II
Looking back on that dreadful winter, I seem to have run across Eva only upon occasions of disaster. I must have seen her in quieter moments, but the memory of pleasant things is overlaid with misery.
I knew, when I started for the party given by Daniel Pentreath, that the evening would be a sign-post along the way. It was not cheering, upon my somewhat late arrival, to fall immediately into Florence Quincy’s hands; her laughter was derisive, was mournful, was a brew of all the sorts of laughter within the range of man. “You, too, searching for the unattainable?”
“This is, then, one of your evenings in the grand manner,” I commented with resignation. “I asked you a simple question: what’s doing?”
“And I answered you, perhaps less simply. For none of us know what’s doing.” Her painted mouth set in a smile which was the antithesis of her laughter: when she laughed, her face gave the impression of having broken in order to allow sound to escape. “Doubtless you will get off in a corner—and sit on your silly foot—and moon about your soul; and if you had a soul would you be here? There’s the answer. It’s the answer to everything about us, to every one of us and our questions about everything.”
“And maybe I agree with you.”
I saw the shiver which ran along her fine skin, so that the heavy powder she wore cracked, and rolled into ridges. “There’s something in the air tonight—something bad!” With her vermilion lip-stick, and her dead white thick powder, she was a tragic clown.
Annoyed by the sound of a man’s groans coming from the adjacent bedroom, we moved away, although groans were not uncommon here.
Daniel Pentreath loomed over the studio, his gigantic chair, painted as starkly vermilion as Florence’s lips, a throne lifted above his mob of guests. He wore pyjamas, and his grey curls thrust themselves independently into the air; except for his unusual size, he might have been a bad boy escaped from bed. His great voice roared out from a great mouth like a cavern. Pentreath was indifferent to the fact that he had been born too late by many centuries. His behaviour was simply direct and self-indulgent. Topping his guests by his great height, he dwarfed them by his ruthless ability. “Hey!” he shot at someone, a vocal projectile. As most of his teeth were gone, he spoke in short sentences which he threw against his gums. “You gal! Keep your head still!”
“He’s making a sketch of Eva,” Florence explained. “She kept well in his sight until he did. She brought on herself whatever comes.”
For as he worked Pentreath muttered, and snorted, and called all women kittle cattle. “Heugh! Hard as nails—mean as the devil—vain as peacocks: all women! Ornamental, though—silly creatures! Strut like peacocks. Prancing—proud of their tail feathers. Ain’t natural: ought to leave tail feathers to the males, like the birds.”
Florence and I moved cautiously to a position whence we could see Eva. She sat against the vast canvas of Pentreath’s latest study of mountains: they were menacing mountains of black rock. She was very pale. Occasionally she looked helplessly around the room. “I know all about myself,” she said. “I wish you wouldn’t do me. You’re cruel.”
I thought: “Like the gods.” But if I had spoken aloud no one would have heard, for Pentreath’s bellow again shattered the room. “Pretty things—glaciers,” he remarked with a change of imagery; “cool, and quiet—full of clear colour—know where they’re goin’ and get there!”
The groans from the bedroom were more insistent, rising, I made no doubt, in order to beat out Pentreath at his own game of noise. A gorgeous youth came up to Florence, his Greek profile magnificently the only classic in the room. “Florence dear—do you mind?—I’m afraid that this time Barney will truly do something desperate.”
Florence said waspishly: “Do I have to take care of everyone who’s incapable of taking care of themselves?” She pulled aside the curtain shrouding the bedroom door, and out gushed the lamentations of Barney. Over her splendid shoulder, she grimaced for my benefit. “I take it they’ve had one of their quarrels,” she remarked; and went inside. The Greek profile rested picturesquely against the door jamb; its owner said to me that he was afraid the trouble was Barney’s disapproval of one of the boys.
Urged by a spiritual necessity for physical support, I went over to lean against another door jamb; and from the next room I heard Anthony Bloodgood making love to a New York girl whom we knew as one of those who are “sometimes going to write because they must express themselves.” Anthony’s voice was strange to me; it was as if his heart were singing because he was with her, and I recalled having heard that he had been in love with her since her school days. He said: “When we’re married, Janny, we can have these people at our home.” If she replied, I missed it; but Anthony’s sense of the magnanimity of his conduct again caused his voice to ring out boldly. “You don’t know it, Janny, but I’m not a brute. I know all about it, loveliest! I’m not going to scold you. I’ve done it myself, you see.”
“You!” The girl’s laughter was convulsive. “You! Oh—— I can’t bear it!”
Indulgently, he shared her amusement. “Carouse around a bit? You don’t think a chap can reach my age without having racketed around town; do you?”
All men spoke the same words to all girls; all men, in more or less roundabout ways, boasted of their early peccadillos. I was mildly amused. Glancing around for some answering smile—for this was the only comic relief of the evening—I met the eyes of a woman who had that instant taken up a position which enabled her to watch the pair. This woman, an interior decorator, was herself the rarest decoration of any room. She had a white face to which she added emphasis by her lack of the slightest touch of rouge. Her hair was densely black with no highlights and with not a trace of the blue sheen which is the beauty of actually black hair. Her eyes, a burning black without glitter, and exceptionally large, revealed at this moment a wild intensity. She looked like some ancient conception of a goddess who takes away, but never bestows, life. I remembered that her hand was small and like a bird’s claw, and that it was always bone-dry. This woman, then, stood looking intently at the girl Janny, and the girl left Anthony Bloodgood and went to her.
The studio was more peaceful than this, although Florence had been right about the tension in the air—tension flowing after me, catching up with me, as I found a chair in a comparatively hidden nook behind the piano. But in the midst of my burst of pure gratitude for the chair I realized that my host held nicely suspended over the crown of my head a beer bottle, or some such missile. The ludicrous feature of it—if one excepts the character of the weapon—was that he looked thoughtful. “Go on!” I instructed him. “Do it! You haven’t the idea that I care if you bash my head in, have you?”
“Heugh!” Pentreath grunted, and made off down the room. I scrambled from the chair. With elaborate carelessness I lit a cigarette; and I noticed, with impersonal interest, that my hand shook. He had, then, frightened me. I hurried to tell Florence, who had come from the bedroom, also carelessly smoking, that he had made me see that bad as existence was I liked it. “He knocked into a cocked hat all that Yoga stuff you forever tease me about. I wonder what would be happening to me now, if he’d come down with that beer bottle?” And she speculated, but indifferently, on whether I was unstrung because of the beer bottle being capable of causing pain, or because of the tottering of my belief.
Eva came up to us with a reproach. “Why didn’t one of you make me go home? I have a feeling of something menacing. I can’t understand what is going on. Tony Bloodgood is looking queer, and hunting for Nick: and where—I want to know—is Nick? Oh, Dinah—you always take up for him; but even you must acknowledge that he shouldn’t go off and leave me to face this sort of thing alone! Some people may be able to bear this sort of thing; but if you realized how things affect me——” She went on about artists being extraordinarily sensitive to impressions.
Florence asked if she did not think we had to hear a lot of that; and turned on her heel and left us. Enviously I gazed after her: I never acted on my impulses, and they died quickly. With a sigh, I suggested that we go down to the sidewalk and get some air.
On the steep and winding stairway another fugitive rushed past us and flung open the street door. We reached the sidewalk as the girl Janny was being handed into a cruising taxi by the night watchman on the block. The watchman treated us to a leer. “Lor!” he remarked affably. “I’m used ter ladies bustin’ outer that there house! I knows, when I sees ’em atearin’ for the street, I better git ’em a taxi in a jiffy.”
We stayed out long enough for a cigarette. I think that we were both reluctant to reënter the house. The watchman hung around, senilely communicative. “It pays ter be a watchman, on some blocks of this here town. You know this town well, ladies?”
The walls of the winding stairway were painted with beasts and birds unnaturally entangled amid unnatural forests. With every step that we mounted we became more apprehensive. But Eva said: “We’re being foolish; aren’t we? There’s no bogy lying in wait for us. But I’ll own up, Dinah, that there are times, of late, when I feel afraid in the dark. It must be this damnable depression you forever talk about. I feel—— Well, I don’t feel natural.”
As if in answer to her reassurance that no bogy-man was around the next turn of the stairs, there was a crack, a thud, and outcries from the studio. Past us, as we shrank back against the dreadful beasts on the wall, they dragged a youth with a bloody head. “Heugh! Got him!” And Pentreath returned to his seat on the piano bench where he played the interrupted accompaniment to the song of a large woman with a large voice. The woman’s voice easily soared above the febrile scale of comments on the recent violence. She sang a thing that sounded angelic.
The damaged youth, supported on either side by youths who winced when his blood spattered them, was being borne to the bathroom for repairs. He opened his eyes and said he did not see what had made Dan so mad at him. He called out: “Jonathan! Oh, Jonathan! Do please come and hold my hand while they wash my head?”
The boy Barney shuddered. “My goodness! How can you have the nerve to ask such a thing with a face all nasty and gory like that?”
“Jonathan?” the injured youth implored. “Do please come with me while they wash my head? Please, Jonathan?”
“No, I won’t!” said the gorgeous youth with the profile. “I’m glad of it!”
Through the now uneasy movement of his guests from room to room, Pentreath played and listened to the song; his face was fine and rapt.
Eva’s spasmodic clutch was on my arm. “Pentreath isn’t human, is he? But he’s great! Why should any of us mind what he does, or says? That is what it is to be truly great.”
Many drank at the sideboard. Addis Wickersham pushed through the throng to ask Eva if it were true that Nicholas had eloped with Gertrude Cuyler. “And here am I, on my way to console my own wife, which you will admit is a novelty.” He added that it had been reported to him that his wife was in possession of Pentreath’s mammoth bedstead, from the depths of which she declared her intention of ending it all. “A side show to the greater show of the party,” commented Wickersham. “You ladies are always upset, in this house; because Daniel steals the spotlight.” His sonorous voice flowed to the bedstead in the adjoining room. But something was missing from this splendid organ; who could be the centre of things at Pentreath’s but Pentreath himself?
It occurred to us, belatedly, that we missed Molly Underhill from amongst these excitedly moving women. And someone said: “She’s off somewhere trying to get herself ruined.”
I found myself near Nicholas; and both of us had lost Eva. He said: “Do try to find out what’s on Eva’s mind?”
I endeavoured to reply with comfortable assurance: “Oh, it’s merely the times.”
And at this moment, through a gap in the throng which had again turned delirious, we saw Eva’s little mouth going—going; and someone with a pale face came up and said that Nicholas must get Eva home before she should have a breakdown. I heard Nicholas mutter that this would be a good chance to hit Mapes with a beer bottle, and saw that the man with the pale face was he. But Mapes at once faded into the mass of people, and Eva, her cheeks wet with tears, waited for him. But I thought that she waited for anyone who would help her. People were crowding, but I got the impression that they did not attend Eva. It was a man around whom they clustered, necks stretching to see over each other’s shoulders.
His pleasant face dead white, his gentle eyes glassy, his plump form on the verge of collapse, this young man, Freye Remsen, felt no ground under his feet. He who had talked to every desperately threatening artist in New York—he who had believed these people to be the great tragic characters of the century—had now looked on the face of death by self-inflicted violence, and everything he believed had been at once reversed. He babbled: “I was going to bring Molly here tonight—and her apartment was filled with the police and they held me up and pushed me out. I was going to bring her here tonight. The place was full of policemen.”
Pentreath stepped down from his vermilion throne. He reared up like a primeval statue. He bellowed: “Well? Ain’t that what we’ll all come to? Ain’t we all mad as coots?”