III
Florence Quincy was a tall woman so blonde as to be almost albino. She had a large mouth which she made up to suggest danger; it became, under her lavish use of vermilion lip-stick, a fixed and sullen sneer. She wound her flaxen hair closely, and even in the house she usually wore a turban, also closely wound. These turbans ranged from the richest materials to her beige stockings, which one day we caught her twining and pinning into shape. “Nothing else in the place that exactly matched the shade of my frock,” she explained. Her eyes were greenish and grey and almost blue. The amusing negroid suggestion of her features lay in a certain drooping heaviness, and was contradicted by a positive hint of the equine. She had—in short—a face that could not be easily forgotten.
She sat looking into the fire. Spencer Mapes hung over her although he was seated beside her on the club fender; he always seemed to be a cloud descending on the earth and undecided when to smite with his thunderbolt. As I came in he was saying, with his nice mingling of wistful regret and detached cruelty: “Her spirit is too rare, isn’t it, for the things that help you and me to do her the least good? Life hurts her. And, if we grant this, can we censure her for what she may do—for what, I might say, I’m confident she’s planning to do?”
I said: “Poor Eva! For of course you are talking about Eva?”
“Precisely what I was saying,” he admitted. “Poor Eva was led astray by her admirations. She fancied that she would be happy because of the exclusiveness of the Van Suydams. In Eva’s eyes, exclusiveness is a beauty; she goes everywhere because she enjoys making an impression, she runs with everyone because she wants to hear what they say about her, and she would love to hate it all.”
As I suspected this to be profoundly true, I said: “I don’t agree with you.”
“After all,” he said to this, “you’ve just got back. Wait until you’ve picked up the threads.”
I shrugged it off with “At this rate, I’ll know all by the end of the day.”
The house boasted the dimmest corners in town. From one of these umbrageous retreats came Winnie Conant and James Pomeroy to greet the cocktails. The dapperness of Pomeroy at once permeated the room. He had a childlike smile and hinting laughter. When he spoke his mouth pursed into the semblance of a kiss, and his words were the more startling because under their caressing there was no kiss. His remarks were listened to because if one did not hear what he said one would be tormented over a suspicion that he had said it at one’s expense. The fact that he poked fun in his friends’ faces made it no more comfortable to brood over what he might have said upon the occasions when one did not listen. His face, even when flushed with laughter, conveyed an elegance, his enunciation a nicety, as flexible as his mind. He said: “But—Dinah darling!—of course you realize that Eva would be immensely pleased, if she knew how much we talk about her.”
I admitted that she would not resent the quantity of the talk, but I speculated as to whether she would like the quality of it. “I mean this: since I landed this morning I’ve heard talk about Eva on all sides, from every source, and with various interpretations put upon her simplest act. Now, there’s something I want to know: why?”
Winnie Conant said simply: “It’s on account of her marriage.” Winnie wrote juveniles. She had the lightness of fancy that children adored. She had no children of her own, did not want them, and in fact had no use for the budding mind. But with those who had never met her she was a by-word for her sweet motherliness. She lived with her husband, Addis Wickersham, in Macdougal Alley—why, no one knew, but we suspected that Addis had nowhere else found a library sufficiently vast for his books. “You know how Eva comes into a room—gorgeously dressed when she knows it isn’t a formal party?”
I argued that she had always done this; her marriage could have worked differences, but her love of fine raiment was her own. “She dresses for her own satisfaction; she takes a narcissus-like joy in being a picture.”
Winnie’s surprise at this was genuine. “I hadn’t expected you to be the one to call her a narcissist. Well, anyway, the effect of her entrances is more shattering than ever now she has her husband at heel. And how on earth can we talk, when he’s around? I’ll just tell you: you might as well see how things are going; and one party that that man’s presence spoils is like any other that he puts an end to. They don’t live so far from us, and every now and then they drop in after dinner. There are people at our place, usually, as you may remember. Well, anyway, one evening Eva sailed in looking like a Botticelli virgin in cloth-of-gold. Only—she was brittle. You know how she gets? She gives the impression, when in that mood, of choosing her words with care—as if they were going to the printer. Her husband followed her in; and he was laughing. It’s unusual, to catch Nicholas Van Suydam enjoying a good laugh when he’s with any of us. He wasn’t dressed, by the way; said she’d taken him by surprise with her ball costume. And, Dinah, doesn’t that one thing show how little he knows her? Anyway, she told me what he had said on the way to us. You know, of course, that if you get Eva at the right moment there’s nothing she won’t tell? He had reminded her that these studios used to be the stables belonging to his mother’s neighbours. And she had said it had atmosphere. He had come back at her with the reminder that that stiff and starched old coachman of his mother’s lives above his mother’s stable, which, as it happens, is two doors from us in the Alley. And, she said, she stamped her foot at him and remarked that he couldn’t make her lose her temper, because she simply adored his mother’s old-fashioned ways. She said that the old lady is a real literary character. ‘Good lord!’ he said, raising his eyes to heaven. Eva actually does admire that old woman. She said to him that his mother was a literary remains, that she had never seen anything like her, that she was an anachronism. She wound up by thanking her stars that she’d found such a thing in New York, of all places. And that’s when he again rolled his eyes and said ‘Good lord! She is New York!’”
I waited to see if anyone else would comment. They did not; they had heard it before. So I put it to Winnie that I had got no impression of a scene in what she had told.
Winnie finished her cocktail in such haste that she was further delayed by a fit of choking. With a flap of her hand she begged me to wait a minute; she was coming to it. With the further flourish of her now empty glass she might have been dashing her challenge into the face of Eva’s defiant husband. “It seems that he made fun of our two names—Addis’ and mine—over our front doorbell. It seems that it’s a bone of contention between them that on her books Eva still uses her maiden name alone.”
Florence the unmarried smiled. “Why do you suppose Eva told you?” she speculated.
Winnie gloated over the fact that, so she said, one could always get things out of Eva. “And how can you take him, after all—that husband of hers? He’s made no attempt to fit into the circle of Eva’s friends. Eva told us that he said he believed marriage should be an abdication of this willingness to listen to the advice of friends. I do think,” Winnie exclaimed, “that smoking a pipe gives a man an advantage over us; and they know it, the nasty things! Nicholas Van Suydam stretched out his long legs and leaned back and clenched that pipe stem between his teeth and grinned at us; and when I asked point-blank what was on his mind he mumbled around the filthy pipe that he’d been saying to himself ‘My man, if ever there was a time in your life when you had better sit tight, this is it!’”
“Ah splendid!” murmured Pomeroy.
Winnie pushed her complaint. Eva, it seems, had said briskly “Nick darling, we’ve got to get used to things. And hadn’t we better start in by making up our minds to let each other’s work alone?”
I drawled: “I think he sounds rather attractive.”
“Oh well,” Winnie advanced uneasily, “I acknowledge that we were talking about Eva’s affairs.”
“With both of them present—of course?”
“Eva didn’t object,” said Winnie with relief. “You know her. Spence came in about that time, and said—you know, Spence, you can be counted on to say it!—that she was something-or-other-delicate and rare, and she positively purred. She was taken by the idea of having attributed to her an unapproachable perfection.”
Spencer Mapes said: “How do you know I don’t believe it?”
New York has a sliding scale of hours for cocktails. It was still early in the afternoon, although candles were lit in the neighbours’ living-rooms. The soft light of these numerous candles streamed through the windows on to the trees outside; for this row of houses had been remodelled and now faced the river. The branches of the trees leaned towards the windows, and almost brushed the panes, and where they came within the candlelight they were tipped with gold so beckoning as to be unearthly. The river ran at the foot of the garden, separating it from Welfare Island where recalcitrant women saw the error of their ways; and lights began flaring from the windows of the prison, for the sun, if one could have seen it, had moved over the Hudson. There would have been peace except for this suggestion of imprisoned suffering, and quiet except for the radios. The loud speakers of other people’s radios held New York in a deadened thrall. Our small company of necessity raised their voices, and above what we said rolled and bellowed what persons from all America said. Words clacked against our eardrums, songs assailed our taste; and this discordance so persistently knocked against me—as if someone were hitting me—that I wondered for how long a time I could hold out. I wanted to scream.
They were saying things—as people on the air were saying things—useless things. Florence said: “The only good thing about him is that he can make no use in his buildings of what I may chance to say in his hearing. I mean—it doesn’t pay to run around town saying absolutely good things; the first you know, you read your good things in other people’s books. That—” she concluded with her smile that directed her barbs to all in the room—“that is the reason authors are so stupid in conversation.”
“Meaning—?” suggested Pomeroy with interest.
“—That I may be planning a brilliant line on Eva’s husband. He irritates me.”
Pomeroy said: “I adore his mother. And let me tell you that men have adored old ladies for less worthy reasons than mine for my passion for Mrs. Van Suydam. She tells me that she’s disappointed in Eva’s books because they haven’t the rich meaty flavour of Moll Flanders. She’s added to the rich meaty flavour of my life. You should talk to her, Dinah.”
Everyone then told me what I should do. Florence said: “I tell you frankly, Dinah, that knowing your influence over Eva I felt sure you’d want to do something about it and asked you here in order to decide on something.” My influence over Eva being a new idea, and the last thing they would have acknowledged if they had believed it, she flung at me a guarded look. They felt, she said now, that I would see the seriousness of the situation so soon as they had fully gone into it with me.
“And then?” I prompted.
Florence shrugged. She said that she was making no suggestions; for, after all, how could she? She held to the notion that for Eva a divorce would be a disastrous thing. “But she’ll ditch herself yet,” she thought.
“Look here, my girl,” I called myself to account, “why can’t you make up your mind that an American is never happy? We’re a chronically dissatisfied race. You know that if any of us were happy we’d lose our celebrated feverish energy—we’d not be forced by a substratum of uneasiness to push ourselves—push, push, push ourselves—to an end that often we can’t see. It’s our dissatisfaction with life that makes us push. It isn’t going to injure Eva’s work, that she’s unhappily married—if she is.”
Pomeroy announced that I had been talking to myself for the last five minutes. “Have you ever thought, Dinah darling, of using yourself in a novel? But of course you wouldn’t use what really counts; no woman would.”
I said: “Shall we stop this? I’m sick and tired of talking about Eva.”
“My lamb,” interrupted Florence, “wouldn’t it be honest if we acknowledged that these days we get together solely to talk about her? And wouldn’t it be more open and above board if you acknowledged that you eat it up? For my part, I’m frank in my avidity. And I want to say, just here, that I know what Eva herself wants; above and beyond being talked about whenever men—and women—are gathered together in her name, she wants the greatest joy ever experienced by a human being, only, in order that she be not shocked, it must be the joy of creatures without bodies.”
Mapes stood at the window tapping on the panes his own reply to the beckon of the bare branches that mournfully swung in the wind from the river. He said, speaking over his shoulder as if he concealed his face: “She can’t help it. She’s powerless to change her nature—as are we all. Women with thin treble voices have no power of emotion.”
Pomeroy revelled in arguments about the nature of women. “What, then, keeps them going?”
“Their excited nerves.” Thus charitably excusing all possible charges against Eva’s treatment of her husband, Mapes at the same time suggested that this treatment was of a refined cruelty. With anticipatory relish, he glanced keenly from one to another of us, gathering up obscure reactions he might have brought about. I knew that he studied us, measuring our relatively tense muscles as indications of how we had drifted since his suggestion which might embrace so many. I noticed that the cocktail shaker made a swift round of the room. I said that I was tired. “It’s all too much. I can sort out some points, but not so many. Everyone of you has a different impression of everyone of—of—suppose we call them Eva and her opponents? And what you’ve been half-way telling is as jumbled as that statement of mine, and my mind is as jumbled as my statement, and—there you are!”
“Pray for strength,” Pomeroy advised me. “For this is nothing to how you’ll feel when Eva gets at you with her own inner secret side of it.”
They shouted at me that they had been right in assuming that Eva would have no objection to being dissected by us. And, advancing her apology for Eva more tentatively than was her habit, Florence took it up. “Sit down, Dinah,” she begged. “I’m not going to abuse Eva. And, incidentally, I don’t acknowledge the justice of your attitude of holier than thou. You can’t deny several points. You can’t deny that you never get on your ear until after you’ve heard all we have to tell you: and you can’t deny that Eva herself in her distastes is almost inhumane. She’s harsh in her condemnations of what life has brought out in others. And I think that part of the trouble now is that she’s afraid of the effects of life on herself if she lets go and turns human.” Leaning over in her favourite position, her elbows on her knees and her chin cupped in her hands, she stared into the fire with her sullen resentment against something that only she knew. The long, racy lines of her figure were so much lovelier than her face that at the moment Florence presented her greatest contradiction. “She’s harried—like a poor wild thing—and I, for one, am sorry for her. But to hell with it! Why should I worry myself?” When Florence cursed it was in a curiously deadened voice that carried her ultimate conviction. She continued to worry herself, of course. “Spence says—but I have my reason for stating that he doesn’t think it—that her fastidiousness is lack of feeling. It’s all in her head, he holds. And because she happens to have a thinnish voice he puts that, too, down to a thinness of temperament. And I don’t believe a word of it. To docket a woman isn’t so easy as all that.” She paused to smile at Mapes. “Don’t be ashamed of being in love with Eva, Spence. You’re a bloodless radish, and for you to so plunge into the maelstrom of human failings is a comfort to your friends. Wasn’t radish,” she mused, “what Eva’s husband called all you men? She told us about it—remember?”
Mapes was disdainful. “Of course he selected the wrong simile. He meant to say turnip. And if you want to recall what Eva told us, how about that bit to the effect that he said he’d see everything once, and her counter remark that her friends were never guilty of triteness? I seem to recall her repeating a quite long and fiery speech she made to him, in which she said that of course he was splendid in his own line but that we weren’t tolerant of platitudes. Which all of you might bear in mind, as it would be sad to fall below Eva’s praise.”
Florence’s mouth seemed to tear her face when she laughed, as she did now, with complete abandonment. “Add to that the one excruciating comment on us that Van Suydam has been known to make. He said—according to Eva—‘Then it’s a labour union, and I’m a scab and liable to get hurt?’ Eva said she didn’t speak to him for the rest of the way to wherever they were going. Eva, poor devil, doesn’t think it amusing that she tells us these things.” One would have taken her for a different woman from the brooding replica of the antique who so short a while ago had sat looking at who knows what in the fire.
I wanted to know, I said, what it all came down to.
It appeared, then, that upon several occasions Eva had attempted what amounted to explanations, or apologies, Florence reported. “She says, in extenuation of her irritation with him, that her husband has a trick of being verbally frolicsome, and it upsets her. Yet she was upset when, in the days immediately following their marriage, he insisted on making love to her whenever he caught sight of her. She told us, at the time, that the love-making made her fractious because it got in the way of her work. The truth is, she wants him to be always on tap, in a way of speaking: ready to follow her lead, turning on the flow of his adoration and turning it off as she indicates. But mainly, I believe, she objects to his being mentally frolicsome about things that she has said and done. She has a curious lack of all sense of proportion.” She meditated, again staring into the fire. “Do you know, Dinah, I think you won’t find her changed in any particular by this experiment. He—Van Suydam—is himself doing all the changing.”
I said that I took this absence of change in Eva for granted. “She has, absolutely, the correct objectiveness of the creative worker.”
“She has nothing of the sort. She worries all the time over her association with her husband,” rejoined Florence.
Spencer Mapes was once more at the window, tapping on the panes in a maddening way.
“Florence, dearest,” chuckled Pomeroy, “it’s so amazing that none of you see it! She knows that she’s a personage. Her peculiar charm would be spoiled if she were humorous about herself. She knows that her part is to skim through life like a bird, or to hang on the wall like a picture.”
Florence, however, was not light-hearted about it. “What Eva needs—what we all need, and what Nicholas Van Suydam has—is the feeling of family life, our own family life, just around the corner to walk in on any minute we feel the need of its spiritual boost. Mark my words: it won’t be Van Suydam who will smash in the end. He’ll change, but he won’t smash up for once and all. He doesn’t have to take a train to go home; he can put out his hand and touch it.”
This was disturbing: because I did not wish to believe those things which I did believe. “You think, then, that we’d all be better off at home?”
Her mouth stretched like a wound. “I don’t think it; I know it. But I shall stay, as all of us will stay.”
We were soap-bubbles, blown forward by winds that reached New York: no balance because we brought with us no weight of soil: no direction beyond that of the winds blowing towards New York: “You think that, too, Florence?”
Florence’s mirthless smile dominated us. “I think a lot of things, and the trouble is that my point of view shifts. I think a different thing each time I speak of it. What a crazy mess! No conviction about any of us—except in the case of Eva. She, God knows, has the supreme conviction—about herself. And she doesn’t let us forget it. A conviction as strong as hers must be uncomfortable to live with. Sometimes I’m taken by surprise to find myself sorry for the poor wretch who married her.”
I sighed with exasperation. “I’d give a lot to know what you really think. After all, I am trying to form a conclusion.”
Florence’s dead white face, which by right should have revealed no emotion and which hung out like a flag every twinge of her heart, now set into her noncommittal smile of a wry amusement that she would share with no one. “Look out, Dinah! You are going to be let down. Eva hasn’t a ‘story’ because her life has always been higgledy-piggledy.” I realized that she had discovered something on me only to discount it, and laughed. But for a moment, peering out from behind her powder, there was her complete disillusionment. “Oh, yes, my dear! I did say that she, of us all, has conviction and knows where she’s going; and still I say that her life is higgledy-piggledy. Work it out, darling!”