth who wished to confide his ideas on taste; I was not receptive to Glidden’s suggestion, shouted to me as he whirled slowly past with the siren: “Get out and stick pins in people and watch them kick. Everyone kicks differently. It’s very amusing. The pins, of course you understand, must be mental pricks.”

Someone at my elbow said distinctly: “This is a brothel.” It was Nicholas Van Suydam. He had not yet found Eva. But through a rift in the dancing crowd I saw her; her face was as white and exhausted as all others in the room. Spencer Mapes made it plain that he looked after her.

I had again lost sight of Nicholas. I reminded myself that there was nothing I could do about it. And he came back through the crowd on the stairs, Eva’s wrap over his arm. He pushed Spencer Mapes aside with his elbow and held the wrap for his wife.

Winnie stopped dancing to ask if I were going with them. I said that I was not; I added, still more disagreeably, that if they were luckily let alone by all of us they might have a chance. “A chance at what?” asked Winnie skeptically.

From the head of the stair-well, Spencer Mapes looked down on them as they departed. Leaning thus over the balustrade, he seemed to embody in his lean dark face, in his intent eyes, all mishaps of the year just dead, all mishaps to come in the year just born; he might have been juggling the two years, watching to see how he might toss and catch the balls.

Thankful to be alone at last, I took a taxi and rolled swiftly down Park Avenue, encountering no traffic lights. New York was supine, played out by its merry-making. Dawn was in possession of the city. There is nothing so disheartening as dawn that is not rosy.

From a position of relaxation in my splendid chair, I was by now droopingly over the arm. But through the telephone came, sprightly and interested, Eva’s dear little voice: “Now, darling, that you’ve seen Nick and me together, what do you think?”

“I prefer not to say.” I was determined on this.

“H-m!” came over the telephone. I knew that she had drawn her small mouth into a button-hole: she did this when resolved on something. “Well, anyway, Dinah, you must acknowledge that he’s a heavy load to carry on my shoulders when I am with my friends? You see that he’s impossible at a party.”

II

I cautioned myself: “My good woman, don’t be partisan. At every opportunity, you’ve stated that there are two sides to a question. Why not, with your always well explained inquisitiveness, look into Eva’s husband’s side?” He was not so reticent as I had anticipated. Or rather, I imagined the truth lay between his inherited reserve and the trick of ready confidences which to a certain extent he could not have avoided catching from his wife’s crowd as if it were the measles. He must have been bewildered. Nothing of his mother’s training could have prepared him for Eva.

As we would say, I wanted his slant on Eva.

If one waited long enough, Eva played into one’s hands. I demurred at one of her demands to see me at once; I must, I told her, see an editor who was more immediately important. She suggested that I meet her at her publisher’s where, if I insisted on putting business in her head, she remembered she should go. She again asseverated the urgency of seeing me without delay.

I had no intention of meeting her; but I went--possibly from a fear that otherwise I should miss the key note. I went from a magazine editor’s office--where there were gay curtains at outside windows and gayer flowers on the desk--to the inner cubicle of all publishers: the waiting-room nicely calculated to break the nerve of the most recalcitrant. I found Nicholas Van Suydam already in waiting on Eva. He was seated on a comfortable sofa, but he looked half his usual size; even his long legs were shorter. The atmosphere of the cubicle was heavy with the suspended breathing of those on the rack, and Nicholas glanced furtively at persons whom he did not recognize but whom he assumed to be authors in various stages of expectancy. A young fellow clutched to his breast a manuscript that could only be his first. A frowsy female, by the force of her determination, held down a reluctant secretary while she pointed out the best passages in her book which was still in the relatively happy state of not having been rejected. The bored head of a department shared a corner with a gentleman who preached on the excellencies of a work that so far was in his head and on charts which he spread over their united knees. A small though firm woman said: “I insist on speaking to the young man who changed my commas in my last book.” Over the partition separating the cubicle from the main office there came the high-pitched irritation of typewriters. The activity of book publishing leapt the partition, and fell upon the heads of those who wrote books and weakened their stamina by its superior organization.

I said: “She asked me here. She said she simply had to speak to me.”

He said: “She asked me here. She said she simply had to see me.”

The fact that we had reached the point where in concert we laughed at his wife and my friend broke upon us at the same time, and we stopped laughing to curiously inspect each other. But I knew that he was going to tell me almost as much as she would have told.

He remarked inadequately that we had been seeing each other at teas, and as I let this pass without comment he continued: “You look like a meditative kitten. Have you been saying to yourself that I am a lazy devil? But I’ve always found late afternoon in New York a maddening time of day. I want to hurry home, and call out through the darkening house ‘Where are you, Eva?’ And Eva goes to teas, at this eerie hour. If I don’t go with her, I am assailed by loneliness. Dark, in the street outside. You know how it looks, down there, very late in the afternoon; I called your attention to it, the last time you were down.”

I remembered. Along the front of the apartment house across the street the fresh summer awnings had been lifted to admit the cool breeze of the end of the day, and through these unveiled windows heads thrust, and looked up, and drew in again. There was rain in the air, but it was across the river. I said: “You like to stay at home when you’re not working. But we reverse it, you see; we are obliged to reverse it: we stay at home when we work.” Everything about us was the reverse of all things about him. I wondered if he had seen it, for himself, and that it was at this he cavilled, in his mind, during his disputes with Eva.

He replied with his enforced light touch. “As to work--I spent a large part of today leaning out my office window and contemplating the city. Now, don’t, please, say what Eva would promptly say to confound me--that I had led her to believe I worked while at my office. There are times when a man must dream; and one dreams in the most tranquil spot. I would fulfill a better purpose if I sat in the park, or on Riverside, and absorbed the city rearing itself above me; but by doing this wise thing I should be flying in the face of the convention that a business man is always busy. A man, if a proper fellow, sits behind his desk continuously, a portentous scowl on his face and in his heart a mad desire to get off and go fishing. He’s the typical business magnate: the scowl tells you so. Always on the job--a man to be depended on.” He quirked one eyebrow in a way to which Eva had called my attention; I had the idea that he was quirking his eyebrow at himself because of more of an inner discontent than could be accounted for by his differences with Eva. And he then came out with an astounding question: “Do you ever dream--in private--you writing folk?”

I drawled: “At the last tea at which we met, I believe I remember Florence Quincy at the wailing wall: ‘Haven’t I the right to my privacy? Haven’t I the right to the time to work?’”

“All tosh,” he countered promptly. “It is in effect, the litany of literary people: ‘Oh dear God, grant me the time for writing!’ You aren’t angry, are you?”

I acknowledged that we were amusing. “Oh--I mean, unconsciously so.” I was, at the same time, acknowledging to my sense of fair play that I had not expected to find his attitude towards us so disparaging and that I had no right to object to what he might say.

“You’re a breed set apart, by your own wish, from mankind: what are your sources of laughter?” he asked with a faint uneasiness. “You nervously organized sensitives--to quote my wife--who cling together, working each other into tantrums, preying on each other, wrecking each other: tell me, do you like each other?”

I had no reply to this. I did not know. Through a perturbation set up by his question, I heard him explaining that we appeared unable to stay away from each other except when we were deep in slumber; we were, he said, banded against everyone besides ourselves. Architects did not feel this overpowering urge to herd together every evening. On the golf links, he had observed that lawyers mingled agreeably with men who were neither lawyers nor judges, doctors with men who might be potential patients but who had not yet fallen into their professional hands. His friend Anthony Bloodgood, to take an example, could bear it if the stock market were not mentioned during his hours of relaxation. But always amongst us, he averred, there spatted back and forth our technical discussions. “Do you never weary of it?” he wanted to know.

I murmured in extenuation that we did not always listen to what the other said; we waited our own turn to say something. In this way, I explained, we snatched a bit of rest here and there.

“Your private lives, in short,” he on his part expounded, “are lived in the midst of turmoil?” He was, I suspected, thinking of something that his words but overlaid.

I was proud of myself that I smiled good-naturedly. “You are in league with Mattie, then?” As he was frankly puzzled, I explained. Having finally found time for listening to whatever was preying on Mattie’s mind, that competent maid had almost sobbed to me: “Miss Eva’s got some friends what’s got looks like pizen. Yes ma’am, like pizen. But do dat stop Miss Eva from listenin’ to ’em? No ma’am, it don’t. Lordy, Miss Dinah, she ain’t got nothin’ but fancy sense. But she got a good heart. She’s jes’ like a little chile with a good heart, an’ belief.”

He responded to this eagerly. “She has a good heart! The things she does--Mattie knows about them; Mattie can tell you----” He almost stammered in his desire to put his wife forward in a light that he thought new to me.

I wondered: did he love her, except for her beauty? Because if he loved her for nothing more he would not hold her. As if in reply to my silent question, he said: “Even her imperfections are lovable.” But there was, in his fond tone, in his defiant eyes, a perplexity that he as yet denied. He was trying to change the foundations of his home, to make use of a term of his profession; but when a building is erected on the wrong plan there are two things only to be done: it can be put up with, or it can be razed. “After she went away for the first summer of our married life,” he continued his apology for Eva, “she wrote me that at first she couldn’t bear to look at her typewriter because it had come between us, you might say.” But Nicholas Van Suydam was not fatuous: instantly he began to laugh. “She said that the little white keys were teeth to devour her--little masculine teeth biting her heart. I say, Dinah! What I said to her was ‘Why masculine? Feminine teeth can bite.’ And, speaking of the summer--have you any idea of what she is planning to do?”

“None. But surely she would tell you?”

He said that she had begged him to guard her, during the remaining weeks of spring, from the intrusion of the world. “Lock me up, if I suggest going out?” she had requested. “Don’t permit me to go to parties?” He had had what he called one of his ardent fits; he had said to her: “There’s nothing I’d like better. I’d like to think of you, all day, as safely at home waiting for my return. There’s happiness for a man--to know that the woman he loves is watching out the window for his return at night--waiting for him, beautiful and sweet, at the end of his day in a man’s rough world. Oh, Eva----!”

I do not mean to say that, when telling these scattered incidents of his life with Eva, he at once launched into the extended and shameless dissertations which I time and again quote. Rather, he told his story by his halts, his uneasy frowns, his jerky flaps of his hand which were in some strange way appealing; had he not been of my own generation, there were times when I should have felt maternal towards him. But I have not Eva’s camera-like memory for conversations, and I have had to put into words those things that partly I read from his disquietude.

He went floundering along. “She says things, sometimes--at home---- You see, if it weren’t for these things she says and then, evidently, tries to retract, I’d be so much less crazy about her. Can you see how that could be? She said, the other day, that something is happening to her, in her mind, so that at present she doesn’t know much about herself.”

“She doesn’t,” I agreed broodingly.

“She put it down to a real reversal of values. She thinks that maybe she will get her bearings; and maybe not. She said she had found out that one can’t force issues.” I judged that he had been rendered uneasy by this. He had dimly perceived a change in her, so that her words had been merely a confirmation. At times, during the last few days, she had looked as if the breaking point with which he had frequently threatened her were close at hand. This morning she had asked him to meet her here; and he had demurred, because he thought it unsuitable for him to intrude on her business relations. She had, he assured me, all but begged him to come. “She said--it’s so foolish to repeat it!--but she did say that she had about found that her need for me was not so much---- I do feel that I’m drivelling!”

“Go on,” I encouraged him. “I’m tremendously interested. And do remember that I’ve known Eva longer than have you.”

Thus urged, he fixed his eyes on a distant object--it happened to be the frowsy female who still expounded the salient points of her book--and, virtually, plunged. “You know, then, how carefully she chooses her words--it’s almost as if she had got them on paper, she’s so sure--so that what she says has an added weight of truth? She said ‘I found out, lately, that my need for you is not so much physical as it’s spiritual.’” He laughed a little, and asked if I considered this a complimentary remark for a wife to make to a husband.

“From Eva? Undoubtedly.” I left him in no doubt that I was positive about it.

“I didn’t think of it in that way,” he then acknowledged. “I could think of nothing besides what I put to her--a hot demand to know what the devil she meant. I do feel apologetic for telling you this,” he broke off to say. “I must be catching your literary urge to tell all.”

I overlooked the slur to again beg him to proceed. “I’ve been away so long,” I told him, “that I myself know little to tell, and possibly--undoubtedly--should tell it if I had any store of knowledge. But, seriously, I am fond of Eva; and I want to hear everything that you’re willing to tell me.”

He gave me a quick look. I detected an added stiffness in his manner when, after thinking it over, he complied. “What she said next is really my reason for bringing up the subject. I’m aware that you’re a friend of hers, and I feel on my own part that you can be trusted.”

This I could take only as a rebuke, although he was unaware of its hitting me hard: he had no way of knowing that I had been up to what I could only call ferreting. However, my qualm of conscience did not prevent my listening eagerly to what he had to say.