II
As I turned the corner into Park Avenue Gertrude Cuyler caught up with me. She was accompanied by the gay Anthony Bloodgood. He had been the man, I saw now, over whose shoulder she had peeped at me in the restaurant a moment since.
“Mrs. Avery,” Gertrude almost gasped, as if she had been running, “you don’t object if we walk along with you? I tried to leave at the same time so that I might have a chance to talk with you,” she explained with her determined honesty. She dropped into step as well as she could with the difference in our heights. In walking she came down heavily, leaning forward as though on the alert to control her feet, and when she stopped it was with almost a dislocation of her body: decidedly, a girl who would be at her best when middle age justified slow dignity.
I glanced up at Anthony Bloodgood and met his embarrassed eyes. He was twisting the ends of his moustache. Gertrude, too, was confused; that she was about to lose her way on a path that she nevertheless chose to follow was revealed by a heavy flush which added nothing to her somewhat robust good looks. I realized that they were bent on talking about Eva’s marriage, and that Anthony at least would never acknowledge that this was by design. He strolled along with his easy grace, in the fashion of young men who from the nursery have been fed and clothed, exercised and mildly entertained, by rule; only his uneasy eyes gave him away. Walking, therefore, between two painfully self-conscious persons, I tried to be jaunty about it, a difficult part to play towards flanking superiority in height.
In the tiny triangle exposed between the edges of a fur coat and a bright scarf, Gertrude’s throat showed convulsed: like an adolescent, she tried to swallow her agitation. She said, pitching herself into speech and being, as always, devastating: “I don’t want you to think we eavesdropped.”
“Eavesdropped?”
“You both spoke loudly,” she explained.
Of course we had; all of us did, becoming more animated as we agreed or disagreed more definitely. I smiled; had she been imaginative, always we must have reminded her of a mob scene on the stage; we must have seemed without direction, to be getting nowhere and, in truth, to be indifferent where we might eventually bring up.
“I know most of you. And naturally I knew what you were talking about,” said Gertrude. And vaguely she fell upon another point. “I don’t know how any of you talk at home.” Her voice was uneasy, and a little shocked. We must have given her an impression of strain, of frustration, of dissatisfaction because of constant striving, of a profound unhappiness because within us she detected no repose—with her, the basis of all happiness. The thing before her must have seemed to be energy engendered by the activity itself, and she would have been very nearly right.
Her nearness to hitting it made my smile sarcastic. “I’m so sorry that I must leave you here. I have some shopping to do.”
She was surprised. She opened her eyes widely. “But I thought we would have a talk, because I heard you say to Mr. Glidden that you were going to walk across to Sutton Place.”
This made me laugh, and I said more amiably: “The truth is, I don’t wish to discuss Eva Litchfield, who is a friend of mine.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked away. “Oh, I know that. I know that, Mrs. Avery. But then, you see, Nick is a friend of ours.”
I started to say “Then that should enable you to guess at the character of loyalty,” when, glancing at her, I saw that her blush had faded until her little freckles stood out, seeming to spring from her skin. The girl’s heart lay exposed before my eyes, which I considerately turned away. She said, speaking brightly: “Eva Litchfield is very beautiful.” Her lively tone was a weapon in her defense against me. I wanted to pat her shoulder, and remembered that her shoulder was on a level with the crown of my head and that compassion on tiptoes sports the blemish of inelegance. However, the suspicion that Gertrude Cuyler was pathetic had crept upon me, unawares, and it did no good to remember that Charles Glidden had said to me that I must look out for I was only moved by pathos, which is a weakness of the nerves and slides into bathos.
I bent upon her a strictly impersonal look and told her that beauty was not all of Eva Litchfield. “Besides, what is there about your friend, and my friend, that you should properly talk over with me?”
At this, she gasped that Mrs. Van Suydam was dreadfully worried.
“How do you know?” I demanded.
She said, on an even more dying note: “Eva is so attractive to men!”
During this interchange, Anthony Bloodgood had said not a word. He had marched purposefully along, and if he had glanced above my head at Gertrude I was not aware of it. He now, however, gave me the impression of mutely taking part in the conversation; for I was sure that he did not subscribe to Gertrude’s statement of Eva’s attraction. What was there of finer perception about Nicholas Van Suydam, that he could appreciate Eva Litchfield? Anthony walked with a stubborn set to his broad shoulders and a forward thrust to his powerful neck; and I wondered for how long Eva could stand opposed to this phalanx of the Van Suydams and their kin.
I advanced that I should like to know if Miss Cuyler knew what she was talking about; for how conceivably could she be sure that Mrs. Van Suydam was worried?
“Miss Ingoldsby is my aunt,” she said as if this explained the knottiest problems.
“I still don’t see——” I said. “I’m not, after all, a New Yorker.”
“My aunts are very intimate friends of Mrs. Van Suydam’s; they went to boarding school together, years and years ago,” she expounded as to an idiot. “She talks freely to my aunts. Who else is there for her to talk to about Eva?”
There are times when one is abstractly afraid. I wondered if I were really afraid of New York? I lapsed into thought so uncharted—so, really, a maze of instinct—that it came as a shock to be again accosted by her. I had been calling upon that abstraction usually neglected, God. And what she at this moment said was, whether purposely or not, a challenge. “She is obliged to talk about Eva, you see, because everybody talks about Eva.” Eva might have considered this the accolade: but I had been coming to the conclusion that she was badly in need of the help over which Charles Glidden had made merry. “Can’t you do something about it? Can’t you talk to her about it? Can’t you tell her that she will ruin Nick’s work?” Gertrude questioned in a thickened voice.
“Ruin his work?” I was deliberately stupid: if one were quick with her, she became confused in her mental processes.
“She will drive him crazy!” she gasped out of some deep resentment. “You haven’t the least idea of how she acts at home.”
I interrupted with the reminder that I had been given to understand that his people neither approved nor grasped his architectural ambition. I looked her in the eye, and she flinched, but not, I saw, for herself. “Oh, I—I——” She took a fresh start: “It amuses him to do it.”
Anthony Bloodgood now obtruded his view. “You see, Mrs. Avery, Nick is his mother’s only child; he’ll have enough money. And Mrs. Van Suydam—she’s old-fashioned, I’ve heard my father call her—she wanted him to do as the old codgers had always done—settle down to manage the estate, and all that. And I must say,” he concluded wisely, “that it’s a policy that’s worked to advantage in lots of cases, here in New York.” Having so done his duty by his absent friend, he twirled his little moustache and took a long breath.
Here was the crux of the matter, I decided: it was a question of the island of Manhattan. Eva—and the rest of us—were trying to take root on the rock of Manhattan, and we could take root nowhere because in leaving the land on which we ourselves had been born we had cut our tap roots. Was Mrs. Van Suydam the hierophant who would initiate Eva, or was she forever against her son’s wife?
“How does it feel to be a New Yorker?” I asked flippantly.
They bent upon me looks of alarm. I laughed. It was coming clearly into my head what the trouble was. The gigantic growth of New York was accepted by these condemnatory young people—and by their sisters and their cousins and perhaps their aunts—as natural, but it drove us beyond our nervous strength. If we stayed here we would die of attrition while Nicholas Van Suydam and his kin waxed fat. The soul’s food grows only on the land of one’s birth. “Did you ever read Genesis?” I asked Gertrude Cuyler.
“Why—no, Mrs. Avery,” she stammered. “Or—I probably read it when I was a little girl.”
“You might ask Mrs. Van Suydam if she agrees with the Bible that authors should stay at home. She will, of course—in this case.”
The Cuyler girl asked timidly if the Bible really said such a thing. She was losing the thread of what she had set out to say to me. I could see her fighting to hold on. “All of you make such jokes,” she advanced.
“One must joke,” I threw out carelessly. Especially, I added in my mind, when one is beginning to understand. I cautioned myself: “Old girl, you’ve got to understand. You’ve got to understand the two sides; for don’t you always drag in that there are two sides? There’s the side of Eva, and there’s the side of the Van Suydams: there’s the side of us, and there’s the side of New York. You might start—by way of a drastic change!—by understanding yourself. Why—for instance—are you about to be detestable to this good-natured young woman? Is it because you’re envious of her security? She gets that security from having always kept in touch with her home. You could have stayed at home; Eva could have stayed at home: your precious crowd could have stayed at home. Why didn’t you?” There we were: we were transplanted and sickly, and I was turning to bite the hand that fed me.
We paused at a street crossing, and the lights changed, and I felt Anthony Bloodgood’s hand at my elbow symbolically guiding me for the passage of the—Red Sea, I decided in despair: it had become vitally necessary that I laugh. Anthony looked down—very far down—to my face, and enquired solicitously: “Did I rush you too fast?”
“Yes!” I said. But it was the life that I had selected, and not Anthony Bloodgood, which was rushing me too fast. The Lord God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, back to the land from whence they had come. If one read the Bible when one was upset, it applied to the most modern of problems. An author takes colour from the land of his birth, but mainly, it seemed to me today, he derives from the land of his people the calm strength through which he is enabled to go on. I glanced at these two satisfied persons who, because they believed that nothing in the world was so good as New York, had never considered moving away.
Encouraged by my attention, Gertrude hurried on: “Eva has a way of saying to Nick ‘When I work, I work’.”
I objected: “Why would she find it necessary to say that to him? Doesn’t he grasp it that there’s such a thing as the privacy of work?” I could not be homesick: it was inconceivable that I be homesick. This was more fundamental than the rather slippery emotion called homesickness. We were here; and we were unaware of what worked against us. We believed nervousness was the excitement of inspiration when it was the excitation of sick nerves. We were defeating our own ends. With more tranquillity, with a greater simplicity, we might stay in the garden of Eden of peace. But in pushing myself into the problems of Eva Litchfield I was being forced to face my own. I knew that nostalgia was growing on us, destroying our correct self-appraisal, and that it would finally envelop our minds in a foreboding gloom that we would call our genius. I said to myself: “Laugh at it, you fool!” I laughed, at myself and every friend I had in the world.
Uneasy over my silences, racked by my laughter, Gertrude spoke with a catch in her breath: “Tony and I dropped in: we used to drop in on Nick when he lived at home. Eva didn’t come out of her study, just shrieked through the closed door that she’d go crazy if Nick interrupted her. We heard it so plainly, you see, because she lifted her voice and—and—yelled. I tried to look as if nothing was happening, and Tony, too, tried to pass it off for Nick’s sake. And then Nick opened her door and walked in. I whispered to Tony that we had better leave——”
“Was she working?” I cut across her flow of narrative: she told things as a child does, starting each sentence with a small intake of the breath.
She said that Eva had been writing, she imagined. “And I said to Tony that we had better go——”
Anthony shrugged. “I told you there would be no squabble. Nick’s loony over her. If I had a wife who didn’t so much as turn her head to speak to me when I went to her room, I’d give her a dose of her own medicine.”
“I should like to know what he did?” I murmured. “That’s the point you were thinking of making, wasn’t it? What did he do?”
“He went over and kissed the nape of her neck,” said Anthony with deep disgust.
“She is pretty,” Gertrude conceded.
Agreeing that this was the solution, he wagged his handsome head. “She knows it. She’s wise. Those tea roses she has around her study are becoming to her. But she is a strange woman: she gets the roses because they are so becoming to her, and then she doesn’t play up to them; she picks up papers from her desk and frowns and pretends she doesn’t hear a word you say.”
“She probably doesn’t,” I reassured him. “Look here, you two: you will have to make up your minds to it. Your friend has married a creature of mist and cobwebs, an—” I hesitated before their blankness—“an enchantress who throws spells and doesn’t take part in what her spells bring about.”
Gertrude was practical about it. “Then why did she marry him?”
“I wasn’t here,” I said drily; “but presumably she was in love with him.”
I knew that this time they did look at each other over my head. I heard them breathe their doubt. Anthony brought up a feature that he assured me would drive any man mad: she was not consistent. He had been in Nicholas’ own workroom, he told me, sitting idly by while another man discussed points of architecture with their host. Anthony acknowledged to having been bored, and floundering out of his depth which, he said, was not in the line of architecture; but men respected each other’s work, and he had of course kept quiet until they settled whatever had come up. But Eva had opened the door and had stood there until they were forced to look up from the plans spread out before them. Was that nice of her, he asked me: was that as she would be done by?
I remarked that she might have wanted to see him about something that could not wait. I added the nugget, for Gertrude to seize, that Eva had much ado to keep out of the way of men’s admiration; she had had, I explained, to fight for the time in which to work.
“Now, Mrs. Avery—” Anthony began to explain—“I didn’t mean— Of course she had something to see him about. She told Nick that the Wickershams had telephoned for them to come around after dinner and talk.”
I looked sharply at him. But his face was blank. Tugging at his little moustache, he gazed down on me with honest good nature. “Oh, well! What then?”
He resumed: “Nick said ‘Why?’ I wish you could have seen how surprised she was! ‘To talk, of course,’ she said. And he said ‘What’s the use of that?’ And that was when I fancied that Gertie was right and that they were about to blow up. The funny thing is, that you can understand every word she says when she’s rattling like machine gun fire. She began to say, over and over like a mechanical doll, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ She told him flatly that she was a public character and owed a duty to society—to show up, I took it she meant. And she called poor old Nick’s attention to the fact that it didn’t matter whether or not he showed up in public, because no one knew who put up a building.”
“Where was the other man while this went on?” I wanted to know. The other man had taken a hasty departure. Then, I remarked, they should have followed his excellent example.
He stopped pulling his moustache. He explained lamely that he had feared such a course would dignify the scene into a serious affair. “A sort of reflection on Eva,” he concluded.
“Oh, nonsense!” I cried. “What is the matter with you people? Is he to be allowed to say what he pleases and she to be muzzled?”
The rock of Manhattan reared itself between us. “You don’t understand, then,” he said. He left it at that.
Gertrude took it up where he left it. “She is so fond of parties,” she criticized.
I said: “Now, look here—be reasonable. Be fair—if you can, to Eva. Aren’t you fond of parties?”
Gertrude reverted to her mother’s time. “She’s married!” She was stolidly virtuous over it, but she came back to what personally she turned the flat of her hand against. “And Nick is bored to death at those literary teas.”
I snapped: “How do you know he is?”
She stammered that she went to these teas herself, when invited. I saw that she went to look at Nicholas who went to look at Eva. I sighed for Eva: the phalanx was unbroken. She pretended to be drawn off the subject by one of our necessary ventures at street intersections, and I could not decide whether her immediate return to it was bravery or the tenacity which would finally dash out her moth life. She stated: “Nick detests the sort of person who hangs around Eva at those parties.”
“Aha!” I sniffed. “Considering that they are distinguished men and women——”
Pushed into a corner, she brought out what she had been driving at during the length of our stroll. “He dislikes Spencer Mapes.”
“He tells you these things against his wife?”
She was quick in his defense. “His mother told me. At the tea—you were talking about the tea at luncheon, Mrs. Avery—his mother saw Mr. Mapes for the first time; and I’m sure she has never stopped worrying about him since. Tony was looking for Nick—although he wasn’t really looking because we knew that he and Eva were talking. And Mrs. Van Suydam said to me ‘Who is that youngish man with the dark face who seems to be in expectation of something from the room beyond?’” She looked at me from the corner of her eye. “Mr. Mapes was waiting for Eva. Everyone knew that, except Mrs. Van Suydam.”
I saw the implacable lady sitting on her sofa without the feminine relief of tapping her foot on the floor and speculating about Spencer Mapes as he waited for Eva and Nicholas, saying to her heart that it was far-fetched to believe that he waited for Nicholas but knowing in spite of herself that he waited for something inimical to Nicholas. She must have said to herself: “But this is an enemy!” And she probably said aloud, surprised that the incident of discovering him had affected her voice: “Who is that?” She would have given full weight to each of her three words. Gertrude Cuyler was without the dramatic sense, and had used a more involved phraseology than Mrs. Van Suydam under the circumstances would have employed.
I regarded Gertrude with a quickened interest: was love, then, such a stimulus that she was becoming perceptive? For she said now: “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Avery, for repeating it—but Mrs. Van Suydam said something else. She said that she had always fancied artists were weak creatures, and that she was now afraid that Nick was weaker than his new friends. This was what frightened her, I suspect.” But her thoughts becoming confused, she gave her little gasp and started again. “She said that in Eva’s friends she seemed to have discovered a toughness of fibre, a tenacity of aim, and the will to succeed. This was what frightened her, I think,” she wound up.
Anthony Bloodgood was surprised. He expostulated with Gertrude: “I didn’t know she felt that way about that bounder Mapes. How could he affect her? It seemed to me that it was Eva who knocked her breath out. I remember I came up and told her that Nick was coming. I explained that he hadn’t known she was there because he was talking to Eva Litchfield. And she looked dashed, to me. I mean, the name, Eva Litchfield, seemed to do something to her. I give you my word, she almost jumped!”
They disputed above my head, leaving me free to do the thing that all along I had known I would do: I began attributing to Mrs. Van Suydam those reactions that she should have felt and that I was sure she had felt in the depths of her bosom so decently restricted by its buckram and black silk. The name, Eva Litchfield, tolling in her head when the young man had ceased speaking, must have drawn together into a design all her premonitions of disaster. This triumphant name took possession of her imagination, seemed, at once, to become part of her life because it menaced her son. So strong must this feeling have been—so swayed by it must she instantly have become—that the garish reception rooms might have darkened. I was sure that she felt old, and helpless, in face of this victorious name. She must have closed her eyes, in her temporary weakness, before opening them to gaze profoundly at her son. In my game of visualizing this fragmentary story, I said to myself: What a gorgeous scene! In her son’s bright blue eyes she must have seen what she had always seen in their sparkling depths, belief that life would be good to him. Sure that his mother adored him—sure that the girl walking beside him was the most exquisite creature in the world—convinced, as every man has been convinced at one time, that the two women he loved would love each other—Nicholas must almost have hurried in his eagerness to bring them together. But his mother’s mind, leaping beyond this appeal, fastened upon Spencer Mapes’ looming fixed regard. She sat, therefore, upon her sofa composed to all outward seeming, smiling at her son and his companion and meeting the eyes of neither; for she was engaged in her duel with Spencer Mapes.
Gertrude, who was watching me out of the tail of her eye, advanced tentatively: “Nick’s so fond of his mother. I heard him saying to Eva—at that same tea——”
I shut my ears to what Nicholas had actually said in favour of what he should have said. Holding Eva’s arm, urging her forward, his own eyes without reservation in his complete reliance on his mother’s devotion, “See!” he must almost have boasted. “Here is my mother!” I had no doubt that what he said was “Hello! How did you get here?” This was what Gertrude quoted—maybe: I did not listen; she was incapable of reaching out beyond five-finger exercises. But she told me fairly: “Eva was lovely about it. She said to Nick ‘But she’s splendid! She’s splendid!’”
It would have been a matter of indifference to Mrs. Van Suydam that Eva, seeming to shrink, to become in a moment blighted by this calculated inattention, had still fixed on the older woman eyes that expanded for a sight that charmed her. “Did Mrs. Van Suydam look at Eva through that lorgnette?” I asked.
Gertrude’s mouth fell open. “How did you know?”
I knew that she would have put up her lorgnette that she might not be scorched by the flame of an approaching passion. I said: “Ah poor Eva!” Behind those glasses, narrowly but covertly, she would have inspected Eva. But on Eva’s bloodless little face, in her clear eyes, there would have been no flame; there would have been, as always under a challenge, only assertion of herself, only belief in herself. I was, suddenly, very wearied and said firmly: “This is a footless discussion. And here’s my street. Goodbye.” I extended a resolute hand and marched down a side street.
But floating helplessly after me came Gertrude Cuyler’s pleading voice: “Won’t you do something about it?”