Part Two
I
I did not doubt that my invitation to tea at the Misses Ingoldsby’s was the direct outcome of Gertrude Cuyler’s dissatisfaction over the abrupt termination of our chat. I knew her aunts but slightly. They were middle-aged ladies of bridge-playing proclivities, and except for the interpenetration of Eva Litchfield we should have continued upon a basis of mutual indifferent kindliness.
I picked a careful way through the jungle of their useless possessions. The apartment was cluttered with “things,” the heterogeneous collection of the Victorian travelling female. They proved their culture by visible evidence of the number of countries in which they had shopped, and, the spoils requiring perches, there were too many cabinets against the walls and too many tables crowding the floor. Everything was handsome, and the effect was as a blow on the head. I accepted a cup of tea, a beverage for which I harbour a vicious dislike, and found that at once my mind was tinged with jaundiced opposition to whatever they intended saying. That they had prepared a line of discussion I saw plainly.
I was not to be left in doubt. The elder Miss Ingoldsby at once said: “My dear Mrs. Avery, what do you think of Nicholas Van Suydam having married Eva Litchfield? Do you believe that they have even a slim chance at happiness?”
Between the Misses Ingoldsby lay a matter or five or six years of added experience for Miss Augusta. As was only proper, therefore, Miss Augusta had long ago assumed entire charge of Miss Lois’ mind and body. The sisters were so unlike that their friends never ceased admiring the further differentiation of them by the precisely right baptismal names. Miss Augusta had a firm and upright character; suitably, her figure was large and firmly handsome. Her splendidly preserved face bore more than a trace of that coldly regular, pink-and-white beauty brought into fashion by Lillian Russell. Her silver hair, of which she retained an abundance, her good skin, her profile, her impressive voice and the weight of her emphasis on her own remarks, served to make Miss Augusta an asset at dinner-parties, although the truth was that she could, and did, out-talk the hardiest. During the period of the early Nineties, she had had a romance which had served to add to her stature as a model woman: she had fallen in love with a married man, and had then taken herself in hand. Her heart, however, proving the only thing beyond her control and remaining true to this implanted image, her abounding energy had had to seek an outlet which should not be disloyal to the image. By way of securing this outlet, she developed into the complete letter-writer of her generation; and this accomplishment, once so obligatory with her class, had never been permitted to run to seed. When the rush of the times had left her with no correspondents because she wrote too often for modern persons to find the time to reply, she took to writing, on world causes, to all individuals who had done things either good or bad; the merit or discredit of their performances made no difference, as in any case what she wanted was to air her own views.
Miss Augusta was given to saying: “Sister Lois is so light-minded.” For the younger Miss Ingoldsby was short and plump, dimpled and inclined to laugh on any provocation. It was easy to see that Miss Augusta, as usual, was right. Miss Lois was so far from serious that upon those occasions when Miss Augusta reproved her for levity she took this as a pretext for still more giggling. Miss Lois cared not at all for causes. She cared not a snap of her fingers for anything which might force her to be low in her mind, as she called an ascent into higher realms of thought. Quite properly, Miss Augusta’s jutting chin put into disrepute Miss Lois’ modest sliding contour.
“My dear Mrs. Avery,” advanced Miss Augusta after a pause during which she marshalled her reasons for having brought about this conference, “we felt that it might be advisable to discuss what can be done about poor Nicholas and—poor—Eva. You young people are so apt to be heedless until the mischief is wrought.”
I endeavoured not to grimace over the tea. It was sweetened, and made more detestable by the addition of cream. “But surely you can’t be so gracious as to call us ‘young people’?”
“Young to me,” said Miss Augusta airily. “Young to me.”
It was in this spirit of throwing a rosy and dissembling glow over the gathering, I make no doubt, that she had invited the one man. Mr. Tappan Tillinghast strolled in to give us the support and the stabilizing weight of his presence. He was strikingly elegant, as always, and, as always, he had in evidence his one defect, to which his friends were accustomed but which instantly drew the eye of a stranger. With all Mr. Tappan Tillinghast’s refined taste in dress, with all his care of his person, his collars invariably appeared to be too large for his neck. This was because one looked for a prominent Adam’s apple and failed to find it. From Mr. Tappan Tillinghast’s head to his feet there could be discovered no protuberance. His legs were long and straight and thin, his waist, even at his age, was thin. He was the envy of younger men because it gave him no trouble to remain without curves. One might have fancied that he had at one time in his life been subjected to a lengthy drying-out process in the tropics, although he had never been known to venture into warm climates. Everything about him was contradictory: he looked as if he had no blood in his veins, and he had never been known to suffer from the cold; he spoke with the chilliest of intonations, and inside he glowed with romance; he gave the impression of having had his springs of being dammed at the source, and for all of his conscious existence he had adored the elder Miss Ingoldsby. One had to acknowledge that his pale blue eyes looked as if they had been washed too often, but a quizzical expression lurked behind their parchment lids. His grey hair was never rampant; one could easily believe that it had grown from his infant head in the same orderly arrangement of thin strands clinging decorously to his skull that now so nicely topped his formally correct turn-out. His mouth, exposed by a carefully trimmed moustache, was shown to be large though thin-lipped; but this niggardly cut of his lips gave no indication of a meanness of temperament but rather hinted at so profound an understanding of himself that, for the sake of an inherited taste in the affairs of life, Mr. Tillinghast had early set about getting the better of errant fancies.
In his presence certain topics were avoided. No one asked for his address. It took all of his scant means to keep himself going at the Knickerbocker Club. It would never have occurred to him to give up a club that he might be said to have inherited in order to be more comfortable in the small matter of where to live. None knew how, and few knew where, he lived. Actually, as I had discovered by accident, he resided in the East Thirties, in one of the flats evolved from the shell of his forefathers’ fine old house.
Bending at his admirable waist, he imprinted a kiss on my hand; and this kiss was sadly pleasant in its aroma of a bygone day.
Miss Augusta’s voice rolled over us, massing us into an audience; Miss Lois spattered a gaiety that was powerless to stem the flow of such inevitability as that of her sister’s militant uplift; Mr. Tillinghast maintained his seat, however precariously, in the saddle of his balanced friendship. Between tea drinking and the anesthesia of Miss Augusta’s phrases I felt myself to be neatly suspended. “Brains directed to a worthy end—personalities turned into the service of our country——” Miss Augusta’s gobblets of profundity was lavished on us. “Do you realize that in every case of a President of the United States being assassinated, it was inspired by the Pope?”
Miss Lois giggled. “My goodness, Gussie, are you going to tack that on to the poor old gentleman?”
“I refer,” said Miss Augusta, “to the Pope at Rome.”
“I didn’t know there was another one,” gurgled Miss Lois with great enjoyment.
“Ho! Ho!” came suddenly from Mr. Tillinghast, who then looked ashamed of himself.
Miss Augusta could not be said to recover herself, for she had not for a moment lost herself. “Shall we get down to the business that brought us together today?” she enquired.
Surreptitiously wiping his eyes, Mr. Tillinghast smiled attenuatedly: one would have thought that never had he laughed aloud, because never had anything amused him. “Business? With three fair ladies?”
I said: “It seems we’ve got to get it over with.”
“Quite right,” approved Miss Augusta, waving her handsome white hand. “We will now come to the point.”
Miss Lois said surprisingly: “Gussie, you always do talk too much.”
Accentuating her parliamentary pose, Miss Augusta endeavoured to stare down her younger sister. “I should think, Sister Lois, that what concerns so intimate a friend as Lavinia Van Suydam concerns us in only a slightly less degree.”
“I can’t forget,” continued Miss Lois, “having heard Eva say to Nicholas that she needed to feel at home. She sounded forlorn: so there! And I don’t yet see, Mrs. Avery, why Eva shouldn’t feel at home with her husband’s family and their friends.” She wound up with her giggle, which I began to suspect of ramifications.
Miss Augusta emitted what in anyone else would have been called a true snort. “She followed that up, if I remember rightly, by saying that she wanted no more condescension. Such ingratitude! After all that Lavinia, and Lavinia’s friends, have tried to do for her!” But I thought that she looked really hurt.
The younger Miss Ingoldsby went along her own pleasantly winding way. “Nicholas has learned to curse!” She defied her sister’s outraged parliamentary hand. “Oh, yes, he has, Gussie! The time we ran across them at the speakeasy Tilly took us to——”
“Ahem!” hastily interposed Mr. Tillinghast. “I do really suspect that all along Nicholas knew how to curse.” But his eye, taking a furtive survey of the ground with Miss Augusta, showed me that the institution of the speakeasy was one of the lady’s inspirations for battle.
“Well, anyway,” continued Miss Lois, “Eva sailed in like a bird. She has a pretty chin; it’s always so high in air. Nicholas was too upset to notice that they were passing our table. And——”
Miss Augusta’s frigidity was directed at Mr. Tillinghast who had escorted her to unsuitability. “He didn’t expect to see us in such a place. I refer to what is called a speakeasy.”
“He was growling in his throat,” joyfully continued Miss Lois. “And Eva’s skirt went rather billowing down the room. Oh, dear! I’d so like to be young and slim and have my skirts billow! People just have to look at Eva.”
“Outside of her appearance, people would stare at Eva,” I said mildly. “Do please remember that she’s tremendously well known. Her name is known, but also her face.”
“Oh, of course!” screamed Miss Lois. “That’s what Nicholas didn’t like. I heard him distinctly, roaring—although it was under his breath, it sounded for all the world like a roar—‘Damn her public!’”
“Sister Lois!” interrupted Miss Augusta. “Enough! I will not permit such language.”
“He was roaring to his own public, which is his intelligence, I daresay,” I suggested amiably.
They looked enquiringly at me. “What?” they said.
In a nearby apartment someone played badly on the piano. The notes fell indifferently, like drops of water. Life seemed a merry-go-round, getting us nowhere. I sipped tea and looked them over with cool appraisal. I decided that it was a case of dog eat dog: they would eat Eva, if Eva did not eat them first. The game is the same; people may be different, in different cases, but the game remains the same. And the old saws are long-lived because they are true. The piano tinkled, tinkled, tinkled. The tea was awful. I wondered if in decency I could leave and so stop off their discussion.
Spencer Mapes must perch like a raven on Nicholas Van Suydam’s shoulder—always on hand at the wrong time—making a peck at his thoughts and hitting the mark; for Miss Lois went on: “That Mr. Mapes—such a friend of Eva’s, isn’t he, Mrs. Avery?—tried to smooth Nicholas down. I heard him say ‘You’re so lucky that you don’t have to advertise your work; aren’t you? You find it difficult to see why we pander to the buyers of our goods?’ So tactful of him, to try to smooth dear Nicholas down. Nicholas has his father’s fiery temper.”
Miss Augusta put her teacup down with a clatter. “Sister Lois, if you would make an effort to be less frivolous we might get at what I wished to see Mrs. Avery about.”
For a minute, Miss Lois was silent. But Miss Augusta took too long to set the stage, and she started in again. “Do you know, Tilly, I do feel that all the friction started at Lavinia’s dinner? I know that’s what Gussie is getting ready to talk about. But Gussie won’t believe that——”
“And how, pray,” begged Miss Augusta as if any answer would be incorrect, “did we hurt her feelings? I hold that she displayed a lamentable lack of the proper feeling. You ask what happened, Mrs. Avery? I’ll tell you. I aroused fury on her part by asking her to recite some of her work.”
The younger Miss Ingoldsby repeated her idea.
The elder Miss Ingoldsby dismissed the objection with a wave of her hand. “She was merely awaiting an excuse to drag Nicholas out of the home of his ancestors.”
“If you had asked her in another way?” ventured Mr. Tillinghast. His long loyalty did not fail Miss Augusta. Once upon a time, she might have loved a married man, but he had every confidence in her. His suggestion was without the strength of conviction.
Miss Augusta appealed to me in a deadly calm. “Mrs. Avery, do you see why Eva should have been affronted? I’ve always understood that authors like nothing better than to read their writings to their friends.”
I was immediately under the necessity of saying with emphasis: “To their friends, yes. Mightn’t it have been that Eva felt you weren’t friends?”
This released all forces hitherto pent in convention. “I must tell you, Mrs. Avery,” said Miss Augusta with spirit, “that Nicholas’ wife will bring his mother’s grey hair in sorrow to the grave.” I luxuriated in this hackneyed condemnation. She looked sharply at me. “That amuses you? But tell me this: could you yourself live amicably in the house with Eva Van Suydam?”
It was not compulsory to tell her the truth, that none of us could live together. Quiet at home was necessary; and with more than one seeking quiet, noise, strangely enough, reigned.
“When she left Lavinia’s dinner-party,” resumed Miss Augusta, “she was in a tantrum. She said ‘I’m a working woman, and must get home to my labours’. Poor Nicholas! His face was a study.”
I helped myself to another buttered muffin. The Misses Ingoldsby were heavy providers.
“She was so artificial about it. Poor Nicholas said—trying to put a good face on it—that the making of books was a sealed book to him; and she was kittenish and shook her finger at him. ‘A pun! For shame!’ It sounded most silly.”
“You got yourself in trouble,” interrupted Miss Lois with a rare censoriousness, “by trying to manage things. You always try to manage people, and they don’t like it. You started in directly we had left the table, and drew up chairs and told Eva to stand on a certain spot; it was exactly as if she had been hired to amuse the guests. I’ve been sure, ever since, that it made trouble.”
Miss Augusta reared back in her straight chair and looked at her younger sister. In her silent look there was more power than in her spoken word. The air became impregnated with her conviction that Eva had shown base ingratitude. When finally she spoke it was to remark that there were many who were grateful for what she had done for them. Thinking of how, since my return, I had been kept to the question of Eva’s marriage, my own remarks became tinged with acrimony. She almost hastened with her reply. “My dear Mrs. Avery, you don’t think that I should take up your time—not to mention my own, which I assure you is filled with useful tasks—with this trivial scene at Lavinia Van Suydam’s? No, indeed! I really planned to request you to use your influence about the apportioning of the rooms in Nicholas’ house.” I must have stared with, almost, my mouth open. But her eyes were beaming with the best intentions.
I made the reasonable request to know what she could possibly mean. She explained that she was afraid Nicholas would come to his death by the present distribution of sunlight in his home. “It was done by Eva,” she told me significantly. Another woman would have been disconcerted by my amused bewilderment; but the elder Miss Ingoldsby took it as a tribute to her ability as a public speaker. She sat waiting for me to heckle her. She knew how to wait for what she desired: it was I, and not she, who broke down. I said that I was sorry I did not understand.
“Of course you remember how the small houses on the side streets are arranged?” she began her exposition of Eva’s iniquity. “On each floor there is one sunny room and one in which the sun never shines. It is unhealthy to get no sunshine,” she said through tightly pressed lips. She made me know that never willingly would she condemn.
“And Eva has the sunny rooms?” I knew that she must: she loved the sun.
“She has, Mrs. Avery.”
I laughed, seeing Eva at her writing-table in transparent shafts of golden sunshine. I knew how she arranged her background; always, her study was the same. A glow of copper—the light streaming through chintz figured with bright birds and roses which were rust-coloured and big as cabbages, and falling on bowls of overblown tea roses revealing their copper hearts. Against the roses with their deep hearts and their imminent surcease, Eva’s head was that of a painted saint wearing a halo of beaten gold leaf. I said in her defense: “She hadn’t time to stop and think what was good for him.” But disapproval so permeated the drawing-room that I hastened to add a lame second thought: “Eva is a very hard worker, and sometimes she seems much more heedless than in her heart she is.”
I was not sure whether Miss Augusta’s resultant sniff was one of approval of my defense of my friend or disapproval of my evident inability to see her grounds for a virtuous indignation. She said shortly: “Poor Nicholas will shoot up weedy and pale like a potato sprouting in a cellar.”
Miss Lois’ giggle relieved a suspense that I felt to be fairly exuding from Mr. Tappan Tillinghast. “I don’t think he would like to be called a potato in a cellar, Gussie; he’s such a good looking man. Besides, when they were showing us the house he really did impress me as being awfully proud of it. And I did hear her say to you that it was lucky that when she wrote she wanted sunshine, and when he worked at home he needed a north light for his drawing-table.”
“She didn’t explain a like apportioning of the bedrooms,” brooded Miss Augusta.
Mr. Tillinghast ventured that he fancied Nicholas admired his wife so much that he was contented. “Remember when he said ‘Suppose we go back to Eva’s study? She looks so sweet at her writing-table—like a little girl playing’?”
Miss Lois gurgled: “Eva does know how to manage men! And I do think——” Her pause was caused by her stifling giggle.
“Well?” demanded Miss Augusta. “What were you going to say, Sister Lois?”
Miss Lois almost swooned, so spasmodic was her giggling fit. “I meant, Eva does know how to pull the wool over gentlemen’s eyes!”
Properly, Miss Augusta passed this over in silence. When she inflated her lungs it was for a further exposition of her own argument. “She leaves Nicholas in those dreadful northern rooms during the warm weather when the only breath of air comes through the southern windows. It’s useless for him to assert—he is so chivalrous, being Lavinia’s son—that he prefers the north light for his work. He works at his office. And if the house is so good to work in, why—will you tell me—does she take herself off to some cool spot every summer?”
I refused to commit myself beyond the remark that I saw nothing I could do about it. This brought from Miss Augusta the innuendo that I did not yet know the half of it. There were, for instance, unnecessary and solitary trips to Europe——
I enquired: “Do you think they have a chance on earth?”
They turned to face me fully. “But we thought you were against us in the matter!”
My calm was now uncivil. “With every acquaintance taking a hand, they are, of course, heading for the rocks.”
“Dear me! Dear me!” grieved Mr. Tillinghast. “I should really dislike to think it. They’re so well matched in the way of looks. I admire Eva’s looks more than I can tell you.” He failed to observe that Miss Augusta now strung his well meant words on a handy rosary to be used during his inevitable penance. He swept into what was almost lyricism. “She has such a broad and gracious brow, and her eyebrows take a flying line. Her hair seems to fly upwards, too, although it really never blows about. Did you ever notice that about her, Augusta—that she is never frowsy? There’s something about her,” he said in his nice elderly voice, “that is wing-like, aspiring. She’s—she’s aloof, untouchable, and reaching up. She seems to be looking at a facet of the star to which she’s hitched her wagon; and the star is eternally within and beyond her reach, poor girl!”
“Well!” The monosyllable might have been propelled from Miss Augusta by her inner and boiling emotions.
Mr. Tillinghast gave her every indication of having jumped the fence. Gazing into space made lovely by his faint regret, he said: “Her mouth—such a small mouth!—is fastidious.”
Miss Augusta said: “But not generous.”
Mr. Tillinghast asked her: “Have you ever noticed that she has the nicest little straight nose?”
“It will be pinched when she is older,” remarked Miss Augusta.
I hurried to the window embrasure and stood looking down into the uninteresting street; I hoped they would take my shaking form for the sign of some tender emotion. That they did was proven by their guilty haste in urging me back to the tea table. “Poor Tilly isn’t what he was,” Miss Augusta reassured me in a whisper, as she plied me with a fresh buttered muffin. “Do eat this, Mrs. Avery. You’re such a scrap of a person, I always think you must be dieting.”
“If you mean, that he’s in love with her,” I suggested maliciously, “he is eating too many muffins for that state of mind.”
For Mr. Tappan Tillinghast had absent-mindedly reached out a heavily veined hand and appropriated the muffin intended for me. His eyes retained his visions; he dreamily munched the muffin. Sure of Miss Augusta’s sympathetic understanding because he had always been able to count on it, he thought aloud. “It must have been such a strange contrast, that between Lavinia and Eva, the day they met. Both such pale women.”
“Indeed!” sniffed Miss Augusta. “And how, pray, did you come to know about it?”
“A little bird told me,” said he with another of this group’s platitudes. He put a roguish head on one side.
“Meaning Gertrude? She had little to do, not to tell her own aunt!”
“No,” he said. “Oh, no indeed: Lavinia told me.”
Then, she judged, he had at last got the straight of it. How straight the tale must have been, coming from Mrs. Van Suydam—how she must have hit out from the shoulder, defeated as she was by Eva who took no part in it—how bitterly, in short, she must have told her story to this old friend, was a thing that he would never tell me except fragmentarily.
“Lavinia went up there to fetch Nicholas home,” he went into it. He implied that she had thus flung down her gauntlet to fate. Her head scarcely reached her son’s shoulder; but she had dominated him always, and she would dominate him now. She had felt from the start that something dreadful was to happen. There was an underlying meaning to this. It was her duty to find the meaning, if her son were close to it, and she felt in her bones that he was. She felt that it might be the meaning of life itself. One could not manage life, which had a way of sneaking up behind and clubbing one through the medium of the child. She had reported to Mr. Tillinghast that she had said to her son: “Please don’t keep me waiting.” And instantly she knew that she had lost. Stiff and straight, she faced him in silence. She waved off his offer to escort her to her carriage.
“Nicholas was very quiet, too, she told me,” continued Mr. Tillinghast. “She looked back from the head of the stairs. She knew that already she was forgotten. She said that at this moment she tasted bitterness.” It was from force of habit only that her lips said “Humph! Indeed!”
I drank tea that was strong from the bottom of the pot. When I thought it safe to glance at Mr. Tillinghast, I said to him: “Thank you for telling me.”
“What can you mean, dear Mrs. Avery?” demanded Miss Augusta curiously.
“Oh—” I said flippantly, giving it to them for what it was worth—“there are always two sides, aren’t there?”