Chapter IX: Part FOUR: I (1)

There was about the whole thing a sense of swift disaster. Ruin of all things, temporal and spiritual, seemed close on our heels. And yet, nothing had actually happened to us. But the air was charged with vengeance. One found oneself believing implicitly in the Old Testament, and in a God who was mighty in wrath. In words, on white paper, I am failing to convey the full weight of this threat as we received it at the time. Things are never so bad, once they are translated into words; for words fail of true imputation. If I had seen on the sky, as upon my return to New York I had almost expected to see, a finger tracing a curse, I would not have been shakier than I was when, in the chilly afternoon sunshine, I came from the little house in Eleventh Street with Eva. This disappointing sunshine glinted across the stoop and neglected the north windows and warmed nothing.

We were going out for a walk. Eva’s face, above her furs, flower-like in its delicacy of feature and colouring, was so much more heartening than the things of which I had been thinking that I smiled at her. “You are nice, Eva,” I said; “you’re nice!”

She turned upon me eyes that failed to see beyond her own concerns. “When you come down here and bother me with doleful prognostications about things that don’t affect you and me, Dinah, you get me out of sorts. Don’t be ‘sensible’, will you? You’ll spoil your work if you develop executive ability. Nick’s that way.” She gave me her little impish grin; her half-smile with its implications was for other moods. “Spencer Mapes says that Nick has sense while I have sensibility.”

Blaming her for her failure to throw herself into my mood, I now failed to follow her lead to lightness. “I knew, all along, that the outrageous summer before last was an omen. Eva, the brassy sky was a warning!”

She displayed sincere astonishment. “Of what?”

I had, in reply to this, only the small rejoinder: “The stock market crash.”

She remarked, practically, that as neither of us had had money in it we need not think about it. “If you had the things to worry you that I have,” she went on, “then I would sympathize, my dear. But as it is--I have Nick’s work to worry me, if you want to know.” She complained that he had got little work of late, and she put it down to what she said she had all along suspected: the quality of his work had fallen off. “It’s not surprising,” she stated. “Look around you at these abortions of his trade.” She waved disdainfully at the modernity of lower Fifth Avenue. “How can anyone call these horrid things the result of talent?” She was, I had noticed, unimpressed by modern architecture; while it appalled me, it left her unshaken. She said, now, that she felt a desire to go to her mother-in-law’s house in Washington Square and rest her eyes. “I love it, there. One knows, when in that rarefied atmosphere of dried rose leaves, that nothing happens which can shake the world, Dinah. It might do you good to go. You let your nerves play you tricks.”

And yet at this time New York was a city struggling with alarms. Even the staccato of steel construction was, or seemed to be, muted. It was a mild winter, enervating the optimism of those accustomed to bitter cold; and, with surprising ease, the citizens had dropped into one of the most pronounced cases of mass pessimism seen by a world that has seen a great many things. It would not have surprised the New Yorkers if their amazing new buildings had tumbled down. Under the influence of adversity, they had even begun to speculate on how much weight the rock of Manhattan could hold up without splitting, a contingency over which no thought had been wasted in the days of their prosperity. “Have you sensibility?” I wondered aloud.

“Not that sort,” she replied promptly and cheerfully. “But I want to tell you that I have looked forward more than you may surmise: what do you think I did with the money the last book brought me? I didn’t spend it; I went back to first principles, and while I didn’t hide it in my stocking I did the modern equivalent: I put it in a bank! Oh, I’m safe! I’m safe!” she crowed. Her cheeks flushed; she looked more nearly herself than for some time past.

We discovered Mrs. Van Suydam to be entertaining her own friends at tea. The Misses Ingoldsby and Mr. Tappen Tillinghast at once ceased what they had been saying to look at us with varying degrees of guilt. With the same expression of stopping in the middle of something detrimental, the dark old portraits on the white walls might have this minute clapped their lips together; the red draperies over the windows might have been drawn in front of a whisper. Formal old chairs stiffened their backs at our entrance, nice old tables forbade us to enjoy their grace. The ginger jars on the high mantel closed in against us their dried rose leaves. I had been in this drawing-room many times, and had always found it to be a gracious room.

“You were talking about me,” Eva asserted gaily. “No matter where I go, I find that people have been talking about me. However, we all talk about each other.” But the look that she now bent upon her mother-in-law was serious, and revealed in its small way that she was, then, uneasy. “We don’t object to being discussed; it’s part of the business, really. Only, here in this house, it’s different.”

Miss Augusta Ingoldsby could always be depended on. She said judicially: “My dear girl, whenever we speak of you it is in your best interests, let me assure you.”

Eva took this with her lightness which she wore like a mantle. “Of course! I told you that I didn’t object. I came over, to tell the truth, to discuss myself.”

Miss Augusta moved her chair closer and leaned forward, efficient and reliable. “You can tell us anything.”

Mrs. Van Suydam sat more rigidly erect. “Augusta!”

I heard the aside of the younger Miss Ingoldsby: “Gussie always did talk too much, Tilly, as I am forever telling her.”

Mr. Tillinghast cleared his lean throat.

Miss Augusta rolled a vigorous eye around the circle of her cronies. She settled firmly in her chair, her feet together in the correct dancing attitude of her youth; she could have instantly risen without undue effort, and she could then have charged forward, or retreated, in full command of her body. “I am very fond of young people,” she began her lecture, “and I don’t at all mind giving much of my time to the solution of their problems.” She was so intently marshalling her as yet unspoken sentences, and the others were so keenly waiting for a chance to stop her off, that it was easy to speak in an aside to Eva. I touched her arm. Remembering what she had told me of a previous tea-party in this room, meeting her eye which gleamed with her own memory of that conversation and this present substantiation of it, I argued with her: “I see no reason for staying. Do come away? Why should you subject yourself to unpleasantness?”

Eva said: “Nonsense! Nick’s mother is never unpleasant. We are staying, old girl, and you might as well resign yourself to it.”

I urged my point, however. “Did you ever talk to her--really talk to her?” It seemed to me that the face Mrs. Van Suydam at this moment turned towards Eva was as closed as the room. This elderly and colourless face was not forbidding so much as it was casually but totally withdrawn from recognition of anything between herself and her son’s wife. I recalled her manner towards her daughter-in-law at the Glidden party a year ago. In deciding for herself a matter that she held to be solely her own affair Eva had brought down on her head an avalanche that as yet she did not even instinctively feel. Mrs. Van Suydam enquired: “You wished to speak to me, you say?” Her courtesy was so complete as to be in itself a barrier.

Eva said: “Very much. I knew, as I came in sight of the house, that I must talk to you.” Her smile was a lovely thing. And I noticed again how easily she believed in the devotion of others.

With dexterity compounded of equal parts of will and of a surety that she could do as she pleased with circumstances, Mrs. Van Suydam got rid of her friends. It might have been that Eva’s refusal to carry on the Van Suydam family was the first irretrievable reverse she had ever encountered. I cannot recall with what polite inanities I made my attempt to escape in the large wake of Miss Augusta; I do remember that Eva pushed me into the embrasure of a window and said that she would not keep me waiting long. There was nothing for it; and I had cause to castigate myself because of a suspicion that I was delighted to have had it taken out of my hands. I said to myself: “Face facts! We are, none of us, any good. What is friendship, when one writes novels?” I therefore attempted to discipline myself by not listening. I stood behind the long red draperies, looking out at the Square with eyes that saw nothing; and I think they must have forgotten my presence, for all at once I realized that Eva was nervously shedding tears. “Tell me how to bear life?” she implored the older woman, and wept more convulsively when Mrs. Van Suydam did not at once reply.

Mrs. Van Suydam’s eventual “The only way to bear life is to do your duty” was dry as dust.

I put my fingers in my ears. But this makes the ears ring; it is uncomfortable. When I again listened, Eva was saying that she loved Nicholas.

Her mother-in-law qualified this assertion. “Not so much as you love yourself.”

From her voice I almost witnessed Eva’s defiant stare. “You mean that it would be my duty to love him more than I love myself? It’s possibly a splendid thing to love from a sense of duty; but is it a compliment?”

Mrs. Van Suydam’s “The sense of duty to the man one loves comes out of the fact of the love--if it’s love” was flat with her final decision on the matter.

This started Eva off on her sometimes wild laughter. “The old fallacies! How can you say a thing like that?” Capitulating as swiftly as she had flouted, she turned back to “How do you know I don’t love him more than I do myself?” I felt reasonably sure that this was a question which she asked herself also. But at this moment she exclaimed: “Let us be frank with each other? I am not afraid of words.” Without peeping around the curtains, I knew that her head was held proudly, as she more than ever defied criticism for which she had asked.

Not until she again raised her voice did I overhear. “I had the right of decision.”

Mrs. Van Suydam judged that “In the eyes of God, you had nothing of the kind.”

But Eva stated that she had not been speaking of God. “It’s a thing that everyone does,” she extenuated.

Mrs. Van Suydam said: “Listen to me very carefully, if you please--you said, I believe, that you are not afraid of words? It comes down to what a man is, and what a woman is. The child is the ultimate answer. As you have settled this question to suit your convenience, my son----”

Eva cried in a sudden high excitement: “So you--and Nick--are trying with all your might to push me down to a question of that sort? I see what----”

Mrs. Van Suydam continued as if she had not been interrupted. “From now on, you will find that my son feels for you the variety of love that a man thinks he feels for his mistress.” The wealth of disdain which she contrived to inject into this sentence was in its way a masterpiece.

“I see what the question is: it’s whether I shall be harnessed! It’s whether I will submit to being harnessed! It’s whether I will meekly agree to demand no more chances than women had in the Middle Ages. I--to be no better than they!” The push of her clipped words made it a sheer impossibility to interrupt; I fancied that the elderly lady must be sitting aghast. “What do you think my friends would say, if you did this to me? What do you think would be the eventual verdict of the world, if Eva Litchfield were fetching and carrying and bearing children for the Van Suydams?” She laughed shortly.

Mrs. Van Suydam then laughed also, shortly, almost viciously, with hatred. “It’s the choice that has always existed, you young fool: the choice between the women men marry and the women they make their mistresses.”

I was enthralled by this contrast between the exaggerations of the generations at war; and it occurred to me--and so amused me that I caught myself just before I chuckled--that Eva’s child, if she had had it, would have been hard put to it to discover a real right course which should also be diametrically opposed to his mother and at the same time his grandmother. The poor generations, on their hunt for novelty!

I heard Eva’s rapid, light footsteps. In her stride up and down the room--up and down, caged--she was almost running, with frenzy. She flung at the elderly lady: “By your creed, the woman with brains is to give up, if she’s so unfortunate as to fall in love?”

Mrs. Van Suydam’s words fell like drops of ice-water. “Those brains are designed to feed the brain of the unborn child.”

“My God!” Eva whispered. And then again she gasped the two words. I could not tell whether she laughed, or whether what she considered the enormity of this had literally taken her breath away. Mrs. Van Suydam sat in an assured silence. In order not to break this silence by my own convulsive merriment, I turned and pressed my face to the window pane. I looked down on teaming life. The inevitable hurdy-gurdy of all home crises in New York ground out, gaily and inconsequentially, an Italian love song. The call of the bird to its mate, the man to his sweetheart: the duet to the child--the little bird. It was the Trinity that, behind me in the drawing-room, Mrs. Van Suydam tried to force on Eva. And I wondered, not for the first time, if these poor creatures who infested the Square, involved in a struggle to make both ends meet, knew profounder things than Eva.

But Eva’s immense distaste was in her voice when she said: “I am tired of being told.” She paused. “What chance would gifted women have, if the world ran as you want it to run?”

Mrs. Van Suydam stated calmly: “It does run that way.”

“I think,” Eva began again, “that when a woman has a gift----”

“All women,” pronounced Mrs. Van Suydam, “have the gift of which I speak.”

Eva demanded triumphantly: “You quote the Bible, and God’s will: how do you get around what Christ said about the talents?”

Mrs. Van Suydam said blandly: “Christ spoke of men.”

As Eva went into a scream of laughter, I made the best of awkwardness by issuing from my lair behind the curtains. Eva’s eyes were filled with tears of mirth. She laughed until the tears dried and her eyes were left still sparkling but rueful. “I’m sorry.” She waited, uncertain what to do next. “You will never forgive me for laughing.”

I felt miserably apologetic for my presence. Mrs. Van Suydam gazed into the fire, her eyebrows slightly raised. Eva stood tapping her foot on the floor, her eyes fixed on this cool face turned towards the fire. And then she glanced swiftly at me, said “There’s--literally--nothing to be done!”, shrugged, and asked if she might use the telephone.

I began a lame explanation. “I’m very sorry that I was, in a way, forced to overhear what you said. But Eva must have forgotten that she asked me to wait over by the window.”

She said politely: “I did not forget that you were there, Mrs. Avery. I had, however, no objection to your hearing what I said to my son’s wife. She badly needs discipline.” She left it in doubt whether she considered that the fact of a third person hearing what she had said to Eva would act as a disciplinary measure. It was with difficulty that I pinned her down to my contention that I had been an innocent victim of what was none of my concern. She was then very gracious. “I pray you won’t disturb yourself over it, Mrs. Avery; for I once more assure you that I hadn’t the slightest objection to anyone hearing what I had to say.”

There was no use in further apologies. I felt like making a face at her when she turned her head to stare in surprise at the re-entrance of the elder Miss Ingoldsby. It was evident from Miss Augusta’s immediate bright inspection of the room that she had been drawn back by her curiosity. She murmured something indefinite about having forgotten to give Mrs. Van Suydam a piece of news, looked over her shoulder and by the power of her eye drew her niece, Gertrude Cuyler, across the threshold, and then asked: “What is Eva doing?”

Mrs. Van Suydam’s failure to reply might have been a rebuke to her friend for prying, and it might have been that she at once drew Gertrude’s face down and kissed her. At this moment Eva returned from telephoning. Halfway around in her chair, and with one stout ankle and gay shoe exposed by her effort to balance and yet lose nothing, Miss Augusta hailed her: “Well, there you are! I was afraid you had gone home.”

Her eyes fixed on Gertrude Cuyler, Eva advanced, her head up; on the surface of her beauty arrogance shone like armour. She said “How do you do?” to Gertrude, said the same to Miss Ingoldsby, and turned sweetly to her mother-in-law. “You will permit me to intrude a little longer? A gentleman is calling for me.” During the silence which upon her pronouncement fell heavily she smiled. She dominated the room, fading Gertrude’s more florid good looks and nearly succeeding in beating into words the inaudible opposition of Mrs. Van Suydam. The maid, going along the hall to answer the summons of the doorbell, walked too deliberately for my nerves. In the hush of the drawing-room, we heard the colloquy. To the query of a man’s voice the maid dropped into a mumble.

“Miss Eva Litchfield,” the man’s voice expounded. “I’m sure she’s here. Suppose you go and find out?”

The maid said more confidently: “There ain’t anybody by that name lives here.”

We in the drawing-room heard the sound of a man’s soft laughter. “I forgot: I’m asking for Mrs. Nicholas Van Suydam.”

Framed by the white woodwork of the door, Spencer Mapes was chastely Continental in his graceful pause. He might have been calling primarily on Mrs. Van Suydam as he bent over her hand; he might have adored Gertrude Cuyler as he let his eyes dwell on her in greeting; his ardour all but embraced the elder Miss Ingoldsby; and then he said, his voice caressing the words: “Oh, Eva!” He smiled charmingly. “I was having a lonely tea at the Brevoort, and it occurred to me--for no reason in the world except that of inspiration--to drop in here on the chance of finding Eva.” In his elaborate carelessness he contrived to be awkward; and instantly Eva’s act of telephoning him took on significance. He averted his eyes from her and fixed them on Mrs. Van Suydam as he continued with an explanation that had not been sought. He said that he was writing a critical article on Eva’s work, and had come to the pass where he was obliged to consult her on what she wished said. With all his acumen he threw upon Eva the burden of association.

Gertrude Cuyler sat with a troubled face. Motionless, Mrs. Van Suydam waited for something: there was something in the wind. Spencer Mapes shed his warmth in my direction; I knew that he was meaning me to understand that he was saying “Our own dear Dinah!” I went across the room and began the process of taking my leave of my involuntary hostess.

But one could always count on the elder Miss Ingoldsby; Miss Augusta at once rushed into speech. “My dear Mrs. Avery, don’t go yet? I came back in order to tell Lavinia a piece of news--not that I fear it will affect her, for she is sound as the rock of Gibraltar. But, after all---- I daresay you don’t, being an artist, keep up with the daily news? Artists always have their heads in the clouds, don’t they say? I have heard that expression used in relation to them, at any rate. But aren’t you, my dear Mrs. Avery, worried?”

This being startling, I paused in my determined progress towards the door to ask what she meant.

“I allude,” she said as if she recited, “to the financial news of the day.”

“I don’t,” I told her, “keep up with it.”

With a visible slight annoyance, Mrs. Van Suydam enquired what she had to tell. “For of course you’ll tell it.”

“I heard, today, from well authenticated sources which I’m not at liberty to quote, that several New York banks are on the verge of their Waterloo,” said Miss Augusta with satisfaction in having put it so neatly.

Eva cried “Which banks?” and began to tremble.

Miss Augusta’s gratification at this sensation was evident. “I don’t know, my dear girl. But do find out from Nicholas if it’s true--I certainly was told it on good authority--ahem!--Tony Bloodgood, to be exact, mentioned it to Gertrude--that he has lost money?”

Eva gasped: “Spence, I must go home. I must go home at once.”

I hastened to her. One never knew; and I was uneasy at the expression on the elder Mrs. Van Suydam’s face. Also, the interest of Miss Augusta Ingoldsby was not strictly impersonal. “We’ll go together,” I said firmly.

She clutched my arm. “What shall I do?”

I said, under my breath: “Listen to reason. I told you all of this, today, and you didn’t then lose your head.”

The clutch of her fingers on my arm was painful. I cannot remember how we got out of the house. Back of my other unpleasant memories of the day is that of curious eyes following us to the door; in front of all other painful impressions is that of Spencer Mapes solicitously attending us. I muttered to him: “If you will kindly leave us, I can manage Eva.”

Eva had a devastating trick of swinging like a peculiarly rapid pendulum, so that one was left behind, gaping, as she flew through the crises of her passionate nature. She said, with no preparation for it: “Do you realize that I’ve never had a break? Is it because I’m a woman?”

Mapes said: “I thought you were upset over the panic.”

I said to him, fiercely: “Can’t you let her alone? She’d forgotten it.”

We disputed over her; and she walked between us, erect, absent-minded, steeping herself in her own thoughts, suffering through her own thoughts. And around the corner from Eleventh Street, and straight towards us, came Nicholas Van Suydam. The eager look of expectancy on his face savoured of the earlier days of their marriage. Eva whispered: “I forgot that I left word for him to join us at his mother’s.”

I found time to be irritated that she had not said, frankly, upon our starting out for a walk, that she intended going to Mrs. Van Suydam’s. Why would she try to make me believe it the impulse of the moment?

Nicholas quickened his pace, hurrying to join us. He must have looked forward to a stroll home with her; he must again have felt the need of those intimate touches of life with one’s wife when one is friends with her. And evening was even now dropping over the city, and with it the quiet. Doubtless he had welcomed the cessation of rivetting, the noise of which must of late have jabbered at him “All construction work is about over--your career is over--it may be that everything is over.” And here we came, with Eva between us; and her face was set in a tragic look of pain. He stopped short. “What has happened?” he demanded sharply.

Without hesitation I played the coward. I turned and ran. But first I laid a firm hand on Spencer Mapes’ arm and held on until we were around the next corner.

II

Looking back on that dreadful winter, I seem to have run across Eva only upon occasions of disaster. I must have seen her in quieter moments, but the memory of pleasant things is overlaid with misery.

I knew, when I started for the party given by Daniel Pentreath, that the evening would be a sign-post along the way. It was not cheering, upon my somewhat late arrival, to fall immediately into Florence Quincy’s hands; her laughter was derisive, was mournful, was a brew of all the sorts of laughter within the range of man. “You, too, searching for the unattainable?”

“This is, then, one of your evenings in the grand manner,” I commented with resignation. “I asked you a simple question: what’s doing?”

“And I answered you, perhaps less simply. For none of us know what’s doing.” Her painted mouth set in a smile which was the antithesis of her laughter: when she laughed, her face gave the impression of having broken in order to allow sound to escape. “Doubtless you will get off in a corner--and sit on your silly foot--and moon about your soul; and if you had a soul would you be here? There’s the answer. It’s the answer to everything about us, to every one of us and our questions about everything.”

“And maybe I agree with you.”

I saw the shiver which ran along her fine skin, so that the heavy powder she wore cracked, and rolled into ridges. “There’s something in the air tonight--something bad!” With her vermilion lip-stick, and her dead white thick powder, she was a tragic clown.

Annoyed by the sound of a man’s groans coming from the adjacent bedroom, we moved away, although groans were not uncommon here.

Daniel Pentreath loomed over the studio, his gigantic chair, painted as starkly vermilion as Florence’s lips, a throne lifted above his mob of guests. He wore pyjamas, and his grey curls thrust themselves independently into the air; except for his unusual size, he might have been a bad boy escaped from bed. His great voice roared out from a great mouth like a cavern. Pentreath was indifferent to the fact that he had been born too late by many centuries. His behaviour was simply direct and self-indulgent. Topping his guests by his great height, he dwarfed them by his ruthless ability. “Hey!” he shot at someone, a vocal projectile. As most of his teeth were gone, he spoke in short sentences which he threw against his gums. “You gal! Keep your head still!”

“He’s making a sketch of Eva,” Florence explained. “She kept well in his sight until he did. She brought on herself whatever comes.”

For as he worked Pentreath muttered, and snorted, and called all women kittle cattle. “Heugh! Hard as nails--mean as the devil--vain as peacocks: all women! Ornamental, though--silly creatures! Strut like peacocks. Prancing--proud of their tail feathers. Ain’t natural: ought to leave tail feathers to the males, like the birds.”

Florence and I moved cautiously to a position whence we could see Eva. She sat against the vast canvas of Pentreath’s latest study of mountains: they were menacing mountains of black rock. She was very pale. Occasionally she looked helplessly around the room. “I know all about myself,” she said. “I wish you wouldn’t do me. You’re cruel.”

I thought: “Like the gods.” But if I had spoken aloud no one would have heard, for Pentreath’s bellow again shattered the room. “Pretty things--glaciers,” he remarked with a change of imagery; “cool, and quiet--full of clear colour--know where they’re goin’ and get there!”

The groans from the bedroom were more insistent, rising, I made no doubt, in order to beat out Pentreath at his own game of noise. A gorgeous youth came up to Florence, his Greek profile magnificently the only classic in the room. “Florence dear--do you mind?--I’m afraid that this time Barney will truly do something desperate.”

Florence said waspishly: “Do I have to take care of everyone who’s incapable of taking care of themselves?” She pulled aside the curtain shrouding the bedroom door, and out gushed the lamentations of Barney. Over her splendid shoulder, she grimaced for my benefit. “I take it they’ve had one of their quarrels,” she remarked; and went inside. The Greek profile rested picturesquely against the door jamb; its owner said to me that he was afraid the trouble was Barney’s disapproval of one of the boys.

Urged by a spiritual necessity for physical support, I went over to lean against another door jamb; and from the next room I heard Anthony Bloodgood making love to a New York girl whom we knew as one of those who are “sometimes going to write because they must express themselves.” Anthony’s voice was strange to me; it was as if his heart were singing because he was with her, and I recalled having heard that he had been in love with her since her school days. He said: “When we’re married, Janny, we can have these people at our home.” If she replied, I missed it; but Anthony’s sense of the magnanimity of his conduct again caused his voice to ring out boldly. “You don’t know it, Janny, but I’m not a brute. I know all about it, loveliest! I’m not going to scold you. I’ve done it myself, you see.”

“You!” The girl’s laughter was convulsive. “You! Oh---- I can’t bear it!”

Indulgently, he shared her amusement. “Carouse around a bit? You don’t think a chap can reach my age without having racketed around town; do you?”

All men spoke the same words to all girls; all men, in more or less roundabout ways, boasted of their early peccadillos. I was mildly amused. Glancing around for some answering smile--for this was the only comic relief of the evening--I met the eyes of a woman who had that instant taken up a position which enabled her to watch the pair. This woman, an interior decorator, was herself the rarest decoration of any room. She had a white face to which she added emphasis by her lack of the slightest touch of rouge. Her hair was densely black with no highlights and with not a trace of the blue sheen which is the beauty of actually black hair. Her eyes, a burning black without glitter, and exceptionally large, revealed at this moment a wild intensity. She looked like some ancient conception of a goddess who takes away, but never bestows, life. I remembered that her hand was small and like a bird’s claw, and that it was always bone-dry. This woman, then, stood looking intently at the girl Janny, and the girl left Anthony Bloodgood and went to her.

The studio was more peaceful than this, although Florence had been right about the tension in the air--tension flowing after me, catching up with me, as I found a chair in a comparatively hidden nook behind the piano. But in the midst of my burst of pure gratitude for the chair I realized that my host held nicely suspended over the crown of my head a beer bottle, or some such missile. The ludicrous feature of it--if one excepts the character of the weapon--was that he looked thoughtful. “Go on!” I instructed him. “Do it! You haven’t the idea that I care if you bash my head in, have you?”

“Heugh!” Pentreath grunted, and made off down the room. I scrambled from the chair. With elaborate carelessness I lit a cigarette; and I noticed, with impersonal interest, that my hand shook. He had, then, frightened me. I hurried to tell Florence, who had come from the bedroom, also carelessly smoking, that he had made me see that bad as existence was I liked it. “He knocked into a cocked hat all that Yoga stuff you forever tease me about. I wonder what would be happening to me now, if he’d come down with that beer bottle?” And she speculated, but indifferently, on whether I was unstrung because of the beer bottle being capable of causing pain, or because of the tottering of my belief.

Eva came up to us with a reproach. “Why didn’t one of you make me go home? I have a feeling of something menacing. I can’t understand what is going on. Tony Bloodgood is looking queer, and hunting for Nick: and where--I want to know--is Nick? Oh, Dinah--you always take up for him; but even you must acknowledge that he shouldn’t go off and leave me to face this sort of thing alone! Some people may be able to bear this sort of thing; but if you realized how things affect me----” She went on about artists being extraordinarily sensitive to impressions.

Florence asked if she did not think we had to hear a lot of that; and turned on her heel and left us. Enviously I gazed after her: I never acted on my impulses, and they died quickly. With a sigh, I suggested that we go down to the sidewalk and get some air.

On the steep and winding stairway another fugitive rushed past us and flung open the street door. We reached the sidewalk as the girl Janny was being handed into a cruising taxi by the night watchman on the block. The watchman treated us to a leer. “Lor!” he remarked affably. “I’m used ter ladies bustin’ outer that there house! I knows, when I sees ’em atearin’ for the street, I better git ’em a taxi in a jiffy.”

We stayed out long enough for a cigarette. I think that we were both reluctant to reënter the house. The watchman hung around, senilely communicative. “It pays ter be a watchman, on some blocks of this here town. You know this town well, ladies?”

The walls of the winding stairway were painted with beasts and birds unnaturally entangled amid unnatural forests. With every step that we mounted we became more apprehensive. But Eva said: “We’re being foolish; aren’t we? There’s no bogy lying in wait for us. But I’ll own up, Dinah, that there are times, of late, when I feel afraid in the dark. It must be this damnable depression you forever talk about. I feel---- Well, I don’t feel natural.”

As if in answer to her reassurance that no bogy-man was around the next turn of the stairs, there was a crack, a thud, and outcries from the studio. Past us, as we shrank back against the dreadful beasts on the wall, they dragged a youth with a bloody head. “Heugh! Got him!” And Pentreath returned to his seat on the piano bench where he played the interrupted accompaniment to the song of a large woman with a large voice. The woman’s voice easily soared above the febrile scale of comments on the recent violence. She sang a thing that sounded angelic.

The damaged youth, supported on either side by youths who winced when his blood spattered them, was being borne to the bathroom for repairs. He opened his eyes and said he did not see what had made Dan so mad at him. He called out: “Jonathan! Oh, Jonathan! Do please come and hold my hand while they wash my head?”

The boy Barney shuddered. “My goodness! How can you have the nerve to ask such a thing with a face all nasty and gory like that?”

“Jonathan?” the injured youth implored. “Do please come with me while they wash my head? Please, Jonathan?”

“No, I won’t!” said the gorgeous youth with the profile. “I’m glad of it!”

Through the now uneasy movement of his guests from room to room, Pentreath played and listened to the song; his face was fine and rapt.

Eva’s spasmodic clutch was on my arm. “Pentreath isn’t human, is he? But he’s great! Why should any of us mind what he does, or says? That is what it is to be truly great.”

Many drank at the sideboard. Addis Wickersham pushed through the throng to ask Eva if it were true that Nicholas had eloped with Gertrude Cuyler. “And here am I, on my way to console my own wife, which you will admit is a novelty.” He added that it had been reported to him that his wife was in possession of Pentreath’s mammoth bedstead, from the depths of which she declared her intention of ending it all. “A side show to the greater show of the party,” commented Wickersham. “You ladies are always upset, in this house; because Daniel steals the spotlight.” His sonorous voice flowed to the bedstead in the adjoining room. But something was missing from this splendid organ; who could be the centre of things at Pentreath’s but Pentreath himself?

It occurred to us, belatedly, that we missed Molly Underhill from amongst these excitedly moving women. And someone said: “She’s off somewhere trying to get herself ruined.”

I found myself near Nicholas; and both of us had lost Eva. He said: “Do try to find out what’s on Eva’s mind?”

I endeavoured to reply with comfortable assurance: “Oh, it’s merely the times.”

And at this moment, through a gap in the throng which had again turned delirious, we saw Eva’s little mouth going--going; and someone with a pale face came up and said that Nicholas must get Eva home before she should have a breakdown. I heard Nicholas mutter that this would be a good chance to hit Mapes with a beer bottle, and saw that the man with the pale face was he. But Mapes at once faded into the mass of people, and Eva, her cheeks wet with tears, waited for him. But I thought that she waited for anyone who would help her. People were crowding, but I got the impression that they did not attend Eva. It was a man around whom they clustered, necks stretching to see over each other’s shoulders.

His pleasant face dead white, his gentle eyes glassy, his plump form on the verge of collapse, this young man, Freye Remsen, felt no ground under his feet. He who had talked to every desperately threatening artist in New York--he who had believed these people to be the great tragic characters of the century--had now looked on the face of death by self-inflicted violence, and everything he believed had been at once reversed. He babbled: “I was going to bring Molly here tonight--and her apartment was filled with the police and they held me up and pushed me out. I was going to bring her here tonight. The place was full of policemen.”

Pentreath stepped down from his vermilion throne. He reared up like a primeval statue. He bellowed: “Well? Ain’t that what we’ll all come to? Ain’t we all mad as coots?”

III

On every street corner men and women offered for sale apples which the passersby were too shocked to buy. Every living thing in the city was in a state of shock. They cried with their eyes and with their pale cheeks: “That this could have happened to New York!” If the fantastic beauty of the panorama still gave them pleasure, it was now a thwarted, masochistic pleasure. Up it went, the city, striving to pierce the sky itself; defying the gods whilst trusting to the law of gravity of the earth, inarticulately but consciously lampooning the great buried cities of the past whilst through its streets swept the old, old misery of money fear.

I went out on my balcony and looked, awe-stricken in spite of habit, into the gnashing teeth of the sky-line. But there is something unsettling in this sky-line; it cannot induce inertia. I dressed and went down into the street, wandering aimlessly and with my head filled with what I had endured the day before. The weather was abominable, with gusts of wet snow--a symbolic day, I felt in my bones. A canopy of fog dropped down on this new white city its burden of soot. And here in front of me was Nicholas Van Suydam, snow slipping down his collar. He rushed into speech. “I’m thankful I ran across you. I wanted to ask if you know what plans Eva is making?”

I scoffed: “That has a familiar ring!”

“Ah but she is making plans! I can see it. And the trouble is that she doesn’t say a word about it. She usually talks about whatever is in her head. I wondered if you mightn’t know?”

Against the insistent question in his eyes I opposed truthfully a blank ignorance; but I had at once felt the need for caution. He stood in the clinging, dirty snowflakes, forlorn, looking as if he needed to be whistled home. His dejection wrung from me the delayed information that I had not seen her for some time. I had--although this I did not say--stayed away from her.

He pointedly requested that I come down to see her. “You know how she is--excitable? She’s got herself tremendously worked-up over the panic; and she was already moping over Molly Underhill.”

I could not resist telling him that Eva had telephoned me, some time since, of having gone to his mother for comfort on the score of her responsibility for Molly’s death. She had said to Mrs. Van Suydam that upon a certain occasion she had been so cruel to Molly about her recitation that she felt this had had a large share in breaking down her desire to live. Mrs. Van Suydam, it appeared, had remarked that the opinion of one person was never so powerful as that would come to. I did not tell him that this had only too evidently clipped Eva’s spirits; but he turned on me an eye so comprehending that I became lost in a confused speculation on how deeply he might actually understand Eva. And, as I submitted to his instantly popping me in a taxi, getting in himself and giving the driver the number of the little house in Eleventh Street, I wondered feebly if my supineness arose from the snow slipping down my own back or from a guilty knowledge of my unwillingness to go at all. I felt like saying: “I have my own troubles.” No one took their troubles to Eva.

The taxi skidded, and he re-adjusted the angle of his hat. Why--I asked myself pettishly--are men fussy about their hats which look the same on any slant? His relieved face, as he contemplated me, a virtual prisoner on my way to taking over a share of his burden, produced in me a contrition in the toils of which he, and Eva, I made no doubt, would use me.

“How is work?” I asked casually.

“Stopped.” Architects, he went on with wry amusement, would soon be in the class of artists who conceived and executed those pleasures which are luxuries, such as--he paused to grin amiably at me--books. Our taxi hurled itself downtown along canons already shut in by more buildings than the frightened population needed. He laughed heartily at the corollary he now propounded: as he went down from usefulness in a man’s work, he automatically went up according to his wife’s circle. “However,” he said with a disheartened drop in his amusement, “she’s worried because she--well, then, because she’s Eva! She thinks I shan’t make enough money to keep us out of the poorhouse. I dislike to talk about such matters, Dinah; but you might put it in her head that she needn’t worry about the poorhouse. We--my mother and I--have a policy, as my father had--he learned it from his father, and so on back--to hold on to real estate. We’re strapped, but not smashed. If you could explain this to her?”

I objected that this was clearly in his own province.

He made a helpless gesture with his hands, thereby loosening his hold on his stick, which fell with a clatter and gave the excuse for bending and so hiding from me any actual realization he might have had about his wife. When he came up, a little red of face, he said indulgently that she was a child about money. “And, you see, she’s got it in her head that the falling away of my work is due to a corresponding falling to pieces of my reputation.” This he also laughed off indulgently, but not before I had seen that it had hurt him. And, still not having discussed her with any intimacy of detail, he again waved it off with a murmur that she was not adult when it came to a question of money. “She keeps saying that she is so afraid to be poor.”

“She was poor, once,” I put in, “before she came to New York.”

“Ah?” He seemed surprised. “I know nothing of that old life before she came to New York. Oh, I mean--naturally, I know the general outline. But I mean to say--you people charge on New York, and show your most sparkling side, and we take it for granted, you see, that you were always, and everywhere, brilliant and prosperous and on the crest of the wave.”

“That’s New York,” I said composedly.

“And then, too, it’s impossible to think of Eva as ever having passed around the hat, so to speak,” he went on.

I held him to the subject. “The city is in such a blue funk, just now, that it works on her; of itself, it would frighten her.”

But he was not frightened by New York. He knew that this city, of which he was an integral part because he had been born of the stock that had settled it--this city whose bold new growth had been conceived in the brains of a body of men like himself--was a cruel city and would cast him out if he lagged; but he was sure that he would not lag and that he and the city understood each other. He gave a positively affectionate glance from the window and said, under his breath, “The poor old town! The poor bastard!” I knew that he thought us the monsters who did not understand. And yet, Eva had hurt him through the medium of every brick in every great new structure.

Through the smoke of my cigarette, I studied him. By his attitude towards what Eva had done he was lying. With him, I fancied, nervousness took the form of an inability to do any creative work at all. But in what he next said he went back to our interchange of remarks on the storming of the fortress by the authors. “You people who come into New York are so marvellous! Such energy! Such apparent ignorance that you could possibly fail to conquer! It’s amazing. I’ve noticed about Eva that she can and does turn on to her work the full force of her storming rages--I don’t mean that in the least the way it sounds, however; but she does tear around the house and bemoan herself--well, then,” he pushed on, now thoroughly involved and, I saw, desperately taking the way out of telling all, “I remember once when she had asked me to read proof sheets to her, and she was cutting up over quite minor mistakes, I assure you--saying that the printers had tampered with her words, and appealing to me in the most agonized way to know if I hadn’t an ear--and the telephone rang in that awfully annoying way it has, off and on, off and on; and she simply screamed to the maid to tell Winnie Conant that she was out--to tell her she was dead--to tell her anything. And, the point is, she gets ahead with her work in, and as a direct result of, her emotional upsets. Sometimes I’m appalled by her vital energy. But when it comes to turning some of that energy into the minutiæ of living she’s horrified at the interruption. She doesn’t,” he concluded helplessly, “open her mail for weeks at a time.” He appeared to look upon this as one of the most inscrutable things about his wife.

I asked lazily: “Why should she? You’ve just said that you’re constantly surprised at the way in which her nervous force is made to serve the needs of her work. Why try to reform her? She knows what she’s about.”

He stared. “But it isn’t I who is up to reforming! She’s putting her shoulder to the wheel of changing me!”

I said to myself: “We’re getting at it!” I asked aloud: “What can you mean?”

He blurted out that she continually told him of how helpful the wives of authors frequently were; these wives, it appeared from her caustic comparisons, saw to it that during the writing of books they were relieved of all annoyances; and she had always wound up by calling on God to know what she would do if no one helped her. In his resentment at this inference, he had, I gathered from what he did not say, studied her with a new cold detachment. He had reminded her of her tantrums when she fancied him falling off in his work. He had gone on to draw her attention to the point of his being the man of the family: would it be suitable for him to be at her disposal all of the working day? He had said--he assured me that he had been dispassionate--“Do you realize that if this goes on I shall be unfit for work?” He gave me a sidelong glance, and said by way of excuse that our crowd talked to each other of all details of our lives; he could not see that he was disloyal to Eva in telling me this.

With no intention of entering into it, I said sweetly that he should be able to manage his wife as men had always managed their wives, by the power of a greater shout.

“Are you laughing at me?” he demanded. “For I assure you that it’s no laughing matter. It has--got out of my hands.” He hurried on with a rather feeble statement that it was not in any way the fault of Eva, who was a particularly guileless creature; it was the fault of certain persons who put things into her head.

“And now you want me to put something into her head?”

He hastened to deny this. He said, out of a clear sky but with immense vindictiveness, that he should have kicked Spencer Mapes out of the house long ago. “Why did I fail to kick him out? What’s lacking in me that I never act on my impulses?” He laughed, then. “I seldom act on my convictions, to tell the truth. This is because I stop long enough to think it out--I want to be fair, you know. But a man shouldn’t stop long enough to think out a crisis. Once it is thought out, a crisis becomes an emasculated psychological situation. There’s something wrong with the age,” he finished on a weak plea.

I said drily that it might be that he was deliberately trying to get himself out of touch with the age. “You’re sorry that you aren’t sorry that jealous husbands no longer flog gentlemen callers. You feel it to be the correct impulse; and you haven’t been able to stem the stream that’s swept our generation beyond it. You’ve turned the clock back--perversely--and its ticks are muffled in your re-adjusted hearing. I mean--you did, of your own accord, step out of Washington Square. Why do you try, in your mind, to step back?” But his clock ticked steadily, and he was helpless. He wondered, he said, if anyone in our crowd had the chance, or wished for the opportunity, to lead private lives. Chatter hit on every nerve in his body. The topics selected applied to him, to Eva, to the two of them in conjunction--to all life, he decided almost wildly. Life was dreadful because, when one needed all strength, all intelligence, in order to see a way through, one was weakened by the cumulative effect of idle remarks that irritated already raw nerves. I said: “You shouldn’t be the one to feel such things. This is your home town.”

He seemed numbed by statements such as this. It was necessary to explain to Nicholas, always, I said to myself with annoyance. “New York does something to us who come here from outside.”

He exclaimed with real indignation: “Eva married me. And a wife becomes what her husband is. Eva is now a New Yorker.”