III
On every street corner men and women offered for sale apples which the passersby were too shocked to buy. Every living thing in the city was in a state of shock. They cried with their eyes and with their pale cheeks: “That this could have happened to New York!” If the fantastic beauty of the panorama still gave them pleasure, it was now a thwarted, masochistic pleasure. Up it went, the city, striving to pierce the sky itself; defying the gods whilst trusting to the law of gravity of the earth, inarticulately but consciously lampooning the great buried cities of the past whilst through its streets swept the old, old misery of money fear.
I went out on my balcony and looked, awe-stricken in spite of habit, into the gnashing teeth of the sky-line. But there is something unsettling in this sky-line; it cannot induce inertia. I dressed and went down into the street, wandering aimlessly and with my head filled with what I had endured the day before. The weather was abominable, with gusts of wet snow—a symbolic day, I felt in my bones. A canopy of fog dropped down on this new white city its burden of soot. And here in front of me was Nicholas Van Suydam, snow slipping down his collar. He rushed into speech. “I’m thankful I ran across you. I wanted to ask if you know what plans Eva is making?”
I scoffed: “That has a familiar ring!”
“Ah but she is making plans! I can see it. And the trouble is that she doesn’t say a word about it. She usually talks about whatever is in her head. I wondered if you mightn’t know?”
Against the insistent question in his eyes I opposed truthfully a blank ignorance; but I had at once felt the need for caution. He stood in the clinging, dirty snowflakes, forlorn, looking as if he needed to be whistled home. His dejection wrung from me the delayed information that I had not seen her for some time. I had—although this I did not say—stayed away from her.
He pointedly requested that I come down to see her. “You know how she is—excitable? She’s got herself tremendously worked-up over the panic; and she was already moping over Molly Underhill.”
I could not resist telling him that Eva had telephoned me, some time since, of having gone to his mother for comfort on the score of her responsibility for Molly’s death. She had said to Mrs. Van Suydam that upon a certain occasion she had been so cruel to Molly about her recitation that she felt this had had a large share in breaking down her desire to live. Mrs. Van Suydam, it appeared, had remarked that the opinion of one person was never so powerful as that would come to. I did not tell him that this had only too evidently clipped Eva’s spirits; but he turned on me an eye so comprehending that I became lost in a confused speculation on how deeply he might actually understand Eva. And, as I submitted to his instantly popping me in a taxi, getting in himself and giving the driver the number of the little house in Eleventh Street, I wondered feebly if my supineness arose from the snow slipping down my own back or from a guilty knowledge of my unwillingness to go at all. I felt like saying: “I have my own troubles.” No one took their troubles to Eva.
The taxi skidded, and he re-adjusted the angle of his hat. Why—I asked myself pettishly—are men fussy about their hats which look the same on any slant? His relieved face, as he contemplated me, a virtual prisoner on my way to taking over a share of his burden, produced in me a contrition in the toils of which he, and Eva, I made no doubt, would use me.
“How is work?” I asked casually.
“Stopped.” Architects, he went on with wry amusement, would soon be in the class of artists who conceived and executed those pleasures which are luxuries, such as—he paused to grin amiably at me—books. Our taxi hurled itself downtown along canons already shut in by more buildings than the frightened population needed. He laughed heartily at the corollary he now propounded: as he went down from usefulness in a man’s work, he automatically went up according to his wife’s circle. “However,” he said with a disheartened drop in his amusement, “she’s worried because she—well, then, because she’s Eva! She thinks I shan’t make enough money to keep us out of the poorhouse. I dislike to talk about such matters, Dinah; but you might put it in her head that she needn’t worry about the poorhouse. We—my mother and I—have a policy, as my father had—he learned it from his father, and so on back—to hold on to real estate. We’re strapped, but not smashed. If you could explain this to her?”
I objected that this was clearly in his own province.
He made a helpless gesture with his hands, thereby loosening his hold on his stick, which fell with a clatter and gave the excuse for bending and so hiding from me any actual realization he might have had about his wife. When he came up, a little red of face, he said indulgently that she was a child about money. “And, you see, she’s got it in her head that the falling away of my work is due to a corresponding falling to pieces of my reputation.” This he also laughed off indulgently, but not before I had seen that it had hurt him. And, still not having discussed her with any intimacy of detail, he again waved it off with a murmur that she was not adult when it came to a question of money. “She keeps saying that she is so afraid to be poor.”
“She was poor, once,” I put in, “before she came to New York.”
“Ah?” He seemed surprised. “I know nothing of that old life before she came to New York. Oh, I mean—naturally, I know the general outline. But I mean to say—you people charge on New York, and show your most sparkling side, and we take it for granted, you see, that you were always, and everywhere, brilliant and prosperous and on the crest of the wave.”
“That’s New York,” I said composedly.
“And then, too, it’s impossible to think of Eva as ever having passed around the hat, so to speak,” he went on.
I held him to the subject. “The city is in such a blue funk, just now, that it works on her; of itself, it would frighten her.”
But he was not frightened by New York. He knew that this city, of which he was an integral part because he had been born of the stock that had settled it—this city whose bold new growth had been conceived in the brains of a body of men like himself—was a cruel city and would cast him out if he lagged; but he was sure that he would not lag and that he and the city understood each other. He gave a positively affectionate glance from the window and said, under his breath, “The poor old town! The poor bastard!” I knew that he thought us the monsters who did not understand. And yet, Eva had hurt him through the medium of every brick in every great new structure.
Through the smoke of my cigarette, I studied him. By his attitude towards what Eva had done he was lying. With him, I fancied, nervousness took the form of an inability to do any creative work at all. But in what he next said he went back to our interchange of remarks on the storming of the fortress by the authors. “You people who come into New York are so marvellous! Such energy! Such apparent ignorance that you could possibly fail to conquer! It’s amazing. I’ve noticed about Eva that she can and does turn on to her work the full force of her storming rages—I don’t mean that in the least the way it sounds, however; but she does tear around the house and bemoan herself—well, then,” he pushed on, now thoroughly involved and, I saw, desperately taking the way out of telling all, “I remember once when she had asked me to read proof sheets to her, and she was cutting up over quite minor mistakes, I assure you—saying that the printers had tampered with her words, and appealing to me in the most agonized way to know if I hadn’t an ear—and the telephone rang in that awfully annoying way it has, off and on, off and on; and she simply screamed to the maid to tell Winnie Conant that she was out—to tell her she was dead—to tell her anything. And, the point is, she gets ahead with her work in, and as a direct result of, her emotional upsets. Sometimes I’m appalled by her vital energy. But when it comes to turning some of that energy into the minutiæ of living she’s horrified at the interruption. She doesn’t,” he concluded helplessly, “open her mail for weeks at a time.” He appeared to look upon this as one of the most inscrutable things about his wife.
I asked lazily: “Why should she? You’ve just said that you’re constantly surprised at the way in which her nervous force is made to serve the needs of her work. Why try to reform her? She knows what she’s about.”
He stared. “But it isn’t I who is up to reforming! She’s putting her shoulder to the wheel of changing me!”
I said to myself: “We’re getting at it!” I asked aloud: “What can you mean?”
He blurted out that she continually told him of how helpful the wives of authors frequently were; these wives, it appeared from her caustic comparisons, saw to it that during the writing of books they were relieved of all annoyances; and she had always wound up by calling on God to know what she would do if no one helped her. In his resentment at this inference, he had, I gathered from what he did not say, studied her with a new cold detachment. He had reminded her of her tantrums when she fancied him falling off in his work. He had gone on to draw her attention to the point of his being the man of the family: would it be suitable for him to be at her disposal all of the working day? He had said—he assured me that he had been dispassionate—“Do you realize that if this goes on I shall be unfit for work?” He gave me a sidelong glance, and said by way of excuse that our crowd talked to each other of all details of our lives; he could not see that he was disloyal to Eva in telling me this.
With no intention of entering into it, I said sweetly that he should be able to manage his wife as men had always managed their wives, by the power of a greater shout.
“Are you laughing at me?” he demanded. “For I assure you that it’s no laughing matter. It has—got out of my hands.” He hurried on with a rather feeble statement that it was not in any way the fault of Eva, who was a particularly guileless creature; it was the fault of certain persons who put things into her head.
“And now you want me to put something into her head?”
He hastened to deny this. He said, out of a clear sky but with immense vindictiveness, that he should have kicked Spencer Mapes out of the house long ago. “Why did I fail to kick him out? What’s lacking in me that I never act on my impulses?” He laughed, then. “I seldom act on my convictions, to tell the truth. This is because I stop long enough to think it out—I want to be fair, you know. But a man shouldn’t stop long enough to think out a crisis. Once it is thought out, a crisis becomes an emasculated psychological situation. There’s something wrong with the age,” he finished on a weak plea.
I said drily that it might be that he was deliberately trying to get himself out of touch with the age. “You’re sorry that you aren’t sorry that jealous husbands no longer flog gentlemen callers. You feel it to be the correct impulse; and you haven’t been able to stem the stream that’s swept our generation beyond it. You’ve turned the clock back—perversely—and its ticks are muffled in your re-adjusted hearing. I mean—you did, of your own accord, step out of Washington Square. Why do you try, in your mind, to step back?” But his clock ticked steadily, and he was helpless. He wondered, he said, if anyone in our crowd had the chance, or wished for the opportunity, to lead private lives. Chatter hit on every nerve in his body. The topics selected applied to him, to Eva, to the two of them in conjunction—to all life, he decided almost wildly. Life was dreadful because, when one needed all strength, all intelligence, in order to see a way through, one was weakened by the cumulative effect of idle remarks that irritated already raw nerves. I said: “You shouldn’t be the one to feel such things. This is your home town.”
He seemed numbed by statements such as this. It was necessary to explain to Nicholas, always, I said to myself with annoyance. “New York does something to us who come here from outside.”
He exclaimed with real indignation: “Eva married me. And a wife becomes what her husband is. Eva is now a New Yorker.”
I contented myself with settling back in my corner of the taxi and from my huddle remarking that at any rate most of us were bad off. “Our gills have dried, you might say.” I liked this simile more than did he; I noticed that he frowned. We went on our way in silence. The great towers leaned over us, threatening us.
He took it up again. “I fail to see what you’re driving at.”
I drawled: “Maybe I don’t see, myself. It’s the result of the weather. It’s depressing weather.”
Having let us in with his latchkey, he set me the example of tiptoeing up the stairs. He might have spared me this anticipatory alarm, for Eva was not at home. I saw that he was at once agitated. It amused me to observe that through association with us he had developed a theatrical attitude towards situations: he went straight to her writing-table, and on his now pale face there was a look of terror. Had there been a note propped against her typewriter, I was convinced that before opening it he would have thought of shooting himself. There was, of course, no note, and he glanced swiftly at me and smiled. I said, casually: “I had feared, you know, that you had got the idea that you were in love with Eva because you were dazzled by the fact of her being, as she undoubtedly is, a famous person.”
He flung me a look of derision. “Nonsense! I was dazzled by her face.” He spoke, however, with reservations: he was in no mood for tender confidences. I wanted, as on many occasions I had wanted, to suggest to him that Spencer Mapes kept his hold on Eva by telling her with his eyes, and with a carefully dropped word or two, that she was a great artist; but Nicholas, always disregarding this side of his wife, would have wanted to say in reply that Mapes was possibly thankful that he had not to chant this theme eternally, that the daily burden of Eva’s mental rapacity was not his to shoulder. I ended by reminding myself that it was an ungrateful task to maneuver between a husband and wife, and that, with every intention of keeping out of it, I now found myself much too deeply in it for my comfort and would do well to retreat. While Nicholas went downstairs to mix a cocktail, I sat relaxed and regretting that the better man failed to manage a very ordinary situation. It might, I said to myself, be an instinctive balancing of the question between this married pair; for Eva, with what she considered her stern clear judgment, did not believe in Nicholas. I had heard her tell him “I asked Spencer Mapes what he seriously thinks of your work——”
Nicholas had said: “That was nice of you. Does the gentleman know anything about architecture?”
Eva had an exasperating way of turning deaf to interruptions. “He said that, while he hadn’t heard of you until we married, he had no doubt but that, with inspiration——”
“Shall we agree,” Nicholas had said pleasantly, “that we don’t, and never can, understand each other’s aims?”
I said to myself—lying back in Eva’s armchair and hoping to make my escape before she should bring a scene in with her: “The real trouble is that neither of them has a vestige of tact. Talk of eugenics! Two tactless people shouldn’t be permitted to marry.” In this fashion I tried to be light about it. It was a difficult task: the room carried a whisper of desertion.
Mattie came in to light the lamps. The room leapt at me. The scent of narcissus, from a pot of forced growth on the windowsill, was overpoweringly sweet and heavy. It was the smell of spring, of the quickening of the earth; and it was December, and this pot of narcissus was unnatural. That Mattie in her own strangely natural way disliked the thing was evidenced by the scorn with which she sniffed the perfume that with the almost cosmic disregard of plant life fell upon her. “I’ll jes’ open this winder a little ways so’s you won’t be kilt by that stink, Miss Dinah,” she said. And into the scented comfort there poured sound. The radio is the unfailing solace of the American family. None so poor that they cannot turn it on at breakfast and turn it off only when they go to bed. The air is free; but in order to hear the variety of noise for which his soul may be said to yearn there were jobs, even in hard times, to shout “on the air.” The latest breadline of New York wound in and out the doors of the big broadcasting concerns. I cried to Mattie: “Shut the window in a hurry! I’d rather smother.”
Mattie said: “Yes’m?” She left the room with eloquent shoulders.
Nicholas came with the cocktails. “I think she will be in soon,” he ventured. It was clear that he thought nothing of the sort.
“I’ve been thinking over things,” I threw myself into what I had but now decided to avoid. “There’s reason in abundance for Eva being worried, you know. I mean, I know she was very apprehensive about the crashing of banks; and now that it’s happened——”
Busy with the cocktails, he cast at me an incredulous look. “My job is to see that she’s not worried.”
“She sees it all around her,” I explained. “Her friends are worried sick. The town is on the run.”
“New York?” He was still more openly incredulous. “But that’s only temporary, of course.”
I was in the mood for considering his civic pride revolting. “So nothing can open your eyes?”
“You think, then, that she is really worried? What,” he demanded, still skeptical, “does she see, then, that would so upset her?”
“She might have run across what I found myself in the thick of, yesterday,” I threw in the teeth of his laughter. “She didn’t, it happens, see this particular thing; but it isn’t the only shocking sight in town—your prosperous town!” I glared at him; and I saw only the surface of his lightness. “It wouldn’t hurt you, to be thrown out to hunt a job for yourself!” I said hatefully.
His mirth stopped as suddenly as if he had turned off a spigot. “Did you never hear of keeping up one’s courage by making fun?” he asked gently. “No, Dinah: I’m—I’m scared to death. And I’m frightened over something so much more vital than money, so much more necessary than a job: happiness with one’s wife.”
We exchanged a long look, at the end of which I told him, commiseratingly trying to get his mind off his anxiety, that which I had intended using as a cudgel to bruise him. “I got the chance to see it,” I flung myself into it; “and now I’d give much if I hadn’t. We crowded into a slit of a place, and peeked through a large pane of glass let into the wall.”
He asked patiently in what wall the pane of glass was. “Don’t make it sound like Alice and the looking-glass, for I don’t feel whimsical.”
I acknowledged to a corresponding lack of whimsy. “It was the trying-out of applicants for the job of radio announcer. We looked through the pane of glass as they admitted them one by one, like those hogs that go sliding down a chute at a slaughter house. Only the hogs don’t realize. And I assure you, Nicholas, that those poor wretches took every conceivable test of their courage. I don’t doubt but that they were hungry. The people on the street corners, selling apples, have made us all hunger-conscious.” I attacked my cocktail with thirst engendered by the hunger-consciousness.
“You have the rapt look of the literary sleep-walker,” he stated. He had seen the look on various faces, and I judged by his accent that he did not like it. He glanced at his watch, and frowned.
“Listen, Nicholas?” I urged. “Do listen? Behind the pane of glass we were like fish in an aquarium. You know how fish goggle out at humanity filing past their tank? We goggled.” The candidates for the one vacant job were creatures outside the world of the fish in the tank. The fish saw them, through the pane of glass, and heard not a word from them. The voices booming at intervals through the loud speaker above the control board beside us might have come from another dimension. Young men, middle-aged men, blustering men and uncertain men, strode past the pane of glass to their salvation or their doom. It had been a motley lot, I reported to Nicholas. There had been a clergyman, an old man.
He interrupted: “Are you trying to drag me in spirit to the pane of glass?”
“It wouldn’t hurt you,” I retorted. I wondered what detained Eva. Looking at the heaps of apples spotting the streets with red, he might feel that all was well and that Christmas was hot on the heels of a town gone mad with apprehension. He was uneasy, but his uneasiness was on account of Eva’s delay in getting home for the security of the night.
Again he looked at his watch. “Dinah, I must interrupt to say——”
But I rushed along. “Would you believe the cruelty of it? They gave them, as the ‘humorous test,’ that ghastly thing about the man worth while is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong! Are you listening to what I’m telling you?”
He listened. But he listened for the sound of a key in the lock.
“Clutching the mike as if it might get away before they made good, they smiled because this would prove them to be men worth while. Their smiles were awful. They stretched their lips over their teeth and didn’t dare draw them back into place. The poor clergyman tried to believe that he was exhorting a congregation. His voice smiled, his face was benevolent, his eyes beamed kindly down from an imaginary pulpit. And because he fell into his old way of drugging his congregation, no one listened to his words. But when he came towards our pane of glass to say goodbye—they were punctilious about this ceremony—he walked bravely; and he smiled. Oh, damn! Listen, Nicholas: I’ve got to have another drink!”
Nicholas said: “You don’t think they are the only men in this town who go on smiling because they don’t dare stop? She told me, a few days ago, that she must get away. She told me that she couldn’t work at home. She told me that I hadn’t the right to forbid it, because she could always make the money to go with. She was sitting just there at her writing-table, but she had whirled around so that her back was to her typewriter; she didn’t seem to know why she was there. She said that she felt me disapprovingly in the house. I asked her if she realized that I might feel her disapprovingly in the house? She said that she wanted peace; and I asked her if she didn’t grasp it that she wasn’t giving me peace?”
I found that I had crouched back in my chair—crouching away from what I had loosed in him.
“It’s difficult to talk to Eva; she isn’t logical in her talk. I had all sorts of thoughts on what I’d say in order to clear things up—arrive at a good and fair understanding with her; but, as always, I no longer knew what I had wanted to say when I entered the room. I could think of nothing but plain words, and so I said it outrageously: ‘It has seemed to me, lately, that we’re going on the rocks.’ And she didn’t answer this, naturally. She had tears in her eyes, so she couldn’t have been trying to hurt me when she said she wondered why a woman might not claim the right to peace for doing her work. She wondered why it is that only a man may say he will have it—that only a man may fight for it, kill for it. And I urged her to sit down and try to talk like a sensible woman. And she said that if ever again she had to listen to that God-awful term ’sensible woman’ applied to her she would—— Oh, she left it up in the air what she would do!” He rapped on her writing-table with strong fingers: it sounded like the roll of a snare drum. “So you see it isn’t only her fear about money. We did have this row.”
I saw that he had marked that in her bearing which had shaken him. It was shocking for Eve, of all people, to show uncertainty of her powers; but he had seen, as I gleaned, that it was uncertainty which was now shaking the foundations on which her life had been built up. Without her pride and joy in her talent, Eva would be a broken woman. He told me that she had all at once cried, as if she had read his mind: “You can’t take it in that something dreadful is happening inside me? You can’t comprehend that an artist’s imagination is a delicate, brittle, easily injured quality?” He had been thrown, by this, back to his cool detachment; although it was not in a spirit of cool detachment that he reënacted this scene for my benefit. He was immensely stirred by the recollection of it. In his intelligence he understood only too well that this was the pose of the creative worker in all arts save architecture, but with his heart he realized that under her doubts Eva’s beauty had faded. It began to seem to him that the conceit of artists is a defence against their own fainting spirit, which otherwise might cringe before the world’s neglect. But she had at once put it on him; she had explained that she felt as if she were beating her head against something more unyielding than the proverbial stone wall when she tried to argue with him. She said it was the fixity of his smile. “You don’t know how you stare at me!” she had said in what amounted to a shriek.
“This was where I was cruel to her, Dinah—and I know it now. I suppose I knew it then, and wanted to be cruel. You see, I don’t trust the influence of that fellow Mapes. You can never put your finger on Eva’s motives; they’re damned complex for a simple man to follow.”
“She is complex,” I put in. I wondered if he were going to regret having told me this. But he had to tell someone: even men feel the necessity to talk, I reflected derisively. “Her acts are necessarily hard to understand, although I don’t doubt that they are simple, and above board, if you could get at them.”
“Then what does she think—feel—about this Mapes fellow?” he asked urgently, but looking ashamed of himself.
I explained that she respected his judgment of her work.
He resumed: “This brings us to my self-charge of cruelty. I told her that while we were on the subject I wished to state that her friends took out the greater part of their sensibility in talk; and she instantly flew at me, although behind her eyes I saw the suspicion she fought down. She said her friends have a great power of belief, a tremendous generosity; and as to critical taste—well, then, if their judgments weren’t to be accepted, where were we for a criterion? I replied to what I saw behind her eyes; I said she’d better go in search of Mapes, then—that as his praise was so whole-hearted a session with him might make her feel better. As for me, I told her, I never got the feeling of sincerity in anything he said. She positively quailed. She might have been seeing a ghost. She begged me not to say such a thing. But I had stopped thinking solely of her. I insisted that he wasn’t an honest man, that he hadn’t an honest eye, and that anyone could tell by his voice that he was sly. She reminded me that he had nothing to gain. But she was at the moment arguing with her intelligence, I knew, trying to bolster her spirit which might turn to water. I was a cheap fellow to say to her ‘I have still to discover what he stands to gain’.”
He tilted back, his hands clasped behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. Now that she was not before him, to exasperate him by her swift changes of mood, to bewilder him by her illogical veering with the wind of her fancies and the shifting winds of her friends’ fancies, he fell into a state of belated compassion. At this moment she must have seemed to him, as always she did to me, a bewildered creature who was hag-ridden, who could neither take care of herself nor bend her neck to the care of another.
It was at this moment that the telephone rang. His face turned white. With all the ringing that this particular telephone did, interrupting talks between them with its insistent summons to the outside world, he still, at this moment, feared.
I heard the reedy voice over the wire: “Miss Litchfield in?”
“She’s out,” he responded gruffly.
“Is this Miss Litchfield’s husband?” came the squeal of Eva’s agent’s secretary.
His laughter making his response almost gay, he agreed to this.
“Can you take a message for Miss Litchfield?”
He said that he could be trusted with a message.
“Will you tell Miss Litchfield, please, that it’s all right about the Hollywood contract?”
“I’ll tell her as soon as she comes in.” With great care he replaced the instrument on its stand, and again leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He said quietly: “You heard? That’s what she means to do.”
And again we exchanged a look in which we encompassed—and judged, and pardoned, respectively—all things about Eva. The silence became hard to bear. He got up and began a restless prowling around the room. When he spoke, finally, he seemed not aware of it; he was talking to Eva. “Go to Hollywood by all means. And bear in mind that you go with my consent.” He bit down savagely on his pipe stem, and no answering glow appeared in the bowl. He took it from his mouth, looked at it with interest, and remarked: “It isn’t filled!” He was painstaking in the refilling of the pipe. He said: “Both of us need a period of rest from each other.” He might almost be hearing her voice coming back at him, for he replied: “You said you wanted peace—repose. That was what you said, wasn’t it?”
I ventured something futile. And he looked at me and said “Huh?” But he gave a short laugh. “Dinah, you and I need a drink.” He went downstairs. When he came back with the replenished shaker, he said “We’re getting nowhere.” I knew that again he spoke to Eva.
The rasp of her key in the lock brought him around to face the door.
She stood arrested, looking in at Nicholas. She seemed to have been halted in some violent rush, so that even her heavy fur coat swept back like classic drapery. I knew that she was uncertain: her eyes showed a curious light flicker. And then, as she gazed at her husband, her face became compassionate. She was oblivious of my presence.
He said harshly: “What is this thing that you’re putting over without consulting me?”
She said: “I’m sorry, Nick. But it had to be this way. I must——” She stopped; and by her refusal to say it she left him to infer what he pleased of the thing she had been about to say. The lovely look passed like a mist, dissolved in her return to her absorption in herself. I slipped past her unnoticed, and hurried downstairs where my coat had been left. I closed the front door softly; I had no wish to be recalled.