Chapter IX

There was nothing to do but for Lilah to go.

Robert came into her room again, pale, with that new look of a man who has found himself in suffering.

“I’m going, Robert.”

Robert sat down by the bed. He avoided looking at her. It was a pain to look at her; Lilah, with that ghost whiteness, the blue veins showing at her temples, her hair in two childish braids over her shoulders. She was like a little girl. At the same time, there was a mystery about her. She had suffered so. She had had to pass, alone, through a dark, terrible suffering where no one could follow or help her. Robert felt ashamed, because his own suffering was so unimportant in comparison to hers. And yet his own cried out for speech. He wanted her to know that she had killed something in him; he would never tell her. Never.

“You can go, if you want to,” he said stiffly.

Lilah turned her head on the pillow. “You don’t want me to stay, do you?”

“Not if you love Flagg.”

“I do.”

After a moment, Robert said, “I’ve seen Flagg. He’s staying at Biddeford. Did you know?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose my grandfather told you.”

“Your grandfather is decent enough to pity me.”

Suddenly Robert went down on his knees and put his face on her hand. “God knows I pity you. Stay with me, Lilah. Tell me where I’ve failed.”

“It’s no good,” she said, “to try. To stay. Don’t blame me too much. I didn’t know what love was.”

Her hand stirred beneath his lips, and he got up again stiffly.

“You must stay until you’re well.”

“They’ll let me walk to-morrow,” she said eagerly.

“Flagg wants me to divorce you.... Well, I won’t.”

“Why?”

He had not intended to tell her. But the answer was torn out of him, a physical wrench, as if he had pulled a leech from off his heart. “You’ve hurt me enough between you! I’ll be damned if I’ll let you humiliate me. A man who divorces his wife is a coward. You may do what you like. But I won’t divorce you.”

Lilah turned on her side, away from him. She could see the sky, a deep, warm blue, with thin clouds passing over. And a quick flight of birds. She had intended to tell Robert that she was sorry. Now she couldn’t.

After a moment, he went out.

* * * * *

She left the Point one morning in June. Her trunks and boxes had gone off the night before. Robert’s motor, driven by the stable man, Edmonton, was to take her to the station. Robert had flung away up the beach, followed by the spaniel. Junius kissed her good-by. He permitted himself only one reproach. “I’m not sure that this is going to be any better. You won’t like poverty. And happiness at the expense of another is likely to go stale.”

“You had Venice,” she reminded him.

“But I came back.”

He took her hand. “Are you sure?”

“Quite.”

A wave of faintness, something almost hysterical, caused her to lean against him. “We have to be true to ourselves. Sacrifice is out of date.... If Robert is wise, he’ll let me go and not care.”

“Good-by, my dear.”

She kissed him quickly.

The motor turned out of the drive, sped smoothly through the forest, now richly green, and she saw the place where she had been thrown, where Flagg, late that night, had found her. It was like him to have arrived sooner than he was expected. Like him, once there, to have faced his responsibility. Through her illness, he had stayed at Biddeford, within call. They had not let him see her, but Junius had played the part, not unwillingly, of messenger; he enjoyed, Lilah knew, the disloyal intrigue. Any man of spirit, Junius probably argued--any man of his own day--would have driven to Biddeford to thrash Flagg on general principles; but Robert had mooned about the house, had sat for hours with his head in his hands! Junius Peabody’s sympathies were with Lilah. Lilah, who lay rigid, her figure outlined beneath the bed covers, her face drawn with the peculiar tension of her will to conquer. Even death.... He had brought Flagg’s messages with a grim tenderness and had murmured them to her often when she seemed unable to hear. Only her lips had quivered, or there had been a faint smile. Whenever Junius wavered, ashamed of his own part in the affair, he reminded himself that in no other way could she be kept alive....

Lilah shuddered. The motor left the woods, turned sharply into the paved highroad.... What did Edmonton know?

It occurred to her that Edmonton was no longer her servant. In the performance of his duty, he was driving her, as he would have driven a guest, to the station.

She straightened herself sharply. Her look became at once indifferent and haughty. But something was unsteady, out of balance, threatening. Her hold on life was precarious; she was drifting away from safety, from her established self. The new self she would have to create to meet the situation she found herself in was still shadowy; she must wear a different face.... Love in exile.... The future had no significance. Nor was there reality in the image of herself, reckless, dedicated, indifferent, somehow romantic....

At the station, Edmonton, swinging her hand-luggage to the platform, showed an impassive face and asked: “New York, madam?”

She thought of tipping him and changed her mind. After all, she wasn’t a guest.... She could not resist saying, as the long train slipped down the track toward them: “Don’t let Mr. Robert saddle the roan while I’m away, Edmonton.”

He flushed and touched his cap. He had heard something! Servants found out everything. “No, ma’am. Indeed, no, ma’am. I won’t. Be sure of that.” An astonished, gratified, sly look passed across his eyes. He handed Lilah aboard with a return of deference, an unmistakable relish.

* * * * *

Lilah met Flagg in New York. She went to a hotel, and Flagg stayed at the borrowed flat in the ’Fifties. She had a few hundred dollars, and she had brought every rag and stitch of clothing and all of her jewels. It was, she argued, no affair of Flagg’s. Robert had given her these things; they belonged to her. She owned a distinguished string of small pearls, well-matched and unusually brilliant, and, for the more formal occasions of the season, Junius had given her a small crown of emeralds which had belonged to Minnie; this, with an emerald bracelet, too heavy and ornate for wear, had about them the innocent elegance of the ’Eighties.... Lilah discovered her wedding ring among the diamonds and square-cut sapphires she preferred. She decided to wear it....

She met Flagg in the lobby of the hotel and they talked in the comparative isolation of a taxicab throbbing up and down Fifth Avenue in a complicated, nervous stream of traffic.

Their first excitement gave way to a hurried planning. They must, Lilah argued, leave New York. “I’ve made such a ‘noise’ here,” she said. “I’m more of a personage than you realize.”

Lilah expected to follow Flagg to his middle-west university town and to become an anonymous figure in the background of his life. But Flagg shook his head. “We’d be better off in New York.”

Lilah suppressed a sharp anxiety. “You won’t lecture, then?”

He assured her again that he wanted only to lie on a green hill with his head in her lap!

“I can get my hands on three hundred a month. Not much; but we needn’t starve! If you say, we’ll go abroad. Three hundred a month isn’t to be sneezed at in Italy.”

“But you wanted to go on with your work!”

His interest in teaching, he explained, had lessened as his knowledge increased. He was beginning to believe that he could do little more than “shove his pupils off the high road into the wilderness of personal experience, speculation”; besides, he was beginning to doubt the value of his own contribution. “When I found you there, crumpled, covered with blood, apparently dead, I was staggered by my ignorance. Death, for myself, has always seemed a sort of translation. But you--flesh I love--There is no solace for what I felt! I want to spend the rest of my days with my arms around a concrete loveliness, warmth, life.... Lilah, I’m afraid to go on alone!”

His desire persisted. They must go abroad, at once. Every day spent in the city, crowded, humid, was wasted. Lilah had the impression that Flagg was hurrying to a happiness which might, with delay, be lost. Impatient, often irritable, he was upset by small details; he wanted Lilah, enjoyment, fulfillment, immediately. The matter of passports proved to be embarrassing. Flagg’s honesty would permit of no compromise and Lilah refused to allow their names to appear on the same passenger list. They agreed, finally, to sail on different ships and to meet in Genoa or Naples.

Flagg left Lilah at her hotel and, alone, went about the complicated business of steamer reservations.

If only there had not been this hiatus; the outlines of the adventure were already blurred; in his arms, secure, the past definitely discarded, her pleasure in her own audacity would return....

She glanced out over the city. From her bedroom, twenty-two stories above the street, she could see the rivers, metallic, laced with bridges. She was impressed by her lack of superiority, save only the elevation granted her by this wall of granite and steel.... Flagg was somewhere down in that swarm of people, that tossing and scurrying of humanity....

Here, society was out of focus. Her rightness or wrongness was lost in a conglomerate jumble of right and wrong. She could not comprehend adultery--a cruel word--betrayal. These things counted only as they affected a few individuals. Her right to happiness was paramount. That crowd down there cared nothing, knew nothing, of what she did or was, what she felt, her success, her failure.... She was struck by the indifference of the mob, the savage concentration of the individual. No tragedy, not even national disaster, not even war, could touch them all! What, then, was she, was any one afraid of? To break a commandment, to do good, was like throwing a pebble into a pool--a little hoop of ripples....

* * * * *

Flagg did not come back at once. He telephoned that he was standing in line at the Customs House. “Have a photograph taken.” “Must I?” It struck her that it was not going to be simple, this flight. They might have gone to California, to Cuba! “But we can’t buy _lire_ in California,” Flagg reminded her. With a hint of impatience, he rang off. And Lilah, alone again, thought: “I’ll go to Thirty-eighth Street. There may be an old photograph--”

She dressed with an odd sense of excitement, of daring. She remembered the Waterford glass chandeliers; she had never seen them in place. After all, the house was her creation; she had evoked it. Flagg could have no possible objection to her going there. For the rendezvous with that self she was discarding, she wore a gown Elmer Shawhan had approved of, longer than the fashion of the moment, made of dark blue and sulphur yellow; her stockings, sheer; her feet, in strapped slippers, might have been bare. A small hat and a heavy veil, the perfume she affected, gave her an exclusive, an unmistakable elegance.

The caretaker admitted her, after a delay, while the taxicab she had hired waited at the curb. “Mrs. Peabody!”

Again that look of surprise! Lilah brushed her way in, across the hall, upstairs. The shades were not drawn and a flood of sunlight illuminated Elmer Shawhan’s riotous panels. Lilah thought: “I told Robert to darken this room!” She stood on the threshold in a sort of trance of delight. She had forgotten how lovely it was; even now, with the furniture covered, the rugs rolled back, it was a room worthy of respect.... Her dreams of a little renaissance had come to nothing; her next step was even less promising. Italy, with a man she could not marry, an invalid who had abandoned his career for her sake....

She crossed the room and became suddenly conscious of voices. Before she could draw back, or hide, Robert and Grace Fuller came in from the hall. Grace Fuller was in gray, her natural distinction accentuated by a clever hat. Lilah saw Robert’s face, flushed and angry. For the first time in her knowledge of him he was beside himself. She said breathlessly: “I didn’t know you were in New York! I wouldn’t have come here, naturally....”

“I intend to sell the house,” he interrupted. “I haven’t spent a happy day here.... If there is anything you want, you are welcome to it.”

Grace Fuller looked from one to the other. In her expression, amusement and pity conquered embarrassment. “Aren’t you two going to be sensible?”

“No!” Lilah wanted to run, to fly ignominiously from this humiliation. She saw how the wind blew; what Robert intended to do; where he had turned, already, for solace, “understanding.” The whole incident made life and love seem disgusting, trivial. Flagg could do nothing to erase the fact of her marriage to Robert. All of their best moments together were ugly in the light of their present situation. They who had been intimate were bitter strangers, abashed by the memory of their intimacy.

She cried desperately: “Let me go. This is abominable.”

Robert said nothing and she ran downstairs. The astonished caretaker opened the door and shut it again, with a bang.

* * * * *

In the taxi, Lilah conquered her panic. “Drive around the park slowly.” She needed people, movement, color, to restore her faith in herself....

No matter what the world thought, now, later she would be forgiven if she failed magnificently. New York was charitable to picturesque sinners. Florence, a villa, herself, wistful but triumphant.... She wondered whether she could do without the things she had, in a year, come to regard as necessary. On three hundred a month she would have to wear made-over clothes; she would have to curb her extravagant desire for amusing, expensive accessories. She was one of those women who sense every variation in style, each new subtle trick of elegance, the sleight-of-hand of the mode. To be inconspicuous and astonishing had become paramount. Until she met Flagg, she had thought of little else. Her charm and her pert wit had carried her. She had forgotten how to think, what to think, since she had long ago discovered that a worthless opinion spoken decisively passes for cleverness in a hurried world.

Flagg would not like her friends, vivacious log-rollers who had peddled their superficial accomplishments successfully and now called themselves the Young Generation of American writers, painters, actors, critics and editors. Lilah enjoyed their ostentatious sophistry, their good humor and their irreverence. They stimulated her and never bored her; like them, she was fundamentally restless, unstable, impatient. Perhaps she was incapable of constancy.... She could never follow Flagg’s thought, painstaking, honest, uncompromising....

The cab turned into the park. On wide, dusty greens children in bright dresses romped with colored balloons. A procession of motors in a blue reek of gasoline clogged the drives.

To be victorious, she must dominate Flagg. He might turn poet or mystic, or he might be content with sunlight and _fritto misto_.

She had seen many such couples--lovers who had surrendered respectability without a struggle, who had relinquished position, who no longer cared what was said or thought about their affair and who fought like cats and dogs. She must see that this didn’t happen. After all, every love, no matter how exalted in the beginning, inevitably resolved into a struggle against the loss of illusion. So fragile the threads from heart to heart, so impermanent affection.... Junius had once said to her that the only happy love relationships were illicit because marriage harnessed the imagination. He believed in the European marriage of convenience, a business arrangement, something outside the emotions. If this were so, Lilah thought, she had a chance of happiness....

The telephone bell was ringing fretfully when she opened the door of her room at the hotel. She ran, lifted the receiver with a sudden, passionate recklessness.

Flagg’s voice, purposefully tranquil, tightened her heart. He began to say that there would be difficulty, when she interrupted him: “No! No! I was wrong. Forgive me. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. The slate’s clean. We’ll go together.”

* * * * *

Florence was all a golden yellow in August, dusted with the pollen of hot sunlight. Flagg and Lilah climbed over the hills or drove in a rickety cab, house-hunting. They chose, finally, a small villa, ironically enough named “Villino Sans-Souci,” near the Ponte a Mensola. It was dirty, but there was a grape arbor at the back, and two very old cypresses, black, tipped with gold, traced invisible slow spirals upon a purple sky. Vincigliata rose behind them and in the cypress groves at sunset there was a constant call of cuckoos. “Legendary,” Flagg said. “Mournful, and beautiful. We’ll take this. What do you say, Lilah?”

They could afford it, just. Flagg figured hurriedly on the back of an envelope. “Rent. Cook. Food and light. Fuel. Not much left for cabs, Lilah! Or the opera. But we have the view! Turn around, my dear, and look--”

Through the arbor, framed in the dusty arch of grape-leaves, they could see the Dome, those delicate stone shafts, remote, miraculous, the Tower, the Bargello, and that great black lily, the Signoria, thrusting through the tumbled roofs of the city.

“It hasn’t changed,” Lilah said. “What immortal loveliness!” She leaned against Flagg and let herself sink into her appreciation of him. Robert would have been more concerned with the plumbing than with the view. Flagg cared for nothing so long as he could fill his senses with this old, secretive, sardonic city, this city with bold cheek-bones, short shining hair, the smile of Gioconda and the eyes of a hired warrior. Flagg belonged in Florence; there was nothing modern about him; he was like Leonardo, was perhaps, Leonardo, sent back to question, to advance a little way, to recede again, like a comet flying down space.... She turned her head and kissed his shoulder.

“Perhaps you won’t miss the other things--”

“What other things?”

“Your work. Those guinea pigs and test tubes, those farmer boys looking to you for the word.”

His eyes, for the first time in many weeks, shut her out. But he smiled and his arm tightened about her waist. “If no one ever comes here--if we’re left alone to grow old in our arbor--will you mind, Lilah?”

“No!”

They went into the house, and Lilah, with wide gestures, refurnished it. “We’ll have to get rid of all the furniture. All of it! And those fearful pictures. Except that one--that’s so bad it’s--positively good! This room needs Venetian brocade, claret-against-the-light color, with Sixteenth Century chairs--”

“But we can’t afford such things,” Flagg interrupted.

“I’d go mad if I had to live in the same house with a gilded waste-paper basket,” Lilah answered.

The agent, sensing criticism, rattled the keys. “The villino belongs to a celebrated poet,” he said eagerly. He showed his teeth and repeated: “Most celebrated!”

“It was here,” he assured them with dignity, “he wrote ‘_Belle Mani_.’ You know this book?”

They had come out into the arbor again. And, licking herself in a patch of sunlight, a little black cat had made herself at home. “Does the cat go with the house?” Flagg demanded.

The agent made a violent gesture. “I have him killed! At once! This poet liked the cats--_everywhere cats_!” He made a terrible face and waved his arms. “_Shoo!_ Get out!”

The cat rose, arched her back, yawned and with her tail in the air, slightly crooked at the tip--a sign of pleasure--went straight to Flagg. He picked her up. “If your poet liked cats, he has my permission to use gilded waste-paper baskets.”

Lilah was seized with a perverse mirth.

“Spaniels and cats,” she said. But, to Flagg, she refused to explain. Holding the little black cat in the crook of his arm, he was tickling her under the chin where a patch of white fur was worn, daintily, like a bib.

* * * * *

In the blazing stillness of an August mid-afternoon, their drowsy isolation was broken into by a friend of Flagg’s who came out from Florence on a bicycle and arrived at the gate of “Sans-Souci,” dusty, jovial and eager, with a quizzical look for Lilah and a shout for Flagg.

Lilah had been painting kitchen chairs an artless apple green. She looked up, saw a strange man staring at her and stood, the paintbrush at arm’s length. This, she saw at once, was to be her first social encounter.

She said quickly: “Mr. Flagg is asleep. I’ll call him!”

“Don’t. Please....”

She hurried indoors, angry, rather stimulated. Flagg was lying uncomfortably on the poet’s divan. He was not asleep and his eyes looked up at her, mischievous, black, bright, more alive than any eyes she had ever seen.

“Some one--” she began breathlessly. “Tall, dusty man on a bicycle--”

“McNair!” Flagg shouted.

He ran outside and Lilah heard their noisy greeting. She did not quite dare to follow, but waited for Flagg to call her. Presently he did. “Lilah! Oh, Lilah!”

She flew to a mirror.... How pretty she was getting to be! The color of happiness was over her, warm, golden.... What a pity that all women couldn’t be happy; so many of them were pinched and gray, shadowy, unrecognized, unreal. She had never existed until Flagg loved her, until, she corrected herself, she had loved Flagg. She had had no other consciousness, since coming to this place, but this.... She went out, smiling.

“Lilah,” Flagg said, “this is Gil McNair. Can you manage tea?”

Lilah gave her hand, sticky with paint, into a large, warm clasp, and it was then she caught that quizzical look. It was not a question, it was, rather, a brief investigation. With an upward rush of spirits, the challenge accepted, Lilah said: “Tea? Of course!” But she threw into her glance what she would have preferred to say: “Yes! Here we are. Quite irregular. But quite charming!”

She made tea on a spirit lamp because she had not conquered the mysteries of an Italian stove and, so far, she had been unable to lure a cook as far out of town as the Ponte a Mensola. It was not the Florence of before the war; Tuscan maid-servants had become aware of their potentiality in commerce.... The poet’s cups were eccentric; apparently _il the_ had not been popular at the “Villino Sans-Souci.” There wasn’t any cut sugar and Lilah had to use cream from a can. “Aren’t there any cows in Italy?” she wondered. She could hear Flagg laughing in the arbor, and she felt a pang of jealousy because he could laugh at something she did not share. To love, she had discovered, is to be jealous--jealous of everything, each unconsidered, careless gesture not directly to do with her; when Flagg slept, she was jealous of his dreams.

She was glad, hearing him laugh, that he had accepted their situation, not as if he were making the best of a bad bargain, but with the positively gorgeous indifference of a man superior to his audacities. She had not once considered right or wrong--she had thrust aside the shadow of presentiment, had drawn the warmth of sunlight over the dark depths of possibility. She had rested for hours with her head against Flagg’s breast, listening to the beating, rapid, unstable, of his heart, his enemy, her enemy; she had lost the reality of death in the living body....

The arbor was patterned with the cool, blue shadows of grape leaves; the sun struck through, white, hot, and lay in flakes on the table, on the smoothly brushed earth.

The black cat had wandered in and sat on Flagg’s knee in that peculiar, feline trance he liked because, he said, it was so “damned superior.” He stroked the shining black fur as he talked and Lilah, in spite of herself, watched the caressing fingers.

McNair took the tray from Lilah. His gestures were quick, nervous. Lilah discovered that he had done something astonishing, if not conspicuous, in the war, what, she could not quite make out; it had to do with “listening gear.”

“He can hear celestial ragtime,” Flagg said. “He ‘listens in’ on the Beyond--michrophonic miracle man.”

McNair laughed. He had big, square white teeth, like tombstones, and dusty hair worn in a bang. Lilah wanted him to notice her. She felt that she must look very pretty in her chintz apron, the little turban of twisted green silk, her feet in buckled slippers.

McNair accepted tea and drank it greedily, his eyes on Flagg; their talk was experimentary, the talk of men widely different yet gifted with an identical passion for the world, the adventure offered by life to eager men; they liked it well enough to want, honestly, to better it. Words, names she had never heard, at first baffled, then bored her. She yawned, but Flagg was not stricken, as she had hoped he would be, as Robert would have been, with an immediate concern. So she moved to the bench beside him, slipped her arm through his and let her head fall against his shoulder.

McNair, putting his tea-cup aside with a clatter, as if he had only just become aware of her, said: “You’re going back in October, Flagg?”

Flagg answered: “No! I’m through. For a while.... I have what every man secretly desires at one time or another, leisure for contemplation. I’ve never had time to think. Since the war smashed man’s favorite image of himself, wearing the laurels of progress, I want to sit alone with the fragments and make of them what I can, for my own satisfaction.”

“For your own satisfaction?” McNair repeated. “You used to believe, or claimed you did, that man owes his wisdom to man. You once said that you despised ascetics and hermits.” He glanced around. “Delightful! Your arbor! But you won’t stay here!”

Lilah interrupted: “Why?”

“Ask Flagg!”

Flagg said: “I claim the right to the one certain beauty--life itself! I’ve been through the five cycles of psychic hell. I’ve questioned until I’m sick and tired of questioning. I’ve come to a sort of acceptance that isn’t surrender--it’s seeing! And if I should tell you, any one, what I see, know--I’d be damned as a dreamer or an idiot. I see that science and religion, both, have failed. We still suffer plague. We still arm ourselves. We still distrust our brother.... But we go forward. Imperceptibly, forward.... Here, at peace, I want first to think, later, if possible, to write. It depends on whether or not I have anything to say.”

“You won’t stay,” McNair repeated. His face was flushed, and he said good-by abruptly, almost angrily.

When he had gone, Lilah said: “Did you really mean what you said?”

“Yes.”

“What did McNair think--about--us?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I dare say.”

Lilah insisted: “But he must have wondered--”

Flagg lifted her face and said gravely: “For God’s sake, let’s be decent sinners! I thought we had decided to pay our debt in the coin of the realm.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean that it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn what McNair or any one else thinks of us! The only thing that matters is what we think of ourselves. If you’re ashamed, you ought not to be here. If you’re sorry, you’re only hurting me.”

She answered: “We’re happy when we’re alone. But when people come, we begin to blame each other.” She kissed him, quick, light kisses. Then her head sank again on his shoulder, and they sat there, clasped together, staring through the arch of the arbor at Florence, the towers, the brazen Arno climbing across the plain toward Pisa. It was very still. A cart went down the road beyond the wall with a tinkle of bells. The little black cat sat on the table, licking, her tail in a plate of cakes.