Part IV — Nemesis
Chapter Twenty I
One morning in the middle of August, Harry Kelly cut short his gymnastics and went downstairs to get fruit, cream and rolls for Cornelia, as he had done daily since Janet left. The letter box held one letter, a fat one, postmarked Paris. Cornelia was inclined to be lackadaisical before breakfast, but a letter enlivened her at once, especially if it came from a long-lost friend or bore a foreign postmark. Kelly sent his powerful form bounding up the staircase, the victuals being safeguarded by a miracle of balancing.
“A letter from Paris,” he called out joyfully, as he entered Apartment Fifteen.
“From Janet!” exclaimed Cornelia with conviction. One glance at the handwriting verified her guess.
“Janet’s hand,” she said, and tore the envelope open feverishly.
“Wouldn’t you enjoy reading it more after breakfast?” he said wistfully as he watched Cornelia unfolding a great many pages of writing.
“What an idea! Make the coffee, Hercules, there’s a good boy. The water is boiling; all you need to do is to pour the water on the coffee and let it stand.”
As Kelly had fallen sole heir to the daily duty of preparing her breakfast, he uncomplainingly went to work. Meanwhile, Cornelia, in a very becoming green-and-gold Mimosa jacket, sat down on a lounge and buried herself in Janet’s letter.
II
Dear Cornelia:
Here I am in the Luxembourg Gardens, alone with my fountain pen and my pad of paper, Claude having gone to the races as the guest of a Russian Grand Duke. I feel ages removed from the days of Kips Bay, though by the calendar only four weeks have gone by.
Why haven’t you heard from me in all this time? That, I imagine, is the first question you would ask me if we met face to face. No, you wouldn’t. You would divine the answer. You would know that the blinding, paralyzing, notoriety into which we were suddenly plunged, left me with but one desire, the supreme desire for solitude. A desert without a single oasis would not have been too lonely for me to live in. For a few days even Claude—
Those cruel headlines, those stabbing capital letters! Like points of fire in a demon dance they riot in and out of my memory yet. “Affinity or Elopement!” “Fontaine Heir Meets Enchantress on Baronia!” “Diamond King’s Son in Joy-Ride to Europe!” How did the inquisition happen to overlook such exquisite weapons of torture as huge red capitals on a smooth white space?
Writing the letters down affords a mild relief. To my physical sight, not to my mind’s eye. Oh yes, I actually saw the headlines that Hutchins Burley fabricated in his newspaper story. Some thoughtful enemy of Claude’s took pains to have a copy of the Evening Chronicle forwarded to his Paris address.
Didn’t you guess at once that Hutchins was the beast responsible for the publicity we got? That vicious man has a mortal grudge to pay off against me or against Claude or perhaps against us both. But what for?
How he got on our track, heaven alone knows. Heaven and Mark Pryor.
Yes, Cornelia, our own Mark Pryor (the human embodiment of the theory of protective coloration, as Robert called him)—he it was who brought me the fateful news. In this wise.
On the second morning out, I was taking a turn around the deck by myself, while Claude was chatting with the captain. (The “Baronia’s” captain is an old friend of Claude’s family, the Fontaines being heavy shareholders in the steamship company. This was the connection that enabled us to get accommodations at such short notice, the purser’s room having been given up to me and the second engineer’s quarters to Claude.)
As I said, I was roving about the upper deck, when one of the ventilators or posts or something, suddenly became alive. Or so it seemed to my startled eyes. Walking remorselessly towards me, this no longer stationary object magically assumed the form and voice of Mark Pryor! You could have knocked me down with a feather. (By the way, I’m more certain than ever that he’s a detective or a spy or a Soviet propagandist—or can he be merely an American novelist studying life for the Saturday Evening Post?)
Whatever the key to his inmost mystery, I’ve always been greatly taken with him. He’s like a flash of lightning on a pitch-dark night: his comings and goings are never more sinister or mysterious than when his sudden vivid presence gives them a momentary relief.
Without letting me into the secret of his skill at sleight-of-hand (or rather, sleight-of-feet), he drew me aside and told me in a most sympathetic way of the story about Claude and me that was being headlined in the Evening Chronicle and that was soon to be the gossip of two continents. The information had breezed his way—by wireless. Out of pure regard for me, he had bribed the radio man to keep mum. Wasn’t it splendid of him? But he warned me to prepare for a leak. “The only thing you can keep dark nowadays is the truth,” he said, in his quiet way, without a twinkle in his eye.
He also said that Hutchins Burley was certainly at the bottom of the whole scandal. He was sure of this, because he had seen Burley on the pier shortly before the “Baronia” left, and because of other reasons which he declared he was not at liberty to divulge.
After predicting that we should meet again, Mr. Pryor “faded away” as imperceptibly as usual, leaving me a prey to my thoughts. My heart was mostly in my boots and I can tell you I was getting pretty limp when I pulled myself up short with the reminder that I must pluck up a little courage if only to show that I deserved a disinterested friend like Mr. Pryor. (He’s in France at present, on some dark business or other. I don’t care how dark, I’m glad he’s here. The mere fact gives me the sensation of being watched over. I’m confident that Mark Pryor’s keen sight is at least as far-reaching as the long arm of coincidence.)
It wasn’t exactly a picnic to tell Claude the news. Like most of us, Claude thrives wonderfully well on good luck but takes bad luck hard. Naturally, to a man who has so many important friends, newspaper notoriety is a bitter pill to swallow. Claude raged at his fate with a violence that frightened me. He tortured himself by anticipating the libels to which his character would be exposed, the pictures of himself and me that the yellow newspapers would print, the slanders that the busybodies would privately circulate. How his father and the Armstrongs would take the affair was another source of torment. And then there was the fear that the story might leak out on the “Baronia” and that we should become the talk of the ship.
It was a calamity. And the worst of it was that Claude appeared to think I was in some way directly responsible for it. His anger worried me far more than the notoriety did; the angrier he got, the more the notoriety sank into relative insignificance. He accused me of being callous! Wasn’t that monstrously unjust? Merely because my advice was that we should make the best of a very bad matter and face the world as if nothing had happened of which we were ashamed. He took my calmness, which was all on the surface, as a personal affront. It infuriated him more (if that were possible) than the exposure, and caused him to accuse me of disloyalty and lack of sympathy. Are men ever satisfied? They pretend that they can’t endure a weeping woman. Yet, give them a stoical countenance, and they’ll ask for tears.
No, Cornelia, this was not the first rift. That had come on the very evening we sailed, when the passengers held a dance on deck in the moonlight. I was not feeling very well and danced only once, but Claude did full duty as a leader of the cotillion. During his absence from my side, a young British captain in mufti (he had been an ace in the war) sat down in a steamer chair next to mine and helped me, what with his charming manner and his gorgeous British accent, to while away the time.
All went swimmingly until, in an interval between dances, Claude came back to me. Can you call up an image of Claude, the magnificent, approaching at a temperature of absolute zero? His manner, of the ice icy, froze the poor captain dead away. This done, he turned on me and asked me what I meant by “picking a man up!”
You can imagine that I replied pretty tartly, and one word led to another till we reached a point where Claude threatened that he would never marry me—no, not for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. At this, I burst out laughing. My laughter was immodest, unladylike, spiteful. And I should have regretted it, had Claude understood me. But Claude is in some respects a reincarnation of Kipling’s famous vampire lady. He had never understood, and now, he never will understand.
But I’m running ahead of my story.
As we feared, rumor and gossip about us soon had free rein on board the “Baronia.” Poor Claude had to bear the brunt of this annoyance and of the Captain’s anger too. That Claude and a lady were together on the voyage had certainly been a secret, but a secret to which the old sea-dog was a party. The Captain’s sense of propriety was not outraged by the secret. It was outraged only when the secret became a matter of common knowledge. And he did not permit a feeling of delicacy to restrain his indignation against his fellow conspirators.
What happened on the “Baronia” was trifling compared to the furor of our landing at Southampton. We were met by “all the latest London papers” filled with the wildest details of our “elopement.” That is the way they featured our experiment over here. It was described as the elopement of a young multimillionaire with a poor plebeian stenographer, an elopement carried out in the teeth of a tyrant father with invincibly aristocratic prejudices. Shades of the Barrs and their Mayflower ancestry!
Worse remained behind. The English reporters promptly spotted Claude. You can’t be six feet two in your socks and have the airs and graces of Prince Charming, without being conspicuous even amongst a crowd of first-class passengers on a fifty-thousand-ton liner. When the newspaper men plied poor Claude with questions, I began to weaken at the knees. But Claude was a trump. He kept his most nonchalant air, gave cleverly evasive answers, and even begged one of his tormentors for a cigarette quite in the style of the imperturbable villain of a screen play. Then a battery of motion picture men turned their cameras on us. Mark Pryor and the British captain swooped down to the rescue at this critical moment, which was very lucky for us, as we had just about exhausted our nerve (to say nothing of our nerves).
We stayed in London barely forty-eight hours. In spite of our assumed names we were bundled out of three hotels, thanks to the curiosity of reporters who kept after Claude as though he were a ticket-of-leave man. I had supposed that only American journalists hounded people, but evidently the London tribesmen have taken a leaf out of the New York book in the matter of pitiless persistence. Claude felt so harassed, outraged and persecuted that he could not get out of London fast enough. He saw a reporter in every strange face and lived in constant dread of another forced interview until we were safely across the Channel.
And now I had better answer the question that I know is uppermost in your mind.
We have been living as a married couple! Now it’s out. Your Janet, the bold and fearless advocate of free unions, has been masquerading as a wife, a timorous and trustful, cowering and respectable wife, differing from other wives only in being a fraud.
It’s a terrible comedown, a sickening fall from grace, isn’t it?
But what else could I have done, short of leaving Claude entirely?
You see, Cornelia, the stark fact was that we couldn’t get accommodations anywhere except by pretending that we were married. Had we declined to make this pretense, we couldn’t have remained together at all unless we adopted all sorts of secret, underground, time consuming devices. It was a choice between the pretense and the secrecy—a Hobson’s choice, so far as I could see.
Cornelia’s lips curled with contempt. She could not escape the reflection that she had showed much more courage when she had been in London with Percival Houghton.
I must add that free love, at any rate in my case, has proved a failure, a dead failure. I do not say that trial experiments in loving and living together should not be made, but I do say that the time is not ripe for them. At present, the two scores I have against free love are: First, that it simply won’t work; and second, that the only thing about it that is free is the undesired advertising one gets.
This conclusion has not been reached in what Mrs. Grey calls the cool, disinterested spirit of the dispassionate investigator. All the same, it is my conclusion.
Of course, it is an abominable thing that a unique, intensely individual experience like love should have to be made the subject of public inquiry and official registration before it can claim to be legitimate. In a more highly civilized nation, such a state of affairs would be unthinkable. But amongst us! Well, when you think of our housing, transport, and domestic arrangements, when you remember how primitive and rigid these still are, can you expect more fluid and elastic relations between the sexes to be welcomed or even understood?
“Huh,” exclaimed Cornelia, half aloud, “she got all that from Robert.”
Please don’t picture me as sitting down and wringing my hands. What’s done is done and can’t be undone. I’ve made an experiment in love. And if the result hasn’t been what I expected, I have, like the experimental chemist, made discoveries I never dreamed of, discoveries about myself, about other men and women, and about human institutions. I can truly say that I haven’t spent four more unhappy weeks in my life, nor—mark this—four weeks that have done me more good.
I call them unhappy weeks. But suppose I had married Claude!
Well, I dare say you’ve been thinking to yourself: “She is capable of anything; now she will try to sell out to smug respectability and settle down as Claude’s duly wedded and articled wife.” I admit this would be the logical sequel to my new conclusions about love and marriage. But though I’m still fond of Claude, a great streak of doubt has crossed my dreams of a happy future with him.
Shall I tell you the truth, Cornelia? Claude and I would make a very poor team. I have in mind, not his fits of bad temper, which are very annoying, nor his attacks of jealousy, which are monstrous. I have in mind his outlook on affairs and his active interests, which are in every respect different from mine. Claude is in love with the pomps and trappings of life; and I am not. He goes in passionately for elegance, luxury, all the externals which men admire in society or public institutions; and I do not. He wishes to study and master the ritual of social intercourse in all its forms (even in its Kips Bay form); and I will not. He is fond of the gay boulevards, the fashionable restaurants, the crowded promenades; I am fond of quiet places and a chair to myself in a corner of a park. Our divergence of tastes is almost absolute. We don’t like the same theatres, concerts, pictures; we don’t even like the same games.
The only game we ever enjoyed together was the great game of love. “What,” you will exclaim, “you mean to contend that this game, which you played with such abandon, so thrilled and absorbed and united you both as to smother the thousand differences between you?” Precisely. That is what I contend, for that is what happened. It is weird, disconcerting, inexplicable, yet it is true.
Equally true is the fact that Claude lacks the talent for companionship. With women, at all events. He has no use for a woman except as a plaything or a wife. And he does not want his wife to be a companion or a partner in his work. He wants her to be an ambassador plenipotentiary, representing him in polite society, and also a species of superior twentieth-century domestic scientist taking full charge of his creature comforts at home. I don’t see myself in either role. Do you? Can you picture me as a sort of mother, nurse, housemaid, valet, cook and errand girl rolled into one?
All of which means that I’m not quite ready yet to handcuff myself with Prince Charming’s household keys. “Hoity-toity,” say you, “isn’t this a bit like piling the evidence sky-high to prove that the grapes aren’t sour?” Perhaps it is, but I think not. It is true that Claude hasn’t asked me to marry him yet. It is true that whenever he is out of sorts with me he tells me that my reputation is damaged beyond repair and that I need not look to him to patch it up. It is true that when I smile at this he invariably insists with explosive fury that he will never, never ask me to marry him. He repeatedly insists that he will not. Still, I believe that he will. My problem is not what will become of me if Claude doesn’t marry me, but what will become of me if he does.
As for my damaged reputation, I’m really not worrying about that. Say I have sullied my character. In one respect, a spot on a character is like a spot on a fine satin dress: hard work will wash all spots away.
But it stands to reason that things can’t go on like this much longer. The little Sorbonne pension in which we are staying (as Monsieur and Madame) has its good points. And there are evenings when Claude, a little tired of all the famous and imposing Parisians he has met, expresses a longing to be quite alone with me again, and transforms himself once more into the Claude he was before we lived together. Then we walk along the Seine or drive on the wondrous roads towards Fontainebleau or Versailles. And these evenings are very delightful.
But they cannot be repeated forever. Any day I may take the step that I ought to have taken some time ago.
Write to me, Cornelia dear. Tell me all the news about the tenements. I suppose the Outlaws are as tame and bourgeois as ever. Does dear old Harry keep you fit and sylph-like with his rising exercises? And how is Lydia Dyson shaping? I see she has another serial in the Black Baboon (I found a copy in Brentano’s here)—she must have coined bushels of money by it. I wish I could work as copiously on my diet as she does on hers of cigarettes and Haig and Haig. Charlotte Beecher, I fear, will be “through with me” as the cinema heroes say. Has she exhibited again or married Robert yet? Tell Robert I shall write to him as soon as I’ve done something he’ll approve of.
Need I give further hints of my insatiable hunger for news? Don’t let me continue to be cut by the postman. Write and write soon to Your affectionate friend, Janet.
III
“Janet’s a little fool,” was Cornelia’s laconic comment as she folded up the letter.
Under Kelly’s persuasive service, she attacked breakfast. Between mouthfuls she epitomized the contents of the letter, a proceeding that she punctuated with caustic exclamations. At the end, Harry Kelly expressed much sympathy with Janet’s predicament.
“She has made her bed; she’ll have to lie in it,” said Cornelia.
This was a far cry from the line Cornelia used to take when she told Janet that “marriage is either a vulgar sex deal or a legalized debauch;” or when she declared in lyrical accents that “a free union is the golden key to the garden of spiritual love.” Her sentiments on this subject had undergone dilution since Harry Kelly with his athletic build, fair prospects, and standing offer of marriage had become a fixture in Number Fifteen.
But then Cornelia had never really had the courage of her radical opinions. Beneath her advocacy of new forms of sex relationships there lurked a strong affection for the old forms. Essentially, her instincts fitted her for the orderly virtuous days of bustles and bust pads, not for these latter days in which established conventions were being summarily overhauled. For her, the time was decidedly out of joint.
It had been so since her affair with Percival Houghton, the artist who had “stolen her soul.” This affair had been an accident of conduct and circumstances, and not, as she always declared, a logical outcome of her character and convictions. And it was as a result of this accidental episode that she was now an irritable, spiteful, new-fangled woman instead of the old-fashioned wife and mother (of seven children) that she should have been.
Some dim perception of all this stirred in the head of Harry Kelly the ex-Harlem Gorilla. Kelly’s mentality fell far short of his bodily development. Still, he was no fool, and he rightly guessed that Cornelia was unfair to her former protegee. He did not approve of Janet’s flight with Claude. But he had seen too much of life in the Lorillard tenements to be easily scandalized. Moreover, his fondness for Janet disposed him to put the blame, if any, on her lover. Like many amiable persons, he reserved his moral censure exclusively for people he did not know or did not like.
“The poor kid’s down on her luck,” he ventured gingerly. “It’s not up to us to hurry the post-mortem.”
“Down on her luck! With a man like Claude at her side?” cried Cornelia, the words curving by slow ascent to an unmusical top note.
“Claude’s a grand looking man, that’s true. But I’ve known many a grand looking man who was no better than a four-flusher when you had to share your bunk with him.”
“Poor Hercules, what do you know about it? If Claude was a rotter, she should have left him. In all decency, she should have left him the moment she saw that her passion was merely physical. What has she done? Nothing. They are still together on the most intimate terms.”
Kelly put his arm soothingly round her waist. It was a privilege she had allowed him in the dull days of late—though not often and always grudgingly.
“I don’t suppose she’s going to have a child,” she went on, in a bitter tone, “yet that would be her one solid happiness. She’s too selfish, I fear. Look how idiotically fate deals out the cards. She could have a child, but she doesn’t want one, while I want one so much, but—”
It was a generous hiatus, and her voice softened as she approached it. She was forever telling men that she wanted a child of her own; they were usually embarrassed or piqued by the information; and whatever the effect she enjoyed it.
For once, Kelly was not nonplussed. He drew his arm tighter.
“Listen, sweetheart,” he said, sentimentally, “what’s to prevent it? I want kiddies, too.”
“Do you indeed,” said Cornelia, with a dangerous light in her eyes. “I said I wanted a child. The difficulty is that I don’t want the father for it.”
“Why not, if we’re married?” he proceeded with unexampled obstinacy. “I’d rather follow Janet than go on being tormented like this,” he concluded, drawing the long bow at a venture.
She withdrew from him and rose, her cheeks parading an angry red. Ordinarily, a look was enough to make him quail, but, lo and behold, he was marching with unprecedented independence to the door. And how could Cornelia know that his body went hot and cold by turns for fear that she would let him walk out?
She could not afford to lose him, so she called him back.
“Here, goose!” she cried, coming swiftly down from her high horse. “Here’s Janet’s letter. You’d better read it through before you quarrel with me about it.”
He took it happily and obediently, she getting little pleasure from such an easy victory.
While he read it, she reflected once more that she could not afford to lose him. She set small store by his doglike devotion and, though he had recently obtained an excellent position as physical trainer in a fashionable men’s club, she considered him vastly beneath her. That he was physically a veritable Borghese Warrior was wholly offset by the fact that he was socially little better than a superior handicraftsman. In her eyes, that is to say, he had his points, but they were not the points of a polished gentleman.
Yet he was the one friend left to her in Kips Bay, the one friend whose constancy to her was undeviating and unimpaired.
Cornelia’s decline from glory had proceeded rapidly since the departure of Janet. The renaissance of flat Number Fifteen as the social and artistic center of the Lorillard tenements had been shortlived. That renaissance (which Cornelia tried to believe was of her own making) had really begun with Janet’s advent. While it lasted, the Outlaws and their cohorts had paraded back, with all flags flying, and had restored the flat to the pinnacle of importance which it had occupied when Cornelia, in the full flush of the Percival Houghton notoriety, had first settled down in Kips Bay. For a brief space Cornelia, glittering like the morning star, had been “the first lady of the model tenements,” and had tasted again what she called life, splendor, joy.
But Janet had gone, and Claude had gone with her. As a direct consequence of Janet’s flight, Robert had more and more often invented excuses for absenting himself from the Lorillard flats. Charlotte Beecher’s visits ceased as soon as Robert’s did, and Denman Page’s as soon as Charlotte Beecher’s. In its turn, the loss of Claude deflected a whole galaxy of feminine stars, including Lydia Dyson at the top of the scale and Mazie Ross at the bottom. And so on, ad infinitum.
Thus, almost in a week, the brilliance of Number Fifteen had been extinguished. Forever, or so Cornelia feared. True, her queenly state had ended in a burst of radiance, as a sky-rocket ends in a dazzling shower of gold. But this was cold comfort at best. Cornelia knew that, without some novel attraction, there was no hope whatever of recapturing the fickle homage of the model tenementers. And no such attraction was in sight. For once, no other adventurous young lady was ready or eager to step into Janet’s shoes as Janet had stepped into those of Mazie Ross. Cornelia’s stock had fallen to its nadir.
She felt deserted. In a mood of bitter, unreasoning resentment, she gave Janet full credit for dimming the splendor of Number Fifteen, the splendor she had never given her any credit for enkindling.
She was very angry with Janet on another score. This adventurous young lady, after a gorgeously romantic time abroad with Claude Fontaine, had apparently come a cropper, as her tirade against free love sufficiently betrayed. Reading between the lines, Cornelia fancied that she detected a veiled reproach. It was as if she were being held responsible for pointing out the step that had landed the writer in disaster. Cornelia repudiated this responsibility and was intensely irritated by the reproach.
What, hadn’t she and Janet threshed out the whole question of sex in the most open and aboveboard fashion? And hadn’t she drawn a sharp line between free love as she sincerely advocated it for the sake of a woman’s rights, and free love as it was practiced among the Outlaws and in Greenwich Village for the sake of a woman’s pleasure or gain? She had told Janet (and told it with some feeling) that many young women nowadays regarded free love as simply a very convenient antidote against man’s growing disinclination for matrimony. It was a new bait for the old trap, and a very successful bait, too, as numberless marriages growing out of free unions attested. In Greenwich Village marriageable girls used this bait by instinct; in Kips Bay they used it with cool professional dexterity, as a surgeon uses a knife.
For Janet to insinuate that she had been taken in, was a trifle strong. If she had been duped at all, she was self-duped. And was this likely? The curve of contempt in Cornelia’s lips indicated her belief to the contrary. There was such a thing as carrying a pose of artless inexperience too far. And what did Janet mean by all this talk of casting Claude off? Casting Claude off, indeed! What was she really up to?
Harry Kelly, having finished the letter, now handed it back.
“Janet’s getting a bit flighty,” he remarked with true male cynicism. “Seems to me Claude has got somebody else on a string.”
Cornelia gave a scornful laugh.
“Don’t be an idiot, Hercules,” she said. “More likely, Janet has got somebody else on a string.”
Kelly held his peace. Like King Lear’s daughter, he adored and was silent: his love was mightier than his tongue.