IV
It was early on the following day when she telephoned to insist on seeing me at once. I demurred, and she asked simply if I were going to fail her. Her emotional crises passed like thunder-storms; they were dangerous, but left in their wake a freshened sweetness. I hoped that it was so now: she seemed calm enough, and neatly refuted my arguments against dropping my work immediately.
I advanced tentatively: “You’ve given up the idea?”
She said curtly: “I’ve decided nothing. Will you, or won’t you, come down here?”
“Soon after luncheon,” I therefore promised. “After all, I’m endeavouring to get along myself, you must remember.”
“All right.” The click of the telephone being replaced on its stand was almost simultaneous with the click of her words.
But she had spoiled my day’s work, and I made the best of it by going to my agent’s office to clear up necessary sordid details of the ways and means of living. I believe that I was not really surprised to find Eva already with him: she had dominated my thoughts for many hours. I scrutinized her with some anxiety. She was quite herself, and with the firmest of mouths; and she displayed her customary business acumen in regard to the terms of the contract. I had sometimes suspected that Eva’s sense was of a more practical calibre than her husband’s; but I knew her too well to laugh over it. I watched her, this morning—as if her mind were on a switch-board, and she pressed a button for the creative to turn off and pressed another button for the practical to turn on—drive so hard a bargain that the agent was overcome with admiration. She had said to me at once: “Dinah darling, you don’t mind if I go on talking to Edgar? Then we can go straight downtown with my conscience clear.”
Edgar, cool in the thick of his day’s hubbub, was only too evidently busy reassuring an anxiety that I failed to discover in her mien. His manner was a nice blending of his private irrepressible amusement and his tactful insistence on the helplessness of his clients. In his experience, authors were fated to suffer every kind of disillusion and mortification whilst remaining sheathed in their inability to understand how it all came about. The eye rolling at me might have winked without change. Dapper, with the comfortable effect of bodily heat of the dark man on a winter day, Edgar bustled along with what, in spite of her flat statement of the morning, proved to be his final arrangements with Eva. “I’ll draw up a water-tight contract. It will be ready for you to sign tomorrow. I trust—” as if discussing a prima donna’s husband—“I trust that Mr. Van Suydam is agreeable to your going?”
“What I do,” she said brusquely, “is my own affair. Is that all we had to talk over, Edgar?”
Edgar agreed that it was. “Didn’t you want to see me about something?” he asked me.
Eva answered for me. “She certainly doesn’t! She’s coming with me.” We left Edgar smiling like an impresario.
“Suppose we go down on the bus, and ride on top?” she suggested. “I want to take a good look at the new buildings.” And when we thus rode between them, she said “I wonder?” She continued gazing pensively from side to side of the spectacular street. “Nick’s right when he says that I can never understand what I feel until after my next reaction.”
I watched her next reaction flame in her cheeks and die down. And I discovered that as I was watching her so she was watching me. She arrested the hand that I extended towards the button which would summon the bus to stop. “We’re going all the way to Washington Square.”
I said impatiently: “I can’t waste my time this way. A bus ride is outside my schedule.”
She begged: “Dinah, you won’t fail me? You must go with me to see Nick’s mother.”
Aghast, I refused sternly. “You do as you wish to do, and then you expect your friends to get in on the inevitable scene.”
She sighed. “In a lot of ways, I don’t want to go!” And she left me uncertain as to whether this applied to the call on Mrs. Van Suydam or the Hollywood project. I sank back on the hard bus seat. I too, sighed. “You manage it, one way or another,” was my capitulation.
We got out at the terminal in the Square and walked across, past the Arch, and towards the row of fine old houses on the northern side. She walked more slowly as she approached her mother-in-law’s door. She said, almost to herself: “It always smells of the things I really and truly like—lemon verbena, and lavender, and pot-pourri jars.” As we drew nearer she walked as if her body, from the weight of her admiration, grew heavier, as if it were not yet prepared for the house. She said: “I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say to her.” But she went doggedly up the steps and rang the bell; and she remembered, she told me, that never had she been given a latchkey. A trifling thing, today it worried her.
We were ushered into the drawing-room; and instantly the servant had left she seized my arm. “Wouldn’t you think she would ask me to come to her upstairs sitting-room? But she never has.” Never before today had it appeared to her a simple and direct act of adjusting values. She began to laugh, however, and whispered to me: “Have you looked at those stodgy Van Suydam faces along the walls? If I’d become the mother of one of them, I’d have had a latchkey!”
I sat stiffly, uncomfortable in mind because I had so weakly allowed myself to be persuaded. I said: “You realize, I trust, that this is the last thing I shall do for you?”
The curious light flicker had come into her eyes, and as quickly passed, like the shadow of a cloud upon water. The tranquillity of this old house pressed in on her as if it were trying to say “Shame on you!” I saw that she was angry with herself over her vacillation; and I knew that this would goad her into saying more than she had planned. More and more I wished that I had not come. She whispered: “If I liked this sort of thing, I could stay here and be a nice lady and forget that I ever was an artist. I think I don’t know what I want.” And as she felt her resolution falter, she invoked her spirit with simplicity of belief: “Pick your hour upon the stage, Eva Litchfield, and stick to it. And don’t be a fool, before this old woman, simply because you admire her as a distinct literary find. That’s all she is, really, Dinah,” she confided in a more natural tone. “I know—none better!—that she’s stupid.”
Mrs. Van Suydam entered with a withheld question which was not her conventional query about tea. “It’s so early that I wasn’t sure tea was what you wanted.” She turned upon me a frigid face, extended to me a stiff hand. “Ah Mrs. Avery! An unexpected pleasure.”
I said: “It is so to me, also.”
There was now no politeness lost between us; and I had the less reluctance to intrude upon whatever conversation they purposed having. I took a chair removed from theirs, and resigned myself to a laceration of the sensibilities that I hoped to conceal under glacial composure.
The Van Suydams had the gift of their imposing silence. It seemed a long time before she remarked that it was a pleasant day. She dropped this into the well of silence as if Eva had been a chance acquaintance. It would not have mattered whether Eva found the day pleasant or the reverse, as it would not have altered conditions in the drawing-room if all storms had raged outside.
By contrast to the glazed surface of Mrs. Van Suydam’s fine indifference, Eva’s brusqueness amounted to bravado. “I’m going to Hollywood.”
Mrs. Van Suydam murmured: “Indeed?”
Eva must push against the erection of her mother-in-law’s impersonality; she was not to be helped: this much was certain. She said bluntly that she had arrived at a stalemate in her work.
“I don’t think I understand,” advanced the elder woman. “Naturally, I know little about it.”
Eva’s resentment flared. “You’ve never let me tell you about it.”
“I took it for granted,” rejoined Mrs. Van Suydam, “that you fancied I couldn’t understand.” She paused, and added, her face buttoned up: “I understand much.”
Thus brought to a pause, floundering helplessly in the hugger-mugger brought about by her mother-in-law’s will, Eva sat mute. Until this bulwark of Nicholas’ rights presented a weak joint, there was nothing she could do or say. And weakness of any kind, even, at the moment, the weakness of advancing age, was hard to credit to the list of Mrs. Van Suydam’s possibilities. She sat upright—she never lolled—gazing blandly at her son’s wife; and if there was anything to talk over, any loose ends left between them, it seemed a remote contingency from the standpoint of Mrs. Van Suydam’s own understanding of the situation. Eva, it was clear, felt a singular reluctance to speak. The elder woman had—although one began to wonder if even this ignorance could be accurately attributed to her—a technical ignorance of the craft of writing; but in her choice of words when engaged in an encounter she found no difficulty in making her shades of meaning plain. She put, now, only the faintest accent on her “And what does my son say to this scheme of yours?” By an inflexion she had repudiated, for all those born of the Van Suydam blood, any knowledge whatsoever of Hollywood.
Eva’s restless glance passed from object to object in the room. The stony eyes of the elderly lady remained fixed on her. What, she must have asked herself with natural irritation, would be accomplished by meeting an eye of stone? She said: “He doesn’t say.” She looked as if she might scream: I knew that she would scream, if Mrs. Van Suydam emitted her equivocal “Humph! Indeed!” To obviate this, I imagined, she rushed along with “I wished to—I thought it wise to talk it over with you.” She must have seen that Mrs. Van Suydam was making it impossible to talk over anything; but she must also, and immediately, have realized that she had come here because above all things she wished to break through the crust of this old lady’s resistance, to win from her one word of understanding, one softened glance of sympathy. Her desire was futile; and I saw that, in order to avert tears of weakness, of dashed hopes that only this minute she had possibly clearly acknowledged to herself, she began talking frantically. “You are a woman! You are a woman, too! And you’ve been married! You must have married a man like Nick! You could understand, if you would!”
“And what, pray, am I to understand? I trust that it isn’t a question of a divorce?” But in her eyes, which for a second blazed straight at her daughter-in-law, there was every question between man and woman and her revulsion to the majority of them; and by her swift advancing of her assurance that no such thing could be in the wind she proved its presence in her mind.
Eva’s repudiation of this contingency, while springing from selfishness which was on the other side of the fence from that of Mrs. Van Suydam, was of a like strength of purpose. “I assure you that there has never been a question of such a thing coming about. This is a matter of business solely.”
“Business? Well, that,” asserted Mrs. Van Suydam untruthfully, “is beyond my province. I don’t—really—grasp what you mean to infer, by mentioning business in connection with my son’s wife going to a place like Hollywood.”
“It is purely a question of money,” Eva explained earnestly. She leaned forward, eagerly searching the face of the elder woman.
“Yes?” Mrs. Van Suydam injected into the monosyllable her inbred distaste for social mention of finances. She turned to me. “Mrs. Avery, I cannot express my regret that you should have been brought—against your will, I am sure!—into a discussion of this sort.”
“If you will let me explain——” the young woman began.
Mrs. Van Suydam made a careless gesture of repudiation. “Not called for.”
Once more leaning forward eagerly, Eva said on a rush of desire to be friends: “You mean that you do understand—you do really understand?”
“My dear Eva,” Mrs. Van Suydam suddenly attacked her, “why do you always explain? Is it because you suspect that you are—usually—wrong?”
Eva was fast becoming diverted from her object in coming here. She stirred restlessly. It must have popped into her head that she might better take her leave without more fumbling. But she made a valiant attempt to have her say. “It means, simply, that I must—I intend—to tell you why I’ve made up my mind to go to Hollywood to make some money.” And her tone, and the sparkle of her eye, said “So there!” She knew that she was being held off; she must have felt sure that the older woman would not listen to what she had to say; and she came back with a counter-attack: “Why is it that you refuse to listen to me?” It seemed to have occurred to her that if she stared hard enough she could compel not only the old lady but herself to go through with it.
If Mrs. Van Suydam felt the force of Eva’s will, she gave no evidence of it. She said: “I can give you no advice about schemes for making quick money, as I believe it is called.” The faint lines of her distaste engraved themselves around her mouth. “I can give you no advice because I can conceive of no situation in which a wife should not defer to the advice of her husband; and this I imagine you haven’t done.” She smiled shrewdly. “Besides, it’s quite evident to me that you’ve already made up your mind.”
Eva brooded drearily over the fire which crackled so genially and with such a warmth of home. Something within her intelligence must have said: “There’s nothing here for you.” And something else, deeper than her intelligence, saddened her, while instinct warned her: “Get out of this, now you know that this old woman has the power to shake you. Preserve your future, at any cost.” This, I was sure, she considered her integrity of purpose. She sprang to her feet and stood firmly; and in her kindling eye I saw her thankfulness that her feet were able to uphold her so steadily. She began her charge against this old woman. “I see no difference,” she said with scorn, “between you and my friends. You hold me off, and it’s for the identical reason that they hold me off.”
Mrs. Van Suydam, who had at once revealed that she was not unprepared for this change of mood, now raised her eyebrows in delicate detached amusement. “I had never dreamed,” she murmured, “that the day would come when I should be compared to ‘artists’.”
Eva was, however, in the full fling of her resentment. “You belittle me in order to aggrandize Nick’s puny little talent! That’s what it comes down to! You know it’s true: I can see in your eyes,” she wound up on a high note of triumph that rang through the room, “that you know it’s true!”
They had now reached a point over which I had vainly speculated. Did his family appreciate Nicholas’ career as an architect? I sat more alertly in my distant chair.
For a moment Mrs. Van Suydam was speechless. Her difficulty in accepting this from Eva was plainly to be read on her face; but whatever inner unsurmountable difficulty scarred her soul I could only guess at: it might have been that of taking from Eva her own estimate of her son. She sat with her lips implacably sealed and her lids drooping over eyes that might be tell-tale, and had it not been for the spots of red on her cheekbones Eva would not have been sure that she had drawn blood; for during a period which became unbearable she said nothing. She looked straight ahead. She might have been alone in the room. When Eva, rushing to throw herself at her knees, cried: “Forgive me? Forgive me?” she still did not look at her. She might not have seen her, for all her nearness, and for all of the fact that the young woman was weeping.
Eva laid her hand over her heart. She had got slowly to her feet and stood hesitating near the old lady. “I’m truly sorry I said it,” she began again to apologize. “I wish I could make you see? I don’t think that I intend doing these things. I’m impelled by some force within me. My life seems driven on by some force within me——” Because she saw that Mrs. Van Suydam’s ears were closed against her, she ceased. I realized that she wondered what to do next. But upon Mrs. Van Suydam’s lips was now a smile of polite boredom; so she might have smiled at simple-minded strangers who had forced their uninvited way to her fireside and who had not there felt at home. Eva must have acknowledged this look while she wondered at it: for how could she have bored? She began drawing away, irresolute and looking down at the small figure in the straight-backed chair.
At last Mrs. Van Suydam spoke. Her tone was charged with excessive courtesy. “My dear Eva, I must ask you to leave me now. I am not so young as I once was, and tire easily. I must lie down before I go for my drive.” She held out her hand with a definite dismissal. And instantly I knew that when the door of the Van Suydam mansion should today close behind Eva it would close on all hope of a mutual comprehension.
Eva must have so decided herself. “That’s that,” she concluded, during the space of time that it took us to walk around the corner and along Fifth Avenue and around another corner to the little house. “I’ve done all I can. She’s impossible.” She enumerated the many lines along which Mrs. Van Suydam was impossible.
As we came in sight of the little house in Eleventh Street, she made her final effort to throw off the effects of her encounter with her mother-in-law. “I’ll go to Hollywood, for all that,” she told me, impressing upon her own spirit her invincible determination. She recalled to me a recent experience: she had told Nicholas that she had felt the rush of wings through the little house. She had said: “If I don’t listen to those wings, what’s to become of me?” Nicholas, she said, had merely raised one eyebrow.
She halted on the pavement and looked at the façade of her house. Her gaze lingered. “I shall go to Hollywood,” she bolstered her courage.