III
We looked as if we were prepared to say that we were beaten by the city. But in fairness we could not altogether put it down to the city that it had been a trying day—as our mothers would have called it, although we would have used a stronger term. It was the end of the winter’s gaieties, and the beginning of the hot weather, and what we liked to call the humidity had begun to roll in from the ocean and fall upon us. The pigeons wheeled more languidly, the sparrows fought with less ferocity, and even the gulls following the rivers up from the sea might have had no real hope so half-heartedly did they dip, and recover themselves, and go on their pilgrimage.
We came from a tea-party where our souls had been dipped in vinegar. For at the tea-party two of our friends had, as Winnie Conant put it, behaved like wild cats. We toiled up the stairs, from the last stop of the elevator, to the penthouse wherein we were to partake of an informal supper; and in a despairing effort to enjoy ourselves we trouped along shouting to each other, not a whit abashed by the heads of tenants who glared through doors on the jar. Divided by floors, our heads called to each other over the banisters, sophisticated cherubs with wings and no legs. James Pomeroy said in a stage whisper: “Call out the names of ‘us’ loudly enough, and you will start up a hue and cry; and tomorrow these people will buy your books. Never neglect a chance of advertising amongst the masses.” Slightly out of breath, but foppish in his use of his hands, he opened the question of a possible marriage with Priscilla Swords. Winnie Conant wanted to know why he felt the urge to do this revolutionary thing. “Besides, you have a wife,” she added, economizing her usual flow of words because of the ascent.
Pomeroy halted to adjust his eye-glasses. The narrow black ribbon waggled jauntily from his extended little finger. “Winnie—dearest!—don’t be literal? That could be arranged.”
No one discussed the recent antics of Eva Litchfield and Molly Underhill because they climbed the stairs with us.
The hostess unlocked her door, and we were at once in the most unique small residence in town. No one looked around. We wanted to sit in comfortable chairs and tell our thoughts. To this day, none of us has the slightest conception of how that room looks. It will always, for us, be swathed in the memory of knots of people who at once told all. I had a twinge of anticipatory horror when I realized that Florence Quincy had captured the chair next the one to which I dashed. The women were collecting in groups, hard at it talking; and I needed to talk to men. Our hostess lifted chastened eyes—the eyes of a nun with a past: “Oh, do you really think it a nice party? Oh, how good you are to me!” I said to Florence: “This woman will have us telling the worst about ourselves. We’ll do it anyway; we’re proud of the worst in ourselves.”
Florence was in a fractious mood. “There’s no way of getting around it—a spit of conventionality runs through me, pinning me to discomfort when I stop long enough to think. The thing is, not to stop long enough to think. Possibly I’m an invertebrate? When Molly Underhill and Eva Litchfield pull their scenes, such as we had to live through this afternoon, the spirit of Cotton Mather—or is it Jonathan Edwards?—not that it matters—seizes on my brain and I think that the best way to fix it is to drop a bomb in our next party and lay us all low at the feet of Saint Peter. If you can stop being a champion of Eva and her divine right to behave as she pleases—what did you think of it, Dinah?”
It had been a tea given by Molly’s publisher in order that she might read her latest poem to the usual scratch lot of people who would hate the poem.
Without waiting for a reply, Florence continued: “I acknowledge that Molly snivelled through her nose in high C, and that it was enough to make the gods revolt. But—and this is more to the point, naturally, for I’m a selfish woman and like my ease—it made me feel torn inside by screams I’m too much of an inherited lady to release, that Eva staged her scene as soon as Molly finished hers. I call it beastly selfish of her.”
“With both of them,” stated Winnie Conant, “it’s a case of suppressed sex.”
My attention attracted by a gaze full upon us, I glanced up. Charles Glidden looked at each of us in turn, between the eyes and not into them; he might have been a surgeon who had operated on these brains and was watching the reactions. For the moment seeing through the lenses of his analytical eyes, it ran through the minds of each of us, I daresay, that it was not a question of what was moral and what was immoral, because what we did was incited by our nerves and not by our emotions. His eyes—which might have had no lids, so immovable were they—seemed to say that men were the poor deluded moths flying head-on into the dazzle of electricity. What I had been about to remark fell into a dead silence; he disconcerted me. But Winnie was of a hardier nature: she asserted that only the surface of Eva Litchfield was vitreous. “Underneath, if she’d only acknowledge it, she’s a human being like the rest of us. But she would die sooner than own up. With Molly, the surface is quite ordinary, while inside—who knows? Therefore, she gives out that she is having one affair after another.”
With his smile, which might have been the outward sign of tremendous inner laughter except that it was without human mirth, Glidden said that this was no place for a modest man; and with his cold stare on us he might, in spite of his words of repudiation, have made up his mind to see it through, as he would, without weakening in his purpose of observing stripped emotions, have seen through all conflicts between living organisms from the flea circus to the circus of life. He said: “Do you like to peer and pry into the insides of those whom you call friends? I ask in no spirit of censure. But I’m interested in the workings of the mind of a realist. Why do you realists go the whole way? You may be said to tell all about your hero’s toe nails. It’s so disgusting. Who cares about toe nails? Eva, thank God, is not a realist.”
“Her work is almost precious,” Molly criticized.
“It’s actual beauty,” Glidden rebuked her. “What is the matter with you women, anyway? Why turn and rend Eva?”
Florence said indifferently: “I am cooling down; but by way of justification of my attitude I’ll say that I object to the implied but ever-present self-praise of the hedonist. Why should Eva take the position that, because she is Eva Litchfield, she is privileged to ruin a party? Naturally, I don’t acknowledge your right to ask. What a crowd we are, to be sure!” She lifted her shoulders. “You weren’t there when Molly read her poem; so you missed Eva’s dramatic ‘That I—I!—should have to listen to such words! Such ill-chosen words! It kills me! It kills me!’ If she for her part is going back on her friends——”
Glidden murmured: “Will you stand by ‘hedonist’?”
I was so weary that the chair seemed not to touch my body.
In the light of half the things she did, Eva appeared to be an unreasoning wretch. Influenced by her husband on the one side and by her friends on the other side, she occasionally—they thought—kicked over the traces and followed a line of her own choosing. But I doubted if her outbursts had their origin in suppressed desires: she seldom suppressed anything. Her actions were variable, seeming to spring from nothing more profound, more remote from the trivialities of daily life, than the casual speeches of her acquaintances. Most people are influenced by their friends; but I have seen no one so instantly changed, and so apt to be as instantly changed in the other direction, as Eva Litchfield. A flower has little root.
That her husband was genuinely puzzled by her I had not for some time doubted. Arriving at the tea for Molly, I had run into Eva and Nicholas disputing outside the entrance. He detained her while he stated his case. “Look here, you are a changed woman the instant you’re thrown with your friends. I never saw anything so peculiar. It’s a fit that comes over you. The fit—” he concluded bitterly—“is on you now.”
I had hurried past with the scantiest of greetings. As I reached the door of the reception room, Molly’s voice rang out above the noise of the already large gathering; it was like the unpleasant voice of a peacock. I craned my head around the guests who now, a receding tide, flowed back into the corridor. In the centre of the room Molly sat enthroned; and behind her, on the piano, was the portrait bust of Nefertiti. The experienced serenity of the plaster head, and the strained expectancy of the living head, confronted me. Two pairs of women’s eyes, filled with something above me, below me, behind me, stared at me but did not see me. I was appalled. The invisible laid hands on me, pushing me back with those who fled to the corridor. The voices in the corridor were pitched against Molly’s voice in the reception room. And the indescribable tautness of the nerves that her speaking voice engendered, intensified by the pressure of this receding wave of our friends and our foes, combined with the effect produced upon me by the eyes of Nefertiti and Molly Underhill and blasted me. I felt the imminent snapping of all control; and in the light of this inner turmoil I saw how good a thing it was, on Eva’s part, to let go in a so-called burst of artistic temperament authorized, by popular consent, if one does it with conviction.
With pure conviction, Eva almost sobbed: “I don’t see why I should be expected to bear it!”
And in the reception room, in the indifferent presence of Nefertiti, Molly suffered purely. They had not listened to her poem, she wailed.
I sank deeper in my chair in the penthouse: one’s friends could be hard to bear. Florence went on raging at Charles Glidden. “Do you blame Eva’s husband for leaving her in the lurch and going home?”
“Oh—by the way—” gasped Winnie—“what made him do it?” She gave me a sharply suspicious glance. “I shouldn’t be surprised if Dinah knows.”
I did. I remembered, in a series of sharp impressions, the horrid happenings of the tea-party. But I shook my head.
From behind muffling velvet curtains there had sounded the clear sweet voice that never failed to act on Nicholas like a call. It had come like the song of some bird caught in a hen yard. Nicholas had listened, rapt: it was a lovely sound.
So distinctly that I glanced in confusion at her husband, Eva had said: “In regard to my next book, Spence, I’m quite sure that the subject of passionate marriage can be so treated as to be without offense. I’ll put ecstasy into it. It should be treated as poetry and not as a study in flesh and blood.”
I had hastened to say to Nicholas: “She never has her feet on the ground. Bear that in mind. She will write nothing raw. She dislikes bawdy words.”
He had replied with profound disgust: “But in talking, she’d dissect the Almighty.”
I had slipped away to stop Eva before he should overhear more. She was indulging herself in an impersonal analysis of personal experiences. I knew that in her case experiences became impersonal as soon as she had stepped out of them. I heard her say: “I’ve found myself thinking, in the midst of tenderness, that there can be nothing in the universe without the right words to convey it. But I’ve found that the search for the words ruins the emotion. Life is so awful.”
Mapes had asked disinterestedly: “Don’t you offend your husband?”
I touched her shoulder. But she had said—impatient of the presence of both Spencer Mapes and me because we were not in the centre of her preoccupation: “I’ve often told him what it was that made me so thoughtful.”
Mapes had relapsed into his almost soundless laughter. “At times, I’m sorry for him!”
I said sternly: “Your husband is waiting for you. I think he’s ready to go home.”
She had turned away indifferently. “I won’t go yet.”
He had left without her. He must, however, have promptly realized that he had set his feet on another stage of a progress the end of which he himself did not yet see; for he entered the penthouse at about this time. Beyond an indifferent nod, she paid no attention. She had been over in a corner talking with Spencer Mapes, and they had been joined by Addis Wickersham and James Pomeroy; we had heard Addis Wickersham’s splendid voice intoning the service of literature. Over our corner a silence fell at his entrance. I suspect that the others were thinking, as I did, that Nicholas Van Suydam was in a position of minor awkwardness. If he himself realized this he gave no sign. He had a graceful manner; and on this occasion I frankly admired the kindness which actuated his attention to Molly Underhill. Since our arrival at the penthouse, Molly had lurked, prowled, and ostentatiously looked over the books, but had seemed unaware of the presence of her friends. Her wide smile of welcome for Nicholas was at the same time a challenge to Eva, upon whom she at once turned a triumphant glare.
The irregularly shaped, low-ceiled room was already thick with tobacco smoke, which wavered into a canopy over our heads, and joined the banked shadows in the ell, and added to the nervous discomfort of finding oneself in the silence of a penthouse. We would have sworn that we heard the silence. The various groups of people broke up, and formed again, and evidently gave it up as hopeless: they stood where they found themselves, waiting for something else. In this way, Eva and Nicholas were thrown together.
She asked lightly why truly he had come back, and shrugged when he persisted that he had returned because he was responsible for her. “You won’t stay,” she dropped, with as much acidity in her tone as she ever employed. “You won’t stay, because you won’t approve of this party more than you did of the one you so charmingly left.” She shrugged again when he replied that he had every intention of staying until she took her departure in his company. “As you please,” she agreed. “But I want to say this to you: you can’t play fast and loose with me, Nick. I don’t permit my friends to do so. My friends, however, have never wished to treat me in a cavalier fashion.” With a nod that was almost one of dismissal, she strolled away.
I hastened to say to him: “Have you thought about this room? It is packed, I’m feeling, with evil influences.”
“The people in the room?” he enquired.
“It’s—it’s—bad. The room itself. The city outside the room. Oh—the whole thing,” I finished lamely enough. But I started in again to keep both his mind and my own from Eva. “I go through this year after year, agreeing with everyone because it’s less troublesome than to hold opposite views. There’s so much talk, if one doesn’t agree.”
“But there’s talk anyway, isn’t there?” he asked, his manner that of one who knew the answer.
It was impossible to divert his attention from Eva; I saw them meet in the middle of the room. She seemed, in fact, to have been seeking him. “Suppose we go?” she urged. “I think there is going to be a scene.”
He responded to her appeal with “Then I feel sure you will stay.”
I heard her foot tapping on the floor. “I won’t make a laughing-stock of myself by hanging around you,” she flung at him, and turned on her heel and left him.
The scene which she anticipated started in by being, as usual, purely a verbal one. I got out of it by retiring into the ell of the room and settling with a book. If Molly Underhill stood pat under baiting, or if she flung back at them, was none of my business. But she brought the scene over to me, as I would not go to meet it: she ran to my corner and threw herself down with such abandonment to her inner turmoil that the chair creaked. In a passion of resentment she said through clenched teeth: “That taunt!” She almost flung herself at me as she talked aloud although to herself. “When I remember that, when I came to New York, these were the people I wanted to impress——!” As spasmodically as she had flung herself down, she leapt from the chair, snatched her coat and ran from the apartment: we heard the thud of her feet as she hurried down the stairs.
Nicholas Van Suydam said to several of us who stood stupidly looking at the door through which Molly had bolted: “She was crying. It seems a pity.”
Winnie Conant jeered: “Molly’s trying to live in a protracted emotional crisis. She gloried in the recent unpleasantness. Save your pity until she needs it.”
I felt Eva’s hand slip into my arm. “Help me out? Help me out, Dinah, for the love of God? I can’t stand this!” At once she continued, speaking imperatively to her husband: “Some of us are going down to the Metcalfs’.”
I heard him say in a low voice: “You’ve behaved like a wild thing all day.”
She pulled away from his detaining hold. “Are you coming, too, Dinah?”
He said: “Very well. I’ll drop you at the door. I shan’t go in. And let me say this, Eva: you’re being discourteous to our hostess, who doesn’t belong to the ‘union’.”
She said for the second time, and indifferently: “Do as you please.”
He told me, afterwards, that he hastened to undress and get into bed. He knew that this was to offset any weakening of his purpose, any qualm that might have urged him to hunt for Eva as she rushed through the homes of her friends.