Chapter VIII: Part THREE: I (3)

She recoiled, pressing her hands against the wall for support. A man had never before struck her. She might have been crucified to the wall, her hands out on either side, holding her body upright; she seemed to hang by her hands. I am sure that she heard what went on around her, and that she could take no part because she had been deprived of her reason for ever again speaking. He had smitten something which had held her up; and this eventually she tried to tell him. But smiling women pressed in on her, clawing at her with words--tearing out her eyes with saccharine words--hurting her, defiling her. She heard them say to each other that she wept because she was not the central light of the party. She told me afterwards that she did not know how she heard these words, for already she was running from the house; but under the strain of her suffering she must have turned clairaudient. The party, becoming too terrible for her spirit, transformed all gatherings of her friends into horrors no longer to be borne; she must not see them again. She said this many times, on her way home: she must never again see her friends.

Gathering up her wrap and mine, I said to Addis Wickersham that I must try to overtake her. “She looks very strange. She’s apt to do anything.”

“Nonsense,” he said comfortably. “She’s strange because she gets away with it.”

I did not believe this to be a pose on Eva’s part. I insisted on going after her. I found myself saying, many times, “She can’t help it.” She walked rapidly. I saw her ahead of me, her thin frock blowing back in the night breeze. She had almost reached the little friendly house in Eleventh Street when I overtook her; she had walked more slowly as she approached her home wherein her husband awaited her return. With a final run, I caught her by the arm; and she seemed to come out of a trance. “Oh, it’s only you,” she said.

She began telling me much of what I have just repeated, and the climax of her rush towards her home. She had said to herself that she must get off from the crowd and think. Her look turned in, and she began to know fear in its decadence. She realized that she must uproot this particular fear, if she was to go on. Time was what she needed--time in which she would hear no unkind word: security in that time. She stopped and leaned against the wall of a house. She tried to tell herself: “It’s their jealousy.” But, her senses more than ever acute, as if she had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, she looked back and read on their faces everything they had not said, and her own intelligence arose to defeat her. She heard herself groaning.

Everyday life pressed in on her: a policeman stopped to look curiously at her. “Anything wrong, lady?”

She straightened. “No. Nothing.” She added: “Thank you, officer.”

Together we went the few remaining yards and she opened the door with her latchkey. I knew that she hoped she would not see Nicholas. But he came down at once. “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking closely at her. The policeman had been kinder.

She averted her tear-stained face. Like a frightened child, she held my hand. “Nothing. Nothing you would understand.”

“I never saw you look this way----” he speculated.

She threw herself face down on the day-bed and cried out that she must be saved from her friends.

Nicholas stood looking down on her. If she had glanced up, and so seen his smile, she would have recognized--behind the smile, where she might never again see it--that quality the absence of which in him she had deplored: irony, newly born to console him.

V

New York in summer is the ideal place to work in; when once hot weather has dropped on this spit of land the hardiest offenders stop giving parties. Office workers who traverse the streets because they cannot avoid it hold their hats in their hands and companion women whose skimpy frocks expose blistered shoulders. Asphalt menders take possession, and the pungent smell of hot tar mingles with smells more intimate to the inhabitants. Close over the sweltering city comes down a roof of brass.

The summer of Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-nine found New York preparing to pay the piper, although no premonition of the end of a great orgy had as yet got in the air. I finished my book, and hung over the parapet of my terrace and watched the antics of aviators who always seem care-free and who are known to be above suffering from the heat, and wondered if Eva and Nicholas had arrived at a better understanding. September set in with its usual recrudescence of a frazzled mid-summer, and what plants were still in window-boxes lay down and died gracelessly.

The sound of Eva’s voice over the telephone--high, sweet, and, I noticed, in some way that I did not fathom very happy--was one of the most irritating things that could have happened. She announced their return at an unexpectedly early date and demanded my immediate appearance at her house. There was nothing I wanted less to do. My curiosity was like the plants in the window-boxes, dead or dying and not caring to pick up. I wanted to go somewhere and tell my own troubles. This bright and terrible day was not the curse which would have been hurled by high heaven at a dancer, let us say, or a singer. Only to a novelist, cooped up all day and every day, would the sun have seemed so personally vengeful.

“Well,” I said to Eva, “I’m glad you are back, and all that: consider it said: but what in the name of peace have you to tell that could not have waited for a more merciful day?”

No matter what the weather, she remained cool and good to look at. Nothing could have persuaded her to leave the house in the daytime. She received me with bubbling mirth; she was, it shortly appeared, vastly amused over her husband’s having fled the house. “He’s about done in by the stage during which I corrected the manuscript; he said my jabbering sentences over and over sounded like radios in the distance. He said ‘What is the matter with it? That thing stands up. I can understand it.’ Poor darling! And I said--” she looked askance at me--“I said ‘Suppose I got at you with a comment on your working so hard over a God-awful building that will stand up anyway?’ He thought that this meant I was at last grasping his line of work, and he said ‘Angel girl!’ and was happy. He really doesn’t, you know, take in what I mean when I say ‘I’ll die--die!--if it leaves my hands before it’s as perfect as I can make it!’ Isn’t it odd, Dinah, that a man thinks kisses--love-making--can heal the laceration of the heart over the eternal fact that a book is never up to its conception?” Her lifted eyes were breath-taking. Gazing into them, Nicholas had probably not heard a word she said. And she might at this moment have been making love to him, the tone of her voice was so thrilling.

But underneath her lightness, her gaiety--and no one could be more lightly gay than Eva in certain moods--I felt that there was something else. I waited.

“Did you know,” she questioned me, “that Nick is playing the stock market? Oh, not plunging; he says he went in ‘not enough to ruin us if I lose, but enough to make us if I win.’ Tony Bloodgood is managing it for him. Nick says his mother is disgustedly shocked, believing as she does that the only sound value is land. But as for me, when he told me I rushed at him and kissed him. And would you believe it, Dinah, although he is the one who is speculating, he was profoundly disgusted by my delight! He accused me again of loving money. Oh--we aren’t beyond quarrelling over everything that comes up, in spite of----”

“In spite of what?”

She threw her head back and laughed. I saw her long throat rippling with mirth. “We shall come to that later. I want to tell you how inconsistent Nick was about what he calls my love of money. Dinah, he has never been poor; he doesn’t know what it is to want to be certain that one will never again be poor. I knew what was the matter with him, although he didn’t know what was the matter with me. He had to have an interval in which to again enclose against me all of his mother’s scorn, all of his mother’s resentment, of the blatant wealth of the present New York. Oh, yes: I’ve been studying Nick, as I would study a character for a novel: there is every reason, now, why I should understand all his quirks and fancies. Not for the first time, he was wondering why I alone have the power to rouse him to this admiration of his mother’s tenets. And I saw his wonder, and his own--in spite of himself--resentment of me.”

She looked worn and tired, and at the same time she looked deeply satisfied. Was it because she had finished her book? Was it because she had decided to understand her husband? She went on to say: “He can’t see how, when a book is at last finished, one is played out, fagged, and terribly glad.”

I glanced suspiciously at her. “You are glad of something else,” I accused her. “What is it?”

She burst out laughing; and I noticed, now, a different quality in her laughter; it lilted. “Well, then--if you will have it--I am going to have a child!”

I sat staring, dumbly.

“It was the last thing I expected,” she told me.

There was no quiet in New York. I heard the noise of outdoors coming in on us--the windows open to it, and my nerves beginning to shriek on account of it. I thought that if there should be no noise, inside and outside of houses, I could more quickly take in what she had said: but the main thing, I felt, was what she in a moment would say. The Elevated roared and clanked, half a block away on Sixth Avenue. I cried: “How can anyone think, in New York? If it were just quieter, I could tell you what I feel about it, Eva.” I reflected. “And I could also try to get at how you feel about it.”

“I am glad,” she said positively. “I should think you could tell.”

“That’s what I was saying,” I returned. “There’s a numbness that drops on me, when the windows are open and noise pours in over me; and then I can neither think nor feel. But I do know that I am glad. I think it is the best thing for you.”

She threw up her hands. She laughed, then, at herself and, I knew, at me. “You did say that as if you were an ancestor!”

I realized that always at the back of my mind had been the speculation of how Eva would take the contingency which had at last arisen. I suppose I had felt that she was not the kind of woman who stands up under buffets; and in spite of her brave laughter I felt sorry for her. Her head drooped, at the moment, as if it had been beaten down by storms. She was looking out at the trees in the back garden. These wretched backyard trees of New York are called the Tree of Heaven--because they grow on nothing but hope, possibly. The leaves had started falling, and the almost bare branches were drawn in ink strokes against the darkening sky in which the first timid stars were coming out. Eva’s small head, bent and graceful, was sublimated and became part of the loveliness of twilight. There was about her still figure a suspension of all emotion. Life had stopped for a time while she looked within. I wondered what she saw; and asked what was the matter, and winced in anticipation of what she might say. I wondered if Nicholas, when she had told him, had felt as if he did not dare move, that any slight motion might precipitate the crash of his ideal.

What she said was: “I’ve always wanted a child.”

I saw that for the time she believed it. She was dramatizing herself. Her voice broke into a sort of rippling joy, like the note of a bird, deep in the throat but liquid. “I’m so glad! So glad! I have such a wonderful feeling of joy, of happiness, of--contentment: as if I had found out something.”

“Did you say this to Nicholas?” I asked impertinently.

“Certainly,” she assured me, her eyes opening wider. “How would you have had me do it? I was bound to tell him how enchanting it was for me to have a child. He took a long breath, as if it went through his body and buoyed him up to the skies. He was quite perfect about it. He couldn’t speak. He was afraid to touch me, as if I were a phantom of some delight that had always faded from his grasp. I suspect he’d had an ideal of me, all along, that would have satisfied me if I’d been nice enough to find it out. This great breath that he drew--exalting him to God, Dinah!--was so nearly a deep sigh that it startled me. There’s a lot to Nick. But I wanted him to say it; I wanted to see what words he would use.”

I said: “He might have felt--you describe him as being very moved--well, then, he might have felt that words can do nothing, when a man’s soul is touched.”

She smiled with pleasure. “Yes, I think that was the way he felt about it. And besides, the poor darling was never good at saying things. He has no command over words.”

I began to giggle. “There’s the sound of conjugal home life!” And we sat quiet as mice, listening to the scratch of Nicholas’s latchkey in the front door. He came up the stairs on tiptoe, the ridiculous creature. He entered Eva’s study as if looking in on an invalid. “Sweetheart!” he said lucidly. If ever I saw a man whose heart might burst with its load of pure happiness it was Nicholas Van Suydam. Words--in a case like this?

When he did resort to words, he employed the wrong ones. “I hope my little woman is taking good care of herself?” he admonished her tenderly. I fled.

I observed that the Van Suydams now embarked upon a course of coddling Eva. Strolling down to the Brevoort for luncheon, I noticed that the maroon brougham waited at the door of the little house in Eleventh Street. Upon a fine afternoon, I was amused at the sight of Eva in the brougham, seated beside her mother-in-law. She looked demure. I fancied that she actually enjoyed the pomp of the brougham with Higginson on the box-seat.

She telephoned to ask if I were going to Charles Glidden’s party for a most exalted English woman novelist. “Who--” she almost gurgled--“do you think is going with us? Nick’s mother!”

I settled myself comfortably at my end of the line. “Go on; tell me the rest?”

“Dinah, that old woman is worthy of praise. She is making a determined effort to see things from my point of view. The now unbroken chain of the Van Suydam family! She hasn’t the slightest desire to see the party, but she considers this the proper time for the family to go out together.”

Eva knew how to make the effective entrance; she would be late. But I would not have missed it, as none of us would: we all arrived early, and made excuses for hovering near the door. Florence Quincy whispered to me that she wondered if Eva had been told by some little bird that the exalted one would also be late, thereby stealing her thunder. “Of course you know----?” said Florence. “Ah well, she is at last a Van Suydam!”

Molly Underhill said violently: “She is welcome to it!” Molly stuck to me like a burr. Her face was pinched and terrible. “Look here,” she burst out, “I’ve got to talk. Talk about myself. Or I’ll blow up. Do you ever wonder about yourself? Do you ever wonder what it is that holds you back?”

“From what?” I demanded impatiently.

Desperation flashed out on her face, and ran through her tense, thin body like a poison. “It’s this way. And if you ever repeat it I’ll say you’re lying. I am a ‘good woman’.”

I looked at her. There was no obvious retort.

She said: “I overheard someone saying it about me, as I came over to speak to you: and it’s true! It’s true!”

I bounced off the foot on which I had sat doubled comfortably. “What of it?”

She said: “I didn’t want it to get out on me. Oh, hell--where’s a drink?”

James Pomeroy hastened to get the drink, and watched her with interest as she tossed it down. “And----?” he encouraged.

Molly smiled languishingly up at him. “How long have you been leaning over the back of the sofa?”

“Not long enough to hear much,” he reassured her. “Do finish it? You were going to say----?”

“I was telling Dinah a lot of fibs because she is simple enough to believe me.” She rose and sauntered off, swaying her hips.

Pomeroy said to me: “She’s a frustrated victim of her early environment. She’s afraid she will die in the state of grace that her mother would wish for her. She will be mortified when she faces God.”

I bewailed myself: “We’re vultures, aren’t we? We pick bones. I’m sick of it--sometimes.”

“Dinah--darling!” said Pomeroy. “Don’t allow yourself to become a virago.”

All around us, talk was served in tantalizing tidbits. Robed like a vampire from some unconscious wish, Florence Quincy stood, with wispy grey draperies flattened against the wall, moodily observing because she lacked the desire that at this moment would have thrown her into something. Her face in repose was never cheerful. We had always fallen short in guessing what she was after. Pomeroy said to me: “It’s simple to guess what Molly Underhill is after: she’s after a load of sin.” He continued buzzing in my ear.

But in my ear others buzzed. “I myself shall try Africa next,” said Justo Zermonte. “The only thing one cannot find in New York is a Negro at home.”

Someone busily took down notes: I heard the scratching of a pencil. “You don’t object if I use that in my column, do you? No one else has thought to say it.”

Molly Underhill huddled in a distant corner with one of her youthful admirers. She made me uneasy. But Pomeroy said: “She can’t harm them, and they can’t harm her.”

A young Jew flung himself at the piano and played the “Rhapsody in Blue”; his face, fiercely intent, wretched, worn, was removed, by his music, from the people in the room. His fingers drew, through the piano, all that was pent up in us. Thwarted passions, disillusioned passions, passions that had leapt the fence: what did it matter, when the result was suffering? I was softened in my judgments by the “Rhapsody in Blue.” I enquired of Pomeroy if conventions had come out of God’s way, or if God were Himself the product of conventions.

“Dearest!” said Pomeroy, putting up his eyeglass to look me over. “Don’t be silly.”

I said to myself: “I won’t talk. I won’t speak another word from the real inside.” And at once I said to Florence Quincy: “I’ve been working it out--what we all need; and it looks as if it of course has to turn us into hell cats--if we do it.”

“We are hell cats anyhow,” said Florence. “But what do you mean?”

I thought of Eva. “In order to do creative work one must have--and preserve at all costs, even to acting as a slow poison on those who come in contact with us--the heart of fire and the brain of ice. That’s the working combination.”

We all thought of Eva, today. “It works both ways,” said Florence fairly. “The unfortunates who take us over poison us. Why do they ever want us?” she pursued pensively. “We never lapse into nice comfortable bodies around the home fireside.”

James Pomeroy remarked that every now and then he, on his part, almost bolted in the other direction. “There’s Priscilla Swords: upon my word, I have to hold myself back from bolting in her direction.” He expounded his reasons for never actually bolting to her. He had said to her that he was about to give her up as hopeless; he had said: “I’ve taken you everywhere; I’ve arranged for you to meet the most famous people in New York; and what impression has it made on you? Not a dent!”

Priscilla Swords had given him her wide smile. She had teeth, he said, that were purely white. “But I do appreciate it, Jimmie. I think they are very nice.”

He said that at this there was nothing to do but break into a genuine groan. “Oh, God, Priscilla! That’s the one thing they aren’t!”

We were laughing over this when the Van Suydams walked in; the smile in Eva’s eyes as they met mine was part of my amusement and at the same time apart from it. She paused long enough to whisper to me: “She has put on her diamond earrings!”

The earrings winked merrily as the elderly lady turned her head. They were large single stones pulling down by their weight the lobe of the ear. On her very small hands heavy diamond rings glittered, and on her bosom sparkled an imperious diamond brooch of the extinct sunburst design. Hooked into her black velvet creation with the hereditary lace after-thought, she trod the measure of a lady’s entrance. I heard her say to Charles Glidden, who, somewhat dashed, met her as she advanced: “A small glass of sherry, if you please.” She observed the party with a detached interest worthy of her host. “Times are changing; and I hope I am not narrow-minded,” she observed graciously. The _lorgnette_ came into play. She appeared to be indifferent to the fact that we watched her as she dissected us; she might have been oblivious of it.

Florence nudged me: “Too bad! And on top of that, too. But here is, at last, the great unknown.”

The exalted one swept into the room on Glidden’s arm. She was at once correctly arranged in a strategic position, and we began filing past. Authors buzzed, near to the celebrity and watching her, a gigantic hive of industrious bees. She was encased, as in a cuirass, with the aura of undisputed fame. Armed with her knowledge that nowhere in the world of the English language was she unknown, she beamed, as she could afford to beam, on her court. She was kind, as the great are kind. And Glidden smiled at his prize, and at his party, and enjoyed a three-ring circus in his mind.

Someone said to Florence and me: “She’s a bit old-fashioned in her style, but she can run for a while longer on her prestige, of course. The old war horses can’t be killed off, worse luck.”

And Pomeroy chuckled: “So she got under your skin, with her formula?”

For the exalted one had dropped into a chant as the easiest way out. Her voice trailing after every introduction performed by Glidden, she turned like an automaton to meet outstretched hands. “So glad to meet you. So glad to meet you. Let me see, now--what is it you have written? So stupid of me to forget.”

“It’s a swell show,” said Florence. We found that still we were accompanied by James Pomeroy. “And to think that I started to go to the theatre instead!” gloated Pomeroy. We hung, enthralled, on the exalted one’s lips, which continued to mouth her formula: “So glad to meet you. What is it you have written? So glad to meet you.”

Getting away from her husband and mother-in-law, Eva fled across the room. “I can’t bear another blow! Did you hear her? What does it come to--that I’ve worked, and sold my soul--when that woman asks what I’ve written?”

“Why can’t you laugh at it?” asked Florence.

However, to even Spencer Mapes’ suave interjections she merely shook a despondent head.

“This won’t do,” said the sophist. “You will have to get up your fighting spirit.”

She said nothing to this.

He pursued his theme. “If you are to beat her out, you must keep yourself in the pink of condition--like a prize fighter, if you’ll pardon the comparison. It’s no half-time job--building up a great reputation.”

She said: “True.” Her voice was discouraged.

He pushed it. “For the reason that women let other interests get in their way----” His pause was impressive. But his lips remained pursed for another cunning effort.

She appeared to be lost in thought. Her eyes were now fixed on him. I looked around for reinforcements; but Florence and Pomeroy had sauntered off.

Mapes’ hesitation might have arisen from a noble wish to be fair. Eva’s face was pale; her lips parted as if to speak, but she contented herself with another shake of her head. He said: “You mustn’t think for an instant that I’ve anything but your ultimate good at heart. I feel--to return to our unworthy comparison--that, in a way, I am your trainer.”

She said: “I know. It’s very good of you.”

He put a commiserating hand on hers. “Don’t be coddled the wrong way--the injudicious way. Remember you’ve your great gift to guard, and for the sake of that gift everything you may want to do yourself--as a woman--must go into the discard.”

A strange exaltation took possession of her. Her cheeks once more bright with the clear pink so characteristic of her beauty, she cried: “Oh, thank you, thank you, Spence! You don’t know what a friend you’ve shown yourself to be--today--at exactly this time!”

He stood looking after her as she went away; and I stood looking fixedly at him. He said to me, surprisingly: “It’s desecration!”

“Ah you frighten me!” I almost wailed. “You frighten me! What are you trying to do to her? You are revolting!”

“My dear Dinah,” he replied smoothly, “you never use the delicate rapier; do you? Your weapon is the battle-ax.”

I said: “What a friend you are!” I pushed through the crowd in pursuit of Eva. But she, on her part, searched for Nicholas. I caught her as she said to him, excitedly, that her brain was on fire, that it burned the inside of her head. She cried to him: “Do you realize that no one considers me? Have you ever stopped to think that everyone conspires to use up my strength?” Had he noticed, she enquired as if it were his fault, that idiot Molly Underhill holding on to her while she told her troubles? “People--” she almost raved--“should keep their troubles to themselves.”

Nicholas was mild about it. “Early to bed, for you. You are working yourself up.”

With her sudden compunction, she touched his arm. “Poor Nick! It was a sad day for you, when you married me, wasn’t it?” For a time she stood quietly, regarding him with kindliness. Then she shrugged. “But you would do it, you know. All right! That’s that. Find your mother, and we will go home.”

It was the next day when I heard from Eva the sequel to the evening.

Mrs. Van Suydam had sat erect in the taxi, resisting her natural fatigue. “We shall have a lovely Christmas, children,” she had remarked affably. “And I hope it may be a bracing, biting spell of weather, such as we had--I recall it vividly--the winter Nicholas was born.”

Eva’s interruption had been abrupt. “It will be a Christmas of work, for me.”

It appears that the elderly lady had protested. Eva had explained with scant courtesy that she must start in at once on her next book, whereupon her mother-in-law had called such a course, “in her condition,” suicidal. “Think of your unborn child,” Mrs. Van Suydam had persisted, driving Eva--so she told me--frantic with her insistence on the necessary sublimation of Eva Litchfield to the child. “Don’t push yourself,” said Mrs. Van Suydam in a voice of stern admonition.

Eva said that she herself spoke through set teeth; she was by now in an agony of determination. “I’ll beat that dreadful woman if it takes me years! And that is exactly what I’ve got to do--push myself,” she had finished in a cry on this her instant response to her own doubts.

The little house was cozy, and Eva’s study heavy with the scent of the roses that Nicholas kept on her writing-table. They stood looking at each other. Nicholas smiled, she remembered, but she knew that her own face was grave. He was still thinking, she assured me, of the emotion of the day when she had told him that she was going to have a child. Her hand, however, was at once raised against him. “Wait!” Held suspended in his recapture of the lovely mood, he did in fact wait. He was helpless, as are all men, in face of this mystery of the creation of another human being.

With the exception of the springing flame in her gaze, she did not move. She was arrested in any ordinary motion by the violence of her purpose. “I am not going to have that baby!”

She reported to me: “I saw straight into his mind. It’s easy to see into a man’s mind when you’ve been married to him.” He was conscious of his face. He had felt the muscles drawing tightly--drawn back to his ears, drawn around his nose--drawing his mouth into a new and strange mouth. In his mind that Eva so easily read there was a crash, as if a house that he had built had fallen.

She again spoke to him. “You might as well understand, first as last, that I have no intention of going through with it.” She said she began walking up and down the room. “I have my work to do. I have my career to consider. Let other women have children.”

And again she was very sure that she saw into his head, and she was not moved by what she saw. He looked at her with impersonal wonder; for this much he had discovered--that she was ugly. But he realized that he must say something. Eva reminded me that she had told me, upon another occasion when she had reported one of their scenes, that when he was exalted he was not under a compulsion to speak. He said, at any rate: “You would do this--you?”

She said to me: “If you keep your head, and watch--and you are a novelist--life is dramatic: isn’t it?” What she said to him was: “You are being melodramatic.”