Part Four
I
There was about the whole thing a sense of swift disaster. Ruin of all things, temporal and spiritual, seemed close on our heels. And yet, nothing had actually happened to us. But the air was charged with vengeance. One found oneself believing implicitly in the Old Testament, and in a God who was mighty in wrath. In words, on white paper, I am failing to convey the full weight of this threat as we received it at the time. Things are never so bad, once they are translated into words; for words fail of true imputation. If I had seen on the sky, as upon my return to New York I had almost expected to see, a finger tracing a curse, I would not have been shakier than I was when, in the chilly afternoon sunshine, I came from the little house in Eleventh Street with Eva. This disappointing sunshine glinted across the stoop and neglected the north windows and warmed nothing.
We were going out for a walk. Eva’s face, above her furs, flower-like in its delicacy of feature and colouring, was so much more heartening than the things of which I had been thinking that I smiled at her. “You are nice, Eva,” I said; “you’re nice!”
She turned upon me eyes that failed to see beyond her own concerns. “When you come down here and bother me with doleful prognostications about things that don’t affect you and me, Dinah, you get me out of sorts. Don’t be ‘sensible’, will you? You’ll spoil your work if you develop executive ability. Nick’s that way.” She gave me her little impish grin; her half-smile with its implications was for other moods. “Spencer Mapes says that Nick has sense while I have sensibility.”
Blaming her for her failure to throw herself into my mood, I now failed to follow her lead to lightness. “I knew, all along, that the outrageous summer before last was an omen. Eva, the brassy sky was a warning!”
She displayed sincere astonishment. “Of what?”
I had, in reply to this, only the small rejoinder: “The stock market crash.”
She remarked, practically, that as neither of us had had money in it we need not think about it. “If you had the things to worry you that I have,” she went on, “then I would sympathize, my dear. But as it is—I have Nick’s work to worry me, if you want to know.” She complained that he had got little work of late, and she put it down to what she said she had all along suspected: the quality of his work had fallen off. “It’s not surprising,” she stated. “Look around you at these abortions of his trade.” She waved disdainfully at the modernity of lower Fifth Avenue. “How can anyone call these horrid things the result of talent?” She was, I had noticed, unimpressed by modern architecture; while it appalled me, it left her unshaken. She said, now, that she felt a desire to go to her mother-in-law’s house in Washington Square and rest her eyes. “I love it, there. One knows, when in that rarefied atmosphere of dried rose leaves, that nothing happens which can shake the world, Dinah. It might do you good to go. You let your nerves play you tricks.”
And yet at this time New York was a city struggling with alarms. Even the staccato of steel construction was, or seemed to be, muted. It was a mild winter, enervating the optimism of those accustomed to bitter cold; and, with surprising ease, the citizens had dropped into one of the most pronounced cases of mass pessimism seen by a world that has seen a great many things. It would not have surprised the New Yorkers if their amazing new buildings had tumbled down. Under the influence of adversity, they had even begun to speculate on how much weight the rock of Manhattan could hold up without splitting, a contingency over which no thought had been wasted in the days of their prosperity. “Have you sensibility?” I wondered aloud.
“Not that sort,” she replied promptly and cheerfully. “But I want to tell you that I have looked forward more than you may surmise: what do you think I did with the money the last book brought me? I didn’t spend it; I went back to first principles, and while I didn’t hide it in my stocking I did the modern equivalent: I put it in a bank! Oh, I’m safe! I’m safe!” she crowed. Her cheeks flushed; she looked more nearly herself than for some time past.
We discovered Mrs. Van Suydam to be entertaining her own friends at tea. The Misses Ingoldsby and Mr. Tappen Tillinghast at once ceased what they had been saying to look at us with varying degrees of guilt. With the same expression of stopping in the middle of something detrimental, the dark old portraits on the white walls might have this minute clapped their lips together; the red draperies over the windows might have been drawn in front of a whisper. Formal old chairs stiffened their backs at our entrance, nice old tables forbade us to enjoy their grace. The ginger jars on the high mantel closed in against us their dried rose leaves. I had been in this drawing-room many times, and had always found it to be a gracious room.
“You were talking about me,” Eva asserted gaily. “No matter where I go, I find that people have been talking about me. However, we all talk about each other.” But the look that she now bent upon her mother-in-law was serious, and revealed in its small way that she was, then, uneasy. “We don’t object to being discussed; it’s part of the business, really. Only, here in this house, it’s different.”
Miss Augusta Ingoldsby could always be depended on. She said judicially: “My dear girl, whenever we speak of you it is in your best interests, let me assure you.”
Eva took this with her lightness which she wore like a mantle. “Of course! I told you that I didn’t object. I came over, to tell the truth, to discuss myself.”
Miss Augusta moved her chair closer and leaned forward, efficient and reliable. “You can tell us anything.”
Mrs. Van Suydam sat more rigidly erect. “Augusta!”
I heard the aside of the younger Miss Ingoldsby: “Gussie always did talk too much, Tilly, as I am forever telling her.”
Mr. Tillinghast cleared his lean throat.
Miss Augusta rolled a vigorous eye around the circle of her cronies. She settled firmly in her chair, her feet together in the correct dancing attitude of her youth; she could have instantly risen without undue effort, and she could then have charged forward, or retreated, in full command of her body. “I am very fond of young people,” she began her lecture, “and I don’t at all mind giving much of my time to the solution of their problems.” She was so intently marshalling her as yet unspoken sentences, and the others were so keenly waiting for a chance to stop her off, that it was easy to speak in an aside to Eva. I touched her arm. Remembering what she had told me of a previous tea-party in this room, meeting her eye which gleamed with her own memory of that conversation and this present substantiation of it, I argued with her: “I see no reason for staying. Do come away? Why should you subject yourself to unpleasantness?”
Eva said: “Nonsense! Nick’s mother is never unpleasant. We are staying, old girl, and you might as well resign yourself to it.”
I urged my point, however. “Did you ever talk to her—really talk to her?” It seemed to me that the face Mrs. Van Suydam at this moment turned towards Eva was as closed as the room. This elderly and colourless face was not forbidding so much as it was casually but totally withdrawn from recognition of anything between herself and her son’s wife. I recalled her manner towards her daughter-in-law at the Glidden party a year ago. In deciding for herself a matter that she held to be solely her own affair Eva had brought down on her head an avalanche that as yet she did not even instinctively feel. Mrs. Van Suydam enquired: “You wished to speak to me, you say?” Her courtesy was so complete as to be in itself a barrier.
Eva said: “Very much. I knew, as I came in sight of the house, that I must talk to you.” Her smile was a lovely thing. And I noticed again how easily she believed in the devotion of others.
With dexterity compounded of equal parts of will and of a surety that she could do as she pleased with circumstances, Mrs. Van Suydam got rid of her friends. It might have been that Eva’s refusal to carry on the Van Suydam family was the first irretrievable reverse she had ever encountered. I cannot recall with what polite inanities I made my attempt to escape in the large wake of Miss Augusta; I do remember that Eva pushed me into the embrasure of a window and said that she would not keep me waiting long. There was nothing for it; and I had cause to castigate myself because of a suspicion that I was delighted to have had it taken out of my hands. I said to myself: “Face facts! We are, none of us, any good. What is friendship, when one writes novels?” I therefore attempted to discipline myself by not listening. I stood behind the long red draperies, looking out at the Square with eyes that saw nothing; and I think they must have forgotten my presence, for all at once I realized that Eva was nervously shedding tears. “Tell me how to bear life?” she implored the older woman, and wept more convulsively when Mrs. Van Suydam did not at once reply.
Mrs. Van Suydam’s eventual “The only way to bear life is to do your duty” was dry as dust.
I put my fingers in my ears. But this makes the ears ring; it is uncomfortable. When I again listened, Eva was saying that she loved Nicholas.
Her mother-in-law qualified this assertion. “Not so much as you love yourself.”
From her voice I almost witnessed Eva’s defiant stare. “You mean that it would be my duty to love him more than I love myself? It’s possibly a splendid thing to love from a sense of duty; but is it a compliment?”
Mrs. Van Suydam’s “The sense of duty to the man one loves comes out of the fact of the love—if it’s love” was flat with her final decision on the matter.
This started Eva off on her sometimes wild laughter. “The old fallacies! How can you say a thing like that?” Capitulating as swiftly as she had flouted, she turned back to “How do you know I don’t love him more than I do myself?” I felt reasonably sure that this was a question which she asked herself also. But at this moment she exclaimed: “Let us be frank with each other? I am not afraid of words.” Without peeping around the curtains, I knew that her head was held proudly, as she more than ever defied criticism for which she had asked.
Not until she again raised her voice did I overhear. “I had the right of decision.”
Mrs. Van Suydam judged that “In the eyes of God, you had nothing of the kind.”
But Eva stated that she had not been speaking of God. “It’s a thing that everyone does,” she extenuated.
Mrs. Van Suydam said: “Listen to me very carefully, if you please—you said, I believe, that you are not afraid of words? It comes down to what a man is, and what a woman is. The child is the ultimate answer. As you have settled this question to suit your convenience, my son——”
Eva cried in a sudden high excitement: “So you—and Nick—are trying with all your might to push me down to a question of that sort? I see what——”
Mrs. Van Suydam continued as if she had not been interrupted. “From now on, you will find that my son feels for you the variety of love that a man thinks he feels for his mistress.” The wealth of disdain which she contrived to inject into this sentence was in its way a masterpiece.
“I see what the question is: it’s whether I shall be harnessed! It’s whether I will submit to being harnessed! It’s whether I will meekly agree to demand no more chances than women had in the Middle Ages. I—to be no better than they!” The push of her clipped words made it a sheer impossibility to interrupt; I fancied that the elderly lady must be sitting aghast. “What do you think my friends would say, if you did this to me? What do you think would be the eventual verdict of the world, if Eva Litchfield were fetching and carrying and bearing children for the Van Suydams?” She laughed shortly.
Mrs. Van Suydam then laughed also, shortly, almost viciously, with hatred. “It’s the choice that has always existed, you young fool: the choice between the women men marry and the women they make their mistresses.”
I was enthralled by this contrast between the exaggerations of the generations at war; and it occurred to me—and so amused me that I caught myself just before I chuckled—that Eva’s child, if she had had it, would have been hard put to it to discover a real right course which should also be diametrically opposed to his mother and at the same time his grandmother. The poor generations, on their hunt for novelty!
I heard Eva’s rapid, light footsteps. In her stride up and down the room—up and down, caged—she was almost running, with frenzy. She flung at the elderly lady: “By your creed, the woman with brains is to give up, if she’s so unfortunate as to fall in love?”
Mrs. Van Suydam’s words fell like drops of ice-water. “Those brains are designed to feed the brain of the unborn child.”
“My God!” Eva whispered. And then again she gasped the two words. I could not tell whether she laughed, or whether what she considered the enormity of this had literally taken her breath away. Mrs. Van Suydam sat in an assured silence. In order not to break this silence by my own convulsive merriment, I turned and pressed my face to the window pane. I looked down on teaming life. The inevitable hurdy-gurdy of all home crises in New York ground out, gaily and inconsequentially, an Italian love song. The call of the bird to its mate, the man to his sweetheart: the duet to the child—the little bird. It was the Trinity that, behind me in the drawing-room, Mrs. Van Suydam tried to force on Eva. And I wondered, not for the first time, if these poor creatures who infested the Square, involved in a struggle to make both ends meet, knew profounder things than Eva.
But Eva’s immense distaste was in her voice when she said: “I am tired of being told.” She paused. “What chance would gifted women have, if the world ran as you want it to run?”
Mrs. Van Suydam stated calmly: “It does run that way.”
“I think,” Eva began again, “that when a woman has a gift——”
“All women,” pronounced Mrs. Van Suydam, “have the gift of which I speak.”
Eva demanded triumphantly: “You quote the Bible, and God’s will: how do you get around what Christ said about the talents?”
Mrs. Van Suydam said blandly: “Christ spoke of men.”
As Eva went into a scream of laughter, I made the best of awkwardness by issuing from my lair behind the curtains. Eva’s eyes were filled with tears of mirth. She laughed until the tears dried and her eyes were left still sparkling but rueful. “I’m sorry.” She waited, uncertain what to do next. “You will never forgive me for laughing.”
I felt miserably apologetic for my presence. Mrs. Van Suydam gazed into the fire, her eyebrows slightly raised. Eva stood tapping her foot on the floor, her eyes fixed on this cool face turned towards the fire. And then she glanced swiftly at me, said “There’s—literally—nothing to be done!”, shrugged, and asked if she might use the telephone.
I began a lame explanation. “I’m very sorry that I was, in a way, forced to overhear what you said. But Eva must have forgotten that she asked me to wait over by the window.”
She said politely: “I did not forget that you were there, Mrs. Avery. I had, however, no objection to your hearing what I said to my son’s wife. She badly needs discipline.” She left it in doubt whether she considered that the fact of a third person hearing what she had said to Eva would act as a disciplinary measure. It was with difficulty that I pinned her down to my contention that I had been an innocent victim of what was none of my concern. She was then very gracious. “I pray you won’t disturb yourself over it, Mrs. Avery; for I once more assure you that I hadn’t the slightest objection to anyone hearing what I had to say.”
There was no use in further apologies. I felt like making a face at her when she turned her head to stare in surprise at the re-entrance of the elder Miss Ingoldsby. It was evident from Miss Augusta’s immediate bright inspection of the room that she had been drawn back by her curiosity. She murmured something indefinite about having forgotten to give Mrs. Van Suydam a piece of news, looked over her shoulder and by the power of her eye drew her niece, Gertrude Cuyler, across the threshold, and then asked: “What is Eva doing?”
Mrs. Van Suydam’s failure to reply might have been a rebuke to her friend for prying, and it might have been that she at once drew Gertrude’s face down and kissed her. At this moment Eva returned from telephoning. Halfway around in her chair, and with one stout ankle and gay shoe exposed by her effort to balance and yet lose nothing, Miss Augusta hailed her: “Well, there you are! I was afraid you had gone home.”
Her eyes fixed on Gertrude Cuyler, Eva advanced, her head up; on the surface of her beauty arrogance shone like armour. She said “How do you do?” to Gertrude, said the same to Miss Ingoldsby, and turned sweetly to her mother-in-law. “You will permit me to intrude a little longer? A gentleman is calling for me.” During the silence which upon her pronouncement fell heavily she smiled. She dominated the room, fading Gertrude’s more florid good looks and nearly succeeding in beating into words the inaudible opposition of Mrs. Van Suydam. The maid, going along the hall to answer the summons of the doorbell, walked too deliberately for my nerves. In the hush of the drawing-room, we heard the colloquy. To the query of a man’s voice the maid dropped into a mumble.
“Miss Eva Litchfield,” the man’s voice expounded. “I’m sure she’s here. Suppose you go and find out?”
The maid said more confidently: “There ain’t anybody by that name lives here.”
We in the drawing-room heard the sound of a man’s soft laughter. “I forgot: I’m asking for Mrs. Nicholas Van Suydam.”
Framed by the white woodwork of the door, Spencer Mapes was chastely Continental in his graceful pause. He might have been calling primarily on Mrs. Van Suydam as he bent over her hand; he might have adored Gertrude Cuyler as he let his eyes dwell on her in greeting; his ardour all but embraced the elder Miss Ingoldsby; and then he said, his voice caressing the words: “Oh, Eva!” He smiled charmingly. “I was having a lonely tea at the Brevoort, and it occurred to me—for no reason in the world except that of inspiration—to drop in here on the chance of finding Eva.” In his elaborate carelessness he contrived to be awkward; and instantly Eva’s act of telephoning him took on significance. He averted his eyes from her and fixed them on Mrs. Van Suydam as he continued with an explanation that had not been sought. He said that he was writing a critical article on Eva’s work, and had come to the pass where he was obliged to consult her on what she wished said. With all his acumen he threw upon Eva the burden of association.
Gertrude Cuyler sat with a troubled face. Motionless, Mrs. Van Suydam waited for something: there was something in the wind. Spencer Mapes shed his warmth in my direction; I knew that he was meaning me to understand that he was saying “Our own dear Dinah!” I went across the room and began the process of taking my leave of my involuntary hostess.
But one could always count on the elder Miss Ingoldsby; Miss Augusta at once rushed into speech. “My dear Mrs. Avery, don’t go yet? I came back in order to tell Lavinia a piece of news—not that I fear it will affect her, for she is sound as the rock of Gibraltar. But, after all—— I daresay you don’t, being an artist, keep up with the daily news? Artists always have their heads in the clouds, don’t they say? I have heard that expression used in relation to them, at any rate. But aren’t you, my dear Mrs. Avery, worried?”
This being startling, I paused in my determined progress towards the door to ask what she meant.
“I allude,” she said as if she recited, “to the financial news of the day.”
“I don’t,” I told her, “keep up with it.”
With a visible slight annoyance, Mrs. Van Suydam enquired what she had to tell. “For of course you’ll tell it.”
“I heard, today, from well authenticated sources which I’m not at liberty to quote, that several New York banks are on the verge of their Waterloo,” said Miss Augusta with satisfaction in having put it so neatly.
Eva cried “Which banks?” and began to tremble.
Miss Augusta’s gratification at this sensation was evident. “I don’t know, my dear girl. But do find out from Nicholas if it’s true—I certainly was told it on good authority—ahem!—Tony Bloodgood, to be exact, mentioned it to Gertrude—that he has lost money?”
Eva gasped: “Spence, I must go home. I must go home at once.”
I hastened to her. One never knew; and I was uneasy at the expression on the elder Mrs. Van Suydam’s face. Also, the interest of Miss Augusta Ingoldsby was not strictly impersonal. “We’ll go together,” I said firmly.
She clutched my arm. “What shall I do?”
I said, under my breath: “Listen to reason. I told you all of this, today, and you didn’t then lose your head.”
The clutch of her fingers on my arm was painful. I cannot remember how we got out of the house. Back of my other unpleasant memories of the day is that of curious eyes following us to the door; in front of all other painful impressions is that of Spencer Mapes solicitously attending us. I muttered to him: “If you will kindly leave us, I can manage Eva.”
Eva had a devastating trick of swinging like a peculiarly rapid pendulum, so that one was left behind, gaping, as she flew through the crises of her passionate nature. She said, with no preparation for it: “Do you realize that I’ve never had a break? Is it because I’m a woman?”
Mapes said: “I thought you were upset over the panic.”
I said to him, fiercely: “Can’t you let her alone? She’d forgotten it.”
We disputed over her; and she walked between us, erect, absent-minded, steeping herself in her own thoughts, suffering through her own thoughts. And around the corner from Eleventh Street, and straight towards us, came Nicholas Van Suydam. The eager look of expectancy on his face savoured of the earlier days of their marriage. Eva whispered: “I forgot that I left word for him to join us at his mother’s.”
I found time to be irritated that she had not said, frankly, upon our starting out for a walk, that she intended going to Mrs. Van Suydam’s. Why would she try to make me believe it the impulse of the moment?
Nicholas quickened his pace, hurrying to join us. He must have looked forward to a stroll home with her; he must again have felt the need of those intimate touches of life with one’s wife when one is friends with her. And evening was even now dropping over the city, and with it the quiet. Doubtless he had welcomed the cessation of rivetting, the noise of which must of late have jabbered at him “All construction work is about over—your career is over—it may be that everything is over.” And here we came, with Eva between us; and her face was set in a tragic look of pain. He stopped short. “What has happened?” he demanded sharply.
Without hesitation I played the coward. I turned and ran. But first I laid a firm hand on Spencer Mapes’ arm and held on until we were around the next corner.