II
I cautioned myself: “My good woman, don’t be partisan. At every opportunity, you’ve stated that there are two sides to a question. Why not, with your always well explained inquisitiveness, look into Eva’s husband’s side?” He was not so reticent as I had anticipated. Or rather, I imagined the truth lay between his inherited reserve and the trick of ready confidences which to a certain extent he could not have avoided catching from his wife’s crowd as if it were the measles. He must have been bewildered. Nothing of his mother’s training could have prepared him for Eva.
As we would say, I wanted his slant on Eva.
If one waited long enough, Eva played into one’s hands. I demurred at one of her demands to see me at once; I must, I told her, see an editor who was more immediately important. She suggested that I meet her at her publisher’s where, if I insisted on putting business in her head, she remembered she should go. She again asseverated the urgency of seeing me without delay.
I had no intention of meeting her; but I went—possibly from a fear that otherwise I should miss the key note. I went from a magazine editor’s office—where there were gay curtains at outside windows and gayer flowers on the desk—to the inner cubicle of all publishers: the waiting-room nicely calculated to break the nerve of the most recalcitrant. I found Nicholas Van Suydam already in waiting on Eva. He was seated on a comfortable sofa, but he looked half his usual size; even his long legs were shorter. The atmosphere of the cubicle was heavy with the suspended breathing of those on the rack, and Nicholas glanced furtively at persons whom he did not recognize but whom he assumed to be authors in various stages of expectancy. A young fellow clutched to his breast a manuscript that could only be his first. A frowsy female, by the force of her determination, held down a reluctant secretary while she pointed out the best passages in her book which was still in the relatively happy state of not having been rejected. The bored head of a department shared a corner with a gentleman who preached on the excellencies of a work that so far was in his head and on charts which he spread over their united knees. A small though firm woman said: “I insist on speaking to the young man who changed my commas in my last book.” Over the partition separating the cubicle from the main office there came the high-pitched irritation of typewriters. The activity of book publishing leapt the partition, and fell upon the heads of those who wrote books and weakened their stamina by its superior organization.
I said: “She asked me here. She said she simply had to speak to me.”
He said: “She asked me here. She said she simply had to see me.”
The fact that we had reached the point where in concert we laughed at his wife and my friend broke upon us at the same time, and we stopped laughing to curiously inspect each other. But I knew that he was going to tell me almost as much as she would have told.
He remarked inadequately that we had been seeing each other at teas, and as I let this pass without comment he continued: “You look like a meditative kitten. Have you been saying to yourself that I am a lazy devil? But I’ve always found late afternoon in New York a maddening time of day. I want to hurry home, and call out through the darkening house ‘Where are you, Eva?’ And Eva goes to teas, at this eerie hour. If I don’t go with her, I am assailed by loneliness. Dark, in the street outside. You know how it looks, down there, very late in the afternoon; I called your attention to it, the last time you were down.”
I remembered. Along the front of the apartment house across the street the fresh summer awnings had been lifted to admit the cool breeze of the end of the day, and through these unveiled windows heads thrust, and looked up, and drew in again. There was rain in the air, but it was across the river. I said: “You like to stay at home when you’re not working. But we reverse it, you see; we are obliged to reverse it: we stay at home when we work.” Everything about us was the reverse of all things about him. I wondered if he had seen it, for himself, and that it was at this he cavilled, in his mind, during his disputes with Eva.
He replied with his enforced light touch. “As to work—I spent a large part of today leaning out my office window and contemplating the city. Now, don’t, please, say what Eva would promptly say to confound me—that I had led her to believe I worked while at my office. There are times when a man must dream; and one dreams in the most tranquil spot. I would fulfill a better purpose if I sat in the park, or on Riverside, and absorbed the city rearing itself above me; but by doing this wise thing I should be flying in the face of the convention that a business man is always busy. A man, if a proper fellow, sits behind his desk continuously, a portentous scowl on his face and in his heart a mad desire to get off and go fishing. He’s the typical business magnate: the scowl tells you so. Always on the job—a man to be depended on.” He quirked one eyebrow in a way to which Eva had called my attention; I had the idea that he was quirking his eyebrow at himself because of more of an inner discontent than could be accounted for by his differences with Eva. And he then came out with an astounding question: “Do you ever dream—in private—you writing folk?”
I drawled: “At the last tea at which we met, I believe I remember Florence Quincy at the wailing wall: ‘Haven’t I the right to my privacy? Haven’t I the right to the time to work?’”
“All tosh,” he countered promptly. “It is in effect, the litany of literary people: ‘Oh dear God, grant me the time for writing!’ You aren’t angry, are you?”
I acknowledged that we were amusing. “Oh—I mean, unconsciously so.” I was, at the same time, acknowledging to my sense of fair play that I had not expected to find his attitude towards us so disparaging and that I had no right to object to what he might say.
“You’re a breed set apart, by your own wish, from mankind: what are your sources of laughter?” he asked with a faint uneasiness. “You nervously organized sensitives—to quote my wife—who cling together, working each other into tantrums, preying on each other, wrecking each other: tell me, do you like each other?”
I had no reply to this. I did not know. Through a perturbation set up by his question, I heard him explaining that we appeared unable to stay away from each other except when we were deep in slumber; we were, he said, banded against everyone besides ourselves. Architects did not feel this overpowering urge to herd together every evening. On the golf links, he had observed that lawyers mingled agreeably with men who were neither lawyers nor judges, doctors with men who might be potential patients but who had not yet fallen into their professional hands. His friend Anthony Bloodgood, to take an example, could bear it if the stock market were not mentioned during his hours of relaxation. But always amongst us, he averred, there spatted back and forth our technical discussions. “Do you never weary of it?” he wanted to know.
I murmured in extenuation that we did not always listen to what the other said; we waited our own turn to say something. In this way, I explained, we snatched a bit of rest here and there.
“Your private lives, in short,” he on his part expounded, “are lived in the midst of turmoil?” He was, I suspected, thinking of something that his words but overlaid.
I was proud of myself that I smiled good-naturedly. “You are in league with Mattie, then?” As he was frankly puzzled, I explained. Having finally found time for listening to whatever was preying on Mattie’s mind, that competent maid had almost sobbed to me: “Miss Eva’s got some friends what’s got looks like pizen. Yes ma’am, like pizen. But do dat stop Miss Eva from listenin’ to ’em? No ma’am, it don’t. Lordy, Miss Dinah, she ain’t got nothin’ but fancy sense. But she got a good heart. She’s jes’ like a little chile with a good heart, an’ belief.”
He responded to this eagerly. “She has a good heart! The things she does—Mattie knows about them; Mattie can tell you——” He almost stammered in his desire to put his wife forward in a light that he thought new to me.
I wondered: did he love her, except for her beauty? Because if he loved her for nothing more he would not hold her. As if in reply to my silent question, he said: “Even her imperfections are lovable.” But there was, in his fond tone, in his defiant eyes, a perplexity that he as yet denied. He was trying to change the foundations of his home, to make use of a term of his profession; but when a building is erected on the wrong plan there are two things only to be done: it can be put up with, or it can be razed. “After she went away for the first summer of our married life,” he continued his apology for Eva, “she wrote me that at first she couldn’t bear to look at her typewriter because it had come between us, you might say.” But Nicholas Van Suydam was not fatuous: instantly he began to laugh. “She said that the little white keys were teeth to devour her—little masculine teeth biting her heart. I say, Dinah! What I said to her was ‘Why masculine? Feminine teeth can bite.’ And, speaking of the summer—have you any idea of what she is planning to do?”
“None. But surely she would tell you?”
He said that she had begged him to guard her, during the remaining weeks of spring, from the intrusion of the world. “Lock me up, if I suggest going out?” she had requested. “Don’t permit me to go to parties?” He had had what he called one of his ardent fits; he had said to her: “There’s nothing I’d like better. I’d like to think of you, all day, as safely at home waiting for my return. There’s happiness for a man—to know that the woman he loves is watching out the window for his return at night—waiting for him, beautiful and sweet, at the end of his day in a man’s rough world. Oh, Eva——!”
I do not mean to say that, when telling these scattered incidents of his life with Eva, he at once launched into the extended and shameless dissertations which I time and again quote. Rather, he told his story by his halts, his uneasy frowns, his jerky flaps of his hand which were in some strange way appealing; had he not been of my own generation, there were times when I should have felt maternal towards him. But I have not Eva’s camera-like memory for conversations, and I have had to put into words those things that partly I read from his disquietude.
He went floundering along. “She says things, sometimes—at home—— You see, if it weren’t for these things she says and then, evidently, tries to retract, I’d be so much less crazy about her. Can you see how that could be? She said, the other day, that something is happening to her, in her mind, so that at present she doesn’t know much about herself.”
“She doesn’t,” I agreed broodingly.
“She put it down to a real reversal of values. She thinks that maybe she will get her bearings; and maybe not. She said she had found out that one can’t force issues.” I judged that he had been rendered uneasy by this. He had dimly perceived a change in her, so that her words had been merely a confirmation. At times, during the last few days, she had looked as if the breaking point with which he had frequently threatened her were close at hand. This morning she had asked him to meet her here; and he had demurred, because he thought it unsuitable for him to intrude on her business relations. She had, he assured me, all but begged him to come. “She said—it’s so foolish to repeat it!—but she did say that she had about found that her need for me was not so much—— I do feel that I’m drivelling!”
“Go on,” I encouraged him. “I’m tremendously interested. And do remember that I’ve known Eva longer than have you.”
Thus urged, he fixed his eyes on a distant object—it happened to be the frowsy female who still expounded the salient points of her book—and, virtually, plunged. “You know, then, how carefully she chooses her words—it’s almost as if she had got them on paper, she’s so sure—so that what she says has an added weight of truth? She said ‘I found out, lately, that my need for you is not so much physical as it’s spiritual.’” He laughed a little, and asked if I considered this a complimentary remark for a wife to make to a husband.
“From Eva? Undoubtedly.” I left him in no doubt that I was positive about it.
“I didn’t think of it in that way,” he then acknowledged. “I could think of nothing besides what I put to her—a hot demand to know what the devil she meant. I do feel apologetic for telling you this,” he broke off to say. “I must be catching your literary urge to tell all.”
I overlooked the slur to again beg him to proceed. “I’ve been away so long,” I told him, “that I myself know little to tell, and possibly—undoubtedly—should tell it if I had any store of knowledge. But, seriously, I am fond of Eva; and I want to hear everything that you’re willing to tell me.”
He gave me a quick look. I detected an added stiffness in his manner when, after thinking it over, he complied. “What she said next is really my reason for bringing up the subject. I’m aware that you’re a friend of hers, and I feel on my own part that you can be trusted.”
This I could take only as a rebuke, although he was unaware of its hitting me hard: he had no way of knowing that I had been up to what I could only call ferreting. However, my qualm of conscience did not prevent my listening eagerly to what he had to say.
He told it with his hesitation augmented by the length of time it had taken him to make up his mind. “She replied in a way that was no explanation. She said ‘The sad part of it is, Nick, that no matter what happens everyone will be sorry for you. No one will be sorry for me. And yet, it seems to me that somebody should be able to see my side of it. Somebody should be sorry for me. It’s very little to ask—that someone be sorry for me.’ I’m sure that this is, word for word, what she said; it made such a peculiar impression on me that I can’t forget it. Her side of—what?” He had, I made out, come to this question in his talk with her; for he said that he had eventually asked her bluntly: “Then, if you don’t want me, what’s the matter with me?” And she had asked: “Is that beyond a man’s comprehension?”
This was so characteristic of Eva that I enjoyed it heartily. It was possible to talk in private, in this waiting-room: no one so much as glanced at us.
“You will see, in a minute, that I went into telling you this rigmarole because it bears on her as yet unspoken wishes for the summer. You see, I shouted at her. There are times when she makes a fellow feel that there’s nothing left but to shout at her. She has that dear little smile that’s the most withdrawn thing in the world. I think—” and he too enjoyed it—“that if once I brought myself to the pitch of shaking the breath out of her I’d get my bearings. And at the present time, I assure you, I am away off in my calculations.”
Again it had helped, that we had shared our amusement. “What did she say when you shouted at her?”
“She withdrew!” His baffled shake of his head was comic. “And then she announced, as a result of her cogitation, that she didn’t really believe she wanted a man at all. You see? She started in by almost making love, and she swung around to a statement like that—to her husband! The fact,” he added slowly, “that I fail to understand a thing about her is a constant fillip. I mean, I am crazy over her. I never saw her equal.”
I suggested: “You can’t get around it that she is Eva Litchfield.”
“Which doesn’t mean a thing,” he said heatedly. “I don’t stop to remember that she has sense. In fact, I often doubt that she has.”
“You don’t see that side of her?”
“Do you?”
“Yes. How can you fail to see it?”
He shrugged this off. “I was—I think, at any rate, that I was—going to tell you how I came to my suspicion that she’s planning something in the way of running off again, this summer. And I wanted to ask if you couldn’t arrange to go to whatever place she selects?”
I replied promptly that this was impossible. I added, significantly, that I had my own work to consider.
He looked at me with more sympathy than he had yet shown. “Exactly! She’s a devastating influence on another’s work.”
“You’ve felt this?” With no right to ask, I still was determined to find out.
Properly, he ignored my question. “She said that she was so crowded in her life—she had so little room in which to work. This was, simply, making excuses—laying the groundwork of her plan, whatever it may be. She said that a man and his claims—his mere presence in the house—held her down, cramping her spirit, injuring her work. If she had wings, she said—and she acknowledged that possibly she hadn’t; she said she hadn’t had a fair chance to see if they would grow—the claims of a man would clip them. This was ingratitude, Dinah. I make myself scarce around the house when she’s working. And besides, all day I’m at my office. I called her attention to this.”
“Shouting?” I enquired, to ease a tension.
His laugh was a bark. “I did. She came back at me, however: she said that I was in the air around her. That she knew I was in existence. That this crowded her—that I was in existence!” His face was clouded with masculine, perplexed resentment. “I said, to this, that I’d be damned if I believed she knew what she wanted out of life. And I asked her, point-blank, what she did want.” He cast at me a shame-faced smile. “You know how she gets you when you’re angriest? With just one little childlike word? She said ‘Wings!’ I assure you, I melted!”
In deciding to catechize him, I had not bargained for so much. I was overwhelmed by these riches of confidence. His outburst, almost popping from his lips as if a cork had been drawn from a soda bottle, and incited by the titillation of the clicking typewriters across the partition, came more easily to a comparative stranger. I only hoped that he would not fly to the other extreme by the next occasion when we should be thrown together. He had so shaken himself by his recital of this scene with his wife that he now swept into a confession as embarrassing for me as it would be for him when he came to think it over. It was a queer state of affairs: both of them working, and each doubting the power of accomplishment of the other. He had said to her: “Suppose I came at you with a remark on the order of these you’ve been throwing at my head?” And she had replied carelessly “Oh, but, you know, you’d never feel this way because you aren’t made of the same clay.” This was what she thought of him; this was how she rated his ability. Nothing that he had accomplished had changed her basic distrust, nothing he might in future achieve would make an iota of difference. In this she was like a man, who can love a woman and at the same time believe her to be a simpleton. It behooved him to look into his mind, to weigh his imagination, in order to settle the question of her estimate before the power of her cool conviction undermined his self-confidence. Suppose he were wrong about himself? But, by acknowledging the chance of this, he did not in the least admit Eva’s conception of their relative standing: a man’s mind would be, necessarily, a better mind than a woman’s. If he had been able to think otherwise, the fabric of his life would have been at once unravelled. He thought it fortunate that he could hold so firmly to this one truth, for a suspicion of Eva’s superiority would have broken the image of his love. He did not wish her to be more sensible; he wanted her to be sweeter. He might shout at her to be sensible, but he wanted her to be foolish. He said—for a moment sheepishly a boy in love—that with her hair of so fine a gold that it was silvery, with her delicate skin so faintly flushed with rose, she had always seemed to him a lovely creature of the moonlight: no, she herself was the moon of his delight.
I said—cruelly, because Eva had accused him of sentimentality: “How could you have forgotten that the moon wanes, and is cold and not to be counted on to warm the house?” Before the eyes of his mind there should have risen the unnatural moon—large, and artificial like a stage setting—rising to look at the astounding city with a face of dead stuff.
He soared above my objection. “She’s so untouchable,” he said with admiration that did not now complain. Always when within his reach, she stood straightly upright; if she had had a less plastic body she would have given the impression of rigidity. But in her eyes he usually discovered a beam of playful fondness. “Dear old Nick! You will be foolish!” Even when telling me of it, he chid himself: so often he forgot her fastidiousness. He knew that a man must be careful in his treatment of Eva, ever bearing in mind her embarrassment in bodily contact. This, I gathered, he attributed to purity. Her notions often irritated him; but he acknowledged that he should make an effort to comprehend that she was more sprite than woman. He had had, at times, flashes of realization; he had seen with his conscience that if a man fell in love with one of these creatures of the elements, withdrawn into her life of the mind—if a mere man had plucked a star from the heavenly host and tried to domesticate it—he must make concessions of his own nature. Essentially cold and sparkling, starlight was not for the common terrestrial day. He had confused his metaphors: it was lucky that Eva had not heard.
I rose. “We are all as selfish as we can be,” I told him. “I’m so selfish that, even after your appeal, I still refuse absolutely to go with Eva this summer. And, if you are looking for a reason, what you’ve just said will provide you with one. Eva, without meaning to do so, tries that out on everyone.”
She came through the archway from beyond the hall of the typewriters. She was breathing rapidly, and her step was hurried and irregular. She said at once: “I forgot all about having asked you to come, Dinah. And I’m not in the mood to talk. Do you mind if we put it off? Come on: I feel like getting out of sight of this place.”
Fifth Avenue displayed the discreet gaiety of late afternoon. Florists offered window displays of odd and prankish blossoms. “Goodbye,” I said gladly.
But Nicholas took me by the arm. I suspected that he did this in order to avoid my eyes. He wished, he said, to buy posies for us. He said to his wife: “You look like a flower yourself. Your cheeks are red. If you knew how much good it does me, to see you look so healthy.”
She smiled at him, her eyes narrowed although not unkindly. “You should know that I can’t wear fresh flowers. They wither at once, if I wear them.”
His own smile retained his ardent admiration of her. “But I must buy you something? This beautiful day—and you knocking a man’s eye out with your charms—I must buy you something. What shall it be? There’s a dog shop around on Park Avenue; and on my way up to meet you I noticed a good little pup in the window-cage. He took my fancy. Shan’t we go and buy him for you?” He was kindness itself in the way he held me grouped with them. He held me, and looked at her as if to say “We are your staunch supporters, your ardent admirers, Eva.” But I felt that in his determined insistence on her beauty of appearance he was over emphasizing; architecturally she was perfect, and he believed in decoration for its own sake, but he seemed to dwell on it because of some other side that he wished to slur over.
“Don’t be so childish,” she said without rancour. She was a woman who followed one idea to its conclusion. I saw that she had something on her mind, and again I endeavoured to escape. But the traffic lights changed, and he rushed us across the street and in the direction of the window wherein pranced and yapped the good little pup. Late shoppers hurried in at doors, scuttling to attain the haven of the showrooms before closing time. Even now dusk was falling swiftly on the city. The shrill cries of newsboys knocked against the roar of the traffic, and from a phonograph shop we heard the sweeter shrillness of the “Peanut Vender.”
“Goodbye,” I muttered; and dodged through the automobiles. Eva did not notice my departure; she built a protection around her thought, hedging it in safely from interruption.