IV
I saw Eva once again before the summer flight from New York set in for most of us. She went abroad with her husband, and I have always believed that this was the direct result of Winnie Conant’s party for women only. This party became famous as the Onion Party, and, we suspected, influenced the course of several lives.
I stopped for Eva, and Nicholas walked with us to the studio in Macdougal Alley. That they had not, at this time, come to an agreement about what had been brewing between them was evident during this short stroll. We started around the corner into Fifth Avenue in a silence that was a thick wall between the two. Across the street, above the mass of a terraced apartment house, the crescent moon hung in a deep blue sky. Nicholas struck his stick against the trunk of a lone tree surviving at the kerb; and it struck him, with the sharpness of the blow he dealt the tree, that he had sold out his birthright: why had he selected a profession whose present aim was to change New York? Why had he not been content with what he had always known? Why had his taste wandered afield? All of this we gathered from what he said to us in his resentment of disillusion. Eva watched him, I fancied, with amusement. “What is it?” she enquired with her air of detached interest in the contortions of human beings.
Promptly he informed us that the city was ruining us. Looking accusingly at his wife, he said directly to her: “It seems, of late years, to inculcate a love of money.”
“Who doesn’t like money?” she asked flippantly. Her flippancy, as with everything about her, even her anger, was dainty; her sweep of eyebrow took a more airy flight, her small mouth was prim: it occurred to me that in this mood she was more than ever dangerous to the peace of mind of this man who acknowledged that he did not understand her.
He said: “People—nice people—don’t openly bay down the trail after it.”
She said: “Oh, don’t they!”
He shut his lips down tight on a sentence that I was sure would have been “Not the kind of people to whom I’m accustomed.”
“As I said,” she smiled, “you’ve the instincts of your family. Dinah, do you know that they hold on to their belongings—in Nick’s case, it’s his wife—as if they were increasingly valuable lots on the island of Manhattan? I assure you, they look upon wives and children as ‘lots’.”
We had walked as far down as Eighth Street, and went through a crowd of those who, Eva said, thought of wives as valentines. The street might have been a penny arcade. Sauntering youths and maidens, for the most part arm in arm, interfered with the continuity of the dispute. But from Eva’s smile I knew that she meant to finish it. We turned into Macdougal Street, illy lighted and grimy; and she came closer to him and purred: “You are sorry you bought this lot?” She touched her breast with her hand. “Too bad! You didn’t select the lot in the fashionable section; eh?” She threw her head back and laughed: “Spencer Mapes warned me!”
He said stolidly: “We’re not going to quarrel, you know.”
“Ah!” She shook her head. “I’m not so sure of that, Nick. You’ve begun to insult me.”
“And you?”
They had forgotten me. I dropped behind.
She said quietly: “I’ve begun to be hurt.”
His voice was no longer firm. “I’m sorry.”
We had reached the Alley, and strove to keep our footing on the cobblestones of its pavement. Ahead of us, under a small lamp, a little terracotta god of love kept watch over the blue door of Winnie’s house.
“I daresay,” said Eva, “that this is the first time you’ve shown what you really think of me.”
“Eva——?”
“Here we are,” said Eva. “And, my dear, I can tell you this: I prefer my friends. Take that as you will. They have never so meanly criticized me.”
I paused long enough to whisper to Nicholas: “What could you have said to her before we started? You’ve—actually—hurt her feelings.”
He shook his head and went off through the obscurity of the Alley.
Eva and I stepped into a scene of feminine revelry; I had never seen the Wickersham library respond to so high a note. The note was sharp, as bright as parrots and as dubious as the talk of parrots. Thrown into relief by the sombre background of the books which covered the walls of the two-storey room were all colours and combinations of colours; and the firelight picked out folds of silk, and was lost in folds of velvet, and danced and flickered until there might have been even more movement than was the case. Wickersham was soliloquizing: “It no longer gives the impression of being the library of a scholar.” He appeared to be broken by the sight.
Eva said to me: “Men are the trouble, in this life.” Already her eyes were shining—because of Nicholas going home through the dark Alley, I made no doubt. Addis Wickersham—apologetic in manner because he said that he had only consented to serve one round of cocktails in order that his wife’s dreadful idea would go over—tried to detain us in talk; but Eva sailed past him and into the evolving matriarchy. She confided to me that she felt like a galleon, with treasure in her hold, because her frock was the prettiest in the room. To impress upon men her standing as an artist she would rely on the quality of her work, supplemented by her beauty; women could only be overwhelmed by clothes. She saw that these women were divided between amusement and irritation at the drama of her glorious entrance; but above the tumult in her mind the galleon which was Eva’s high heart sailed with this brave show of security on the land behind.
But that she was in the grip of tumult I soon gathered by what she dragged me off into a corner to confide. “What happened at home before you left?” I pressed her. “How can you expect me to understand, properly to sympathize, or even to advise—as I do really make out that you wish me to do—if I’m not posted?”
This I was never to know. She revolved in her mind—and in words to me—what she would say to Nicholas, how she could manage the problem of Nicholas, what part, in short, Nicholas could be permitted to play in her life; but if any act of his, any speech of his, had brought about a crisis she did not tell me. Upon her imagination there lay a suffocating weight. Freedom—freedom from the flesh: this was what she told me she must attain. As usual with her, when she began talking about her work she strove to lift herself out of her body. She cried: “You are free, Dinah! You are free!” And this envy of my unvalued freedom mingled with the invisible presence of Nicholas which flooded her body, and threw her into a frenzy of resentment against nature which had trapped her. She felt the flame of her desire to reach the top of her profession lick from her heart all love for Nicholas; and she justified this infidelity of the spirit by what she believed to be true, that never could her mind belong to a man, be obsessed by a man. She began to hate her body because it had been the lure for the attentions of men who would distract her mind.
We found seats comparatively away from the noise, and she sank down for surcease from her pain; and at once it was harder to bear, for she felt as if she were being physically torn to pieces. In her breast there raged, gnawing at her, a demon of frantic desire to be allowed by life to climb with her ambition. And she thought—watching herself suffer, I noticed—of the boy with the fox at his vitals. “What shall I do? What shall I do?” she moaned; but the irregular action of her heart precluded her speaking aloud; I knew, merely, from the motion of her lips what it was she said. I had seen her like this before, although not over Nicholas.
“Come!” I said at last, rising and endeavouring to pull her to her feet. “This is getting you nowhere.”
She did not dare, she said, to leave her corner, for she knew that something of her emotion would show on her face. The span of life was short, the pace rapid, and what was she to do when time flew past and made her breathe in panting gasps of impatience? She felt a wish, she said, to leap from her chair and get to work at once; and she would have annihilated these people, in order to work now—work forever—if the means for murder were within her grasp. People—always people, too close to her, crowding her, cheating her of her chance! It was because she was a woman. A man would not hesitate to kick anyone out of his way. A man was ruthless. But, if a woman should dare to be ruthless, some man was always in her life to hold her down, to turn the key on her—the key of domineering masculine superiority. She began to wish that she believed in a personal Deity: a Deity would be too great to push down a creature he had made—a poor Eva would not be turned from the Paradise of her ambition. But God was a man. There had never been a supreme deity who was a woman. Always the goddess was an underling, a subservient wretch, with a crescent moon on her head while the god wore the sun.
I said: “Stop that! You’re raving.”
She said between tightly closed teeth: “I can’t bear it.”
I asked her what it was that she could not bear.
She said—admonishing herself: “Hold tight, Eva! Keep the reins! You can’t afford to go off the deep end.” She looked at me, rather piteously. “You know, Dinah, that I’ve gone off the deep end so many times?” She knew that her cold intelligence must find the way out; and with her body so shaken, she would have to put off the session with her mind. She cautioned herself—striving to guard the thing in her that was precious: “Hold tight, you awful fool!” Helplessness ran over her like ice-water. What if she lost the command of that intelligence which had always eventually seen her through? She jumped up and started running across the floor to the only man in the room.
Addis Wickersham lingered behind the table on which he continued to mix drinks for his wife’s woman-party. He mixed the drinks automatically, his eyes fixed and glassy, staring at no woman in particular but surprised by all, shuddering at no one incident but revolted by the sum total of womankind in the raw. He murmured, as if to his secret locked-away mind: “What a ghastly sight—a lot of women stuffing onions down their gullets!” Onions disagreed with him. He continued, however, in a spirit of masochism, to stare at the party, and his occasional shudders rippled unperceived over the immaculate surface of his pose. It was with what appeared to be amusement that he called out to his wife: “Winfreda, my spouse, this is intolerable!”
Winnie Conant never cared whether she talked with a man or a woman, for she wished to force either sex to spread before her excited eyes the map of their emotions. Stating openly that only women comprehend other women’s troubles, she also held that only men possessed the gift of sympathy. She went through her party like a plow, forcing issues, disorganizing what groups might have been headed in another direction. For she considered human beings unable, from lassitude, to help themselves. At her husband’s hail, she halted so suddenly that her mouth remained open with the choked-off words that she had had ready for an important woman with an heroic diaphragm—a star from the opera and therefore new material for Winnie’s studies; she emitted an infantile grunt.
The opera star, her own mouth distended to accommodate a slice of Bermuda onion, spoke in her stead. “Onions,” pronounced the star, “are good for the larynx.”
Addis Wickersham’s voice rolled through his splendid library, and reverberated against his lofty ceiling, and fell upon the star. “Your own larynx is a fine one, madame. I saw it distinctly.”
Eva stood tapping her foot on the floor. The sound of these light but steady taps served to keep her shoulders from jerking; she listened, and regulated the rhythm of her jazz-time tapping. It gave her something to do. It was almost dreadful, to see the close attention she gave to her rhythm. She had reached the point where she could no longer sit and wait for the moment when the pressure of her agony would tear her to pieces. She caught Winnie by the arm.
Winnie was immersed in a discussion with several women who, they said, contemplated leaving their husbands. Her mouth open and ready for a release of words, she got the chance to shout: “Why change the shape of the man, when the new spirit is bound to be a duplicate of the old?”
As if she had been brought up short by Winnie’s general question, Eva cried: “How can you invariably speak from your own standpoint? How can you be so sure of what other people should do?”
Winnie went on with it as if she believed what she said. “I don’t think, mind you, that any man is possible as a life companion; but what’s the sense in changing?”
I contrived to get Eva off. “Keep quiet,” I admonished her. “They are joking, and you aren’t.”
She was far from joking. The eyes that she turned on me were haggard. For herself, there was no hope, she said to me. Nicholas had impregnated the little house in Eleventh Street; and for her the essence of the big house in Washington Square had got over all New York. She assured me—and I feared that others overheard—that there was no hope of escape from the exigencies of life.
Even in this room, the effect of the high notes of women’s voices was shocking. We went back to our corner. “What’s the matter?” enquired a woman, pausing in her run past to pry into silence. “What’s the matter with you?” Her sharp eyes bored. “Here you are looking broken down—absolutely broken down!—at the end of every season! Are you sure you can still stand the pace? I certainly think you’re looking—well, fagged.” And she left, up in the air but lively in their inferences, more devastating terms than fagged. “You really should take more care of yourself. You’ll be going off in your looks.” Her inflexion said that already this had come about.
I was pleased to notice that the woman’s spitefulness had roused Eva. She positively hissed: “The viper! Dinah, for God’s sake get off your foot! You can’t imagine how it annoys me, that you always sit on one foot. Someone told me she said I had the childlike vanity of all artists, and had to be praised in order to exist; and now she comes out with that vixenish thing, and the inference is plain, I think, don’t you, Dinah? She means to do all she can to kill my work. Well, she won’t be able to, I can tell you!” Instantly she was filled with a calm security about her work. The recent rebellious surge of false energy gave way to her icy judgment of values, her correct estimate of what she could do. Inspired by the unpleasantness of this encounter, she began telling me that she saw, as on a stage, the immense fatigue of people who, having no repose in their restless hearts, no real happiness in their homes, continued to tread the measure for all of every winter season. And as I laughed at her inconsistency, she cried with delight: “It’s a line of thought for a future novel! Have human beings always trod the measure, do you suppose, Dinah?” And she went over and over the idea so that she might not forget it before getting back to her writing-table. Instantly, she was the author pursuing words in which to clothe her thought; she was a novelist, an observer, a connotator, and had not herself suffered the pangs of which she would write. She began planning: “It must be a modern dance of life, as opposed to the dance of death of that old bridge in Switzerland—you remember, Dinah? You must have seen it, when you were taken to see the sights upon your first trip to Europe?”
I was tired, and out of my weariness I demanded: “Why do we all hang together, do you suppose? Are we afraid to be alone? Tell me, Eva: are you afraid of loneliness because of what you might dig out of the bottom of your heart?” At the moment I might have been wound up, like a watch spring, and bound to go on until I ran down.
She gave me a perfunctory smile. “Cheer up,” she said carelessly; “you’ve no troubles.” After a moment of apprehension, however, she added hastily: “But don’t tell them, anyway. I’m not equal to hearing troubles.” She began tapping her foot on the floor: tap, tap, tap. I felt like shrieking. “Besides, do you know that there was something indecent in what you said? Don’t let a tendency to rawness get the better of you, Dinah. It’s of the crystalline purity of unspoken thoughts that art is made.”
I relapsed into helpless laughter. “Eva, you are perfectly delicious, and unexpected, and so provoking that I often wonder how a man can live with you without blowing his brains out!”
She became brusque. “I’m in no mood for that sort of thing. You should know it without my telling you.” Her attention, in short, could not be diverted from whatever had taken place between herself and Nicholas, with, superimposed, what was now taking place in the room. For that the Onion Party was being directed against her we could no longer doubt.
The opera star, swimming in her path, paused long enough to say: “Why not move around and show yourself, Miss Litchfield?”
Eva looked questioningly at her. I felt a surge of anger at the woman: Eva had the resilient faith of a child who does not look for a blow.
The singer continued, speaking kindly: “There’s Florence Quincy, thinking of herself as a blonde planet and waiting for adulation. Go and catch an orbit around the planet and make her happy.”
I swore that I hated females. The opera star swam on, through the firmament of stars, and collided with the Theatre Guild. I said aloud: “Don’t mind, Eva!”
It occurred to Eva—and devastated her—that she had never faced the question of how much sincerity there might be in these people, her friends. Did they ever give whole-hearted praise to each other? Did they—by her sudden pallor I knew that her heart skipped a beat—did they believe in her? What, behind her back, did they say of her and of her work? Never before had she speculated along this line. But the atmosphere of the large room filled with women who were by now stripped of the rags of convention, and their jibes, had shaken her. For a ghastly moment, she wondered if this party would undermine her faith in herself. Instantly, she answered her own query: “No! No, never that! Without my faith in myself—without the knowledge of what I can do—there would be no Eva Litchfield.”
And at once she found herself in the thick of it, talking in order to avoid being left out. She heard her voice complaining, reciting her grievances. She saw on their faces that they did not care; she realized—she must have—that those outside her line of vision laughed; but she went on, and on. She tried to stop talking: I saw that every now and then she seemed to keep her mouth shut by muscular control alone: and she knew that it had got beyond her mastery, and she feared that she was losing hold of everything in her being; and this still further alarmed her, so that she started running across the room: she must get away—away from herself. “What was that awful speculation of yours, Dinah—something about not daring to look within?”
She reached the table behind which, entrenched, Addis Wickersham still philosophically contemplated his wife’s party. He gave her a forbidding look. “Have you eaten onions?”
She shook her head. She leaned against the wall, her head thrown back. Her long throat blended like a pearl with the grey wall. She had come over here to cling to Addis Wickersham, to wring from him the intellectual reinstatement she must have in order to go on existing. He must be forced to say something definite about the one pure devotion of her life, her work. The noise of these many feminine voices, untuned by the bass of men’s voices, deafened her, took the fine edge off her wits; and she found that she was staring at Addis Wickersham, like a lost thing. She said to him, over and over—a child who has learned a set of words: “What do you think of my work, Addis? I want to know the truth of what you think. I’m strong enough to bear the truth.” And all the time, I felt sure that she was experiencing a new wonder about the truth.
Wickersham’s nerves had frayed; and he was held to the scene by a horrible fascination. He was delighted to take it out on someone. “Has it never occurred to you, Eva, that you write not so much for the quality of literature as for the attention it wins for you?” This being unfair, and untrue, he looked ashamed of himself; but he let it stand. After all, Eva was trying.
She recoiled, pressing her hands against the wall for support. A man had never before struck her. She might have been crucified to the wall, her hands out on either side, holding her body upright; she seemed to hang by her hands. I am sure that she heard what went on around her, and that she could take no part because she had been deprived of her reason for ever again speaking. He had smitten something which had held her up; and this eventually she tried to tell him. But smiling women pressed in on her, clawing at her with words—tearing out her eyes with saccharine words—hurting her, defiling her. She heard them say to each other that she wept because she was not the central light of the party. She told me afterwards that she did not know how she heard these words, for already she was running from the house; but under the strain of her suffering she must have turned clairaudient. The party, becoming too terrible for her spirit, transformed all gatherings of her friends into horrors no longer to be borne; she must not see them again. She said this many times, on her way home: she must never again see her friends.
Gathering up her wrap and mine, I said to Addis Wickersham that I must try to overtake her. “She looks very strange. She’s apt to do anything.”
“Nonsense,” he said comfortably. “She’s strange because she gets away with it.”
I did not believe this to be a pose on Eva’s part. I insisted on going after her. I found myself saying, many times, “She can’t help it.” She walked rapidly. I saw her ahead of me, her thin frock blowing back in the night breeze. She had almost reached the little friendly house in Eleventh Street when I overtook her; she had walked more slowly as she approached her home wherein her husband awaited her return. With a final run, I caught her by the arm; and she seemed to come out of a trance. “Oh, it’s only you,” she said.
She began telling me much of what I have just repeated, and the climax of her rush towards her home. She had said to herself that she must get off from the crowd and think. Her look turned in, and she began to know fear in its decadence. She realized that she must uproot this particular fear, if she was to go on. Time was what she needed—time in which she would hear no unkind word: security in that time. She stopped and leaned against the wall of a house. She tried to tell herself: “It’s their jealousy.” But, her senses more than ever acute, as if she had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, she looked back and read on their faces everything they had not said, and her own intelligence arose to defeat her. She heard herself groaning.
Everyday life pressed in on her: a policeman stopped to look curiously at her. “Anything wrong, lady?”
She straightened. “No. Nothing.” She added: “Thank you, officer.”
Together we went the few remaining yards and she opened the door with her latchkey. I knew that she hoped she would not see Nicholas. But he came down at once. “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking closely at her. The policeman had been kinder.
She averted her tear-stained face. Like a frightened child, she held my hand. “Nothing. Nothing you would understand.”
“I never saw you look this way——” he speculated.
She threw herself face down on the day-bed and cried out that she must be saved from her friends.
Nicholas stood looking down on her. If she had glanced up, and so seen his smile, she would have recognized—behind the smile, where she might never again see it—that quality the absence of which in him she had deplored: irony, newly born to console him.