II
The sun shone, sparrows twittered love, and false spring tricked me into a rebirth of my first delight in New York. If I sat long enough on the bench in Washington Square I would catch the early crocuses springing up. But it was December, and nothing pleasant could last. There was dirty weather lying dead ahead.
Because the day was so fine, I had walked downtown. I was going to call on Eva, who lived four blocks away; but it was early, and she might still be at work. And to sit in the sun and gaze at the pleasant pinkish bricks in the row of old Georgian houses on the northern side of the Square was delightful. I was pleased when Mrs. Van Suydam’s maroon brougham came in sight around the corner from Macdougal Street; its colour toned in with the pinkish bricks and with the pale blue sky. Every fine afternoon, at the correct hour for a lady’s airing, Higginson donned his puce livery, mounted the box-seat of the brougham, and drove the bays which had once been spanking from the stable which still fulfilled its original mission on Macdougal Alley. His little eyes looked neither to the right nor to the left; for he ignored the life of the Alley which had once been a mews and was now an artists’ colony. With the laudable end in view of showing the inhabitants that he flouted them, he contrived to get around the sharp turn into Macdougal Street, and around the further curve into Washington Square, with much stamping of hoofs. For Higginson was conservative. He was the worst of snobs: he was a horseman. And he could remember when the smells along Macdougal Alley had been those of horses and harness and not, as now, the stench of gasoline and the emanations of artistic life. He drew up, with a flourish, before the high front steps of the Van Suydam mansion, froze into immobility, and prepared to endure with scorn the jibes of roller-skating and ball-playing roisterers in the Square. I was sure that he shared the opinion of his mistress on the decline of manners and customs.
I watched Mrs. Van Suydam come down the steps and give directions over her shoulder to the maid who saw to it that no errant gust of wind should lift from their decent protection of elderly limbs the last petticoats in the city. Although a small woman, she gave the impression of solidity, of standing in the last ditch without acknowledging it to be the last, of fighting for a lost cause and believing it to be the only cause. Her ability lay in an inability to see that her people, inheriting New Amsterdam, had not kept up with New York. She had confidence in herself because if she had ever been crossed she knew how to wait until matters adjusted themselves. All of this showed on her face, which was never serene but which was always composed. She had bent her will to a temporary acceptance of the repugnant. For a moment, she stood looming out at the Square with unseeing eyes.
The carriage door slammed. The message of the slam of the door of a horse-drawn carriage differs from that of a motorcar. She was off for the drive which she had made an institution.
I sat, then, on my sunny bench, ruminating over Winnie Conant’s contribution to the various tales of Eva and her husband. I could not bring myself to look upon that scene as significant of future trouble. Nicholas Van Suydam, with his long legs and his pipe, apostrophizing himself and remaining unruffled in the midst of the turmoil of the Wickersham library, verged on the charming. “My man, if ever there was a time—” I shut my eyes and strove to recall his appearance: he had, I remembered, the pleasantest of faces.
I had called Eva, in the morning, and had heard over the telephone her high, sweet voice. Promptly she had rushed into “You should be the last one to reproach me with neglect. You should know how it is when one is torn asunder over a book. You should know that it’s actually birth-pains, in the suffering it causes one. The period of gestation is the same, too—a matter of the best part of a year.” And she began laughing at her conception of the situation. “Do you know, Dinah, you’ve brought me luck, already! Already I’ve said something very, very good.” She did not stop to make a note of it; she never forgot a word she said. She added, on a hasty after-thought: “Do you have to see me today? I mean, is it of particular importance?”
I was firm about it being important. “After all,” I told her, “I’ve heard the other side of it.”
“I don’t mind telling you,” she rejoined, “that I’m in the funniest quandary.”
“Funny? It didn’t impress me as being in the least amusing.”
“Don’t be literal,” she said; and made the appointment.
In Eleventh Street, a few doors west of Fifth Avenue, there still stands a row of red brick houses which is a miniature Washington Square with smiles thrown in. For these intimate little houses smile from their small-paned windows, and run down their tidy front steps and through their little areas and hail their friends. The city might be across one of the rivers; but it is around the corner, and leans over with a leer to remind the small houses that it is only a question of time when they will go into the hands of the wreckers. If the passerby listens, he will hear the rat-tat-tat of riveters. If he lifts his eyes from the always gay window-boxes, he can see, rising against the sky, the hideous steel ribs of unborn towers. Artists passing along the sidewalk thank providence for the small houses; architects possibly reflect that they do things on a bigger scale, these days.
I walked past a modern apartment house, and past one or two remodelled houses, to the little houses in their pristine style. I wondered if Nicholas Van Suydam knew that it was in him to build the greatest of the towers now thrusting their insolent heads skyward; and I reflected that the towers might be in his imagination, but the old red brick of New York had always been in his blood. Not for a moment did I doubt which of the two had selected this house. Home means the opposite of a man’s work, while a woman carries her home with her, even, when necessary, into the office. I went up the high and narrow stoop, liking the house more and more as I noticed that even the basement windows were charmingly curtained and as I pulled the shiny brass knob of the old-fashioned bell. I smiled at the house, and the house, I felt, smiled back at me, personally good-natured about it. Home means a house that smiles inside and out. Through the curtains of the drawing-room windows I saw a chintz easy-chair, a smoking stand beside it and flowers beyond it. To the elderly eyes of Mrs. Van Suydam, accustomed as they were to what was undoubtedly the austerity of the Washington Square mansion, this aspect of a cheery sudden blooming must have seemed ominous of early departure.
A warm welcome awaited me behind the white painted door. Eva’s personal maid, Mattie, smiled broadly. But she had time to whisper: “Miss Dinah, please ma’am lemme speak to you jes’ a minute ’fore you goes?”
I started up the flight of stairs to the second storey. “The door towards the back, Miss Dinah,” Mattie called after me, intelligently staying at the foot of the stairway’s drag on the heart.
Eva had a way of enveloping a guest in a greeting the warmth of which became at once a recitation of her own affairs. “Oh, darling—oh, I’m so glad to see you! If you only knew how I need to talk with you!”
“H-m-m,” I remarked, if this exhalation of the breath can be called a remark. “Over the telephone, you didn’t impress me as feeling so strongly about seeing me.”
She paid no attention to this. “Oh—” she cried on a rising note—“if you only knew! Everything is going to pot!” Holding me by the hand, she dragged me into her study, dashing past the chairs, pushing me on the day-bed and throwing herself down beside me to fix her eyes on my face. “Everything is wrong,” she wailed. She had a long and slender and round throat, and the hollows at the base were delicately modelled. But her face had begun to suggest wasted years; it was the face of one to whom already life had brought disillusion. I thought her more nervously upset than I had ever before seen her.
The room was familiar although in a house that was new to me. It might have been the study in any of Eva’s residences. Over the whole place, seeming to be part of the house itself although it was really Eva’s dressing up of her personality, there hung the scent of tea roses. I told her how delightful I had found the window-boxes, and she gave me an odd look and said that it had been about the window-boxes that she and Nicholas had had one of their first disagreements. “I had forgotten all about the house because I was on a book. And it came out that the geraniums had collapsed in that awful pulpy mess which is one of the horrors of autumn. And he said to me that it was strange I’d talk so much about beauty and not hate the way the geraniums looked. I daresay the sensible course under attack would be to imitate the wild things in the woods: sit motionless until the attacker’s attention has been diverted. But I reply; I always reply. He can be rather hateful, like all equable men.”
“Aren’t you happy with him?” I asked at once.
She blared her eyes. “Happy—with Nick? Of course I am. That is—I could be, if people let us alone.”
“You mean you see too many people? No time to be quietly happy and contented?”
“Sentimental as ever!” she teased. “I mean, in plain words, that everyone—Nick’s friends who aren’t mine, and my friends who aren’t his—take a hand in the least thing we do. Of course both sides have been at you about us?” From my smile she knew that this guess was correct, and went on with what she would have called her own side. “Let me tell you that they aren’t the amiable meddlers who beset all newly wed couples. These meddlers are almost malignant—at least, his side of the mob are malignant. But both sides give an impression of concerted action. They give the impression—his side, I mean, of course—of bitterly resenting any appearance on our part of getting on together. They are the prophets howling in the wilderness that they ‘told us so.’ And, if it doesn’t come out the way they prophesied, they will make it.”
I asked what she meant by this. It appeared that she meant only her momentary irritation at all people; and this seemed to me to be the passing phase of the last long stretch with the book. I felt relieved, and amused, and vastily aggravated. Today, she was pettish over something that ordinarily she would enjoy. I advanced the contingency that her husband might have had to face the problem of readjusting his life and work to her presence, and at once her face became grave. “That is one of the difficulties. He’s lost, I fear, the abstraction of his ideas.”
My mood changed, and I laughed heartily. “How can anyone hold an abstract idea while you are around?”
She was indignant. “I should inspire them.”
“My dear,” I told her, “you have a way of shattering people. You have a trick of making everyone feel inferior to you.”
Because she knew this to be true, she paid no attention. She said that he would come into the house quietly, tiptoeing upstairs to his dusty workroom; he must get to his drawing-table and sketch the vision that shone, bright as day, in his head. Even the shining sight of Eva might injure the delicate fabric of the as yet disembodied image. He would feel sure, she said, that when the dark pressed on his windowpanes he would see it as he had seen it in the first flush of his enthusiasm. “I fixed up a workroom for him,” she explained. “And I let him keep it as grimy with charcoal dust as he wishes. He’s comfortably slouchy, and agreeably smutty, and this should please him, I’m sure. I don’t think men care how they look when they work: as I do, and as I’m sure you do.” She gave this a moment’s thought, and continued: “But he breaks in on me when I’m working.”
“Do you break in on him when he’s working?”
She began to laugh at what she described as herself smudged with charcoal from the injudicious embraces of her husband. “We’ve had some queer love-making in that horribly ugly room.” She recalled one day in particular when from his ravings, as she described it, she had pieced together the tale of his experience; and, telling it to me, she fitted these fragments into a story. How much of this was Nicholas, and how much Eva, she herself could not have made out when she had finished; but I suspected that in the end she would believe that it was all hers.
He had run down the steps of the Elevated station and emerged, with the permanence of the solid flat ground again under his feet, on the twisted line of Sixth Avenue. Although he had got off the train high in the air at Eighth Street, he now found himself at Tenth, in front of the Jefferson Market Police Court; for this is one of the spots whereon Greenwich Village thumbs a derisive nose at the regularity of geometric New York. He gave it no heed; he was used to it. He hurried because he wished to reach home in as short a time as possible, and not because Sixth Avenue smelled of butchers and grocers, of cobblers, and of frying chops in all-night restaurants. His head was ecstatically full of the thing that had occurred to him on the ride downtown from his office. Staring in at, without seeing, the flying intimacies of second storey life in squalid tenements along the way, he had seen in his imagination the stateliest of pleasure domes. How to set-back a tower and keep it from looking like an after-thought: this had been holding up the design on which he had worked all week. It must go in a mass, solidly from the ground—the fundamental earth. Suitably, there should be no springing up, lacy like the Giralda Tower, in this city which grew around him, piling above him, unlike anything the world had seen before. There must be no more erections resembling factory chimneys, stuck for utility on top of square structures no better than a child might build with blocks. The city! What it would be, to build a city—one man to dream, and build, an entire city! He hummed to himself, as he did when ideas were fluid light, and not slow lava which only moved for a short time before hardening. There were dreadful days when his ideas were murky, black days when he doubted his ability. To draw—to envision the city of the future—he had needed peace and a reasonable seclusion, and at the same time he had needed the gratification of his heart and of his senses; and all of this Eva had given him, he assured himself as he hurried to the little house. Two hours before dinner, and after dinner the night ahead; and by tomorrow he would have his building, perfect, and suitable, modern and yet old as the world in purity of intention, reduced to black lines on white paper. He sang, whistled, and hummed through his teeth.
“He was off key,” she explained her subsequent behaviour. “He has no ear.” She had called out to him: “Have you got to make that noise?” She was working; in the pauses of his yelping, he must have heard the clacking of her typewriter running along on a more insistent key. From any inner joy, she reminded me, she was always quiet as a mouse, life itself seeming to hang suspended for the work which went well. But he howled cheap tunes while his charcoal slid over the paper greasily slinking and sly. “I simply cannot understand how he can do it!” moaned Eva to me. “It makes me doubt that he will ever be a great architect.” She had had much ado, she said, to keep from moaning aloud. And without warning he had come playfully into her study. “Playfully, mind you! And after having brought me to the verge of collapse!” she had not glanced up. “Do stay out of here,” she muttered. He mildly enquired what was the matter. She acknowledged that she then spoke in a voice sharpened by her fury. “If you don’t stay out of here when I’m working——!” Bent over her typewriter, she was always cold and concentrated, and her mouth was rigidly a part of a marble face.
“He came across the room and tipped my chin up,” she told me indignantly. “When I was working! I said I wished he would keep out of my sight. I said it over and over because he merely looked at me.”
“Why did he ‘merely look at you’? Was it displeasure? Because, really, Eva——”
“No! No!” She was impatient at my interruption. “He has a way of ‘merely looking’.” He must have realized that in truth she was not at the moment thinking of him as a being: he was an accident, of the weather, of the fading daylight, of the world which persisted in stinging her. But the unfortunate creature was a man, and he forced her face back and bent to kiss her. “That—for—your—work!” it seems he said; she was not clear about it, but she insisted that he said something banal. She preserved the rigidity of her frozen face when she leapt to her feet. And this cold face, this pair of eyes that conveyed no hint of her ever having loved him, brought him to a cool judgment of her attitude. He said: “So! That’s the way it is!”
She said that she was aware of her face shattering into agony. She began speaking very rapidly. “You don’t deal in words. You can always return—at once—to your work. You can pick up that piece of chalk and go back to your lines. But the word—the right word—it’s always dodging us; it’s always out of our reach; it’s the elusive essence of art. My God!” she told me that she broke off with; “everything intrudes!”
She told me that he was a Dutchman, through and through. “He can’t possibly fly off his head. He glares. He asked me what I wanted, anyway? Did I want him to sit in the hall, like a lackey—he would say that; his mother would have said it—not to speak, not to move, not to—exist, by Jove!—unless I pressed a button? He wound up by remarking that I was asking a good deal of him.”
She glanced helplessly around her pretty room. What, after all, was a woman’s work? This, she gathered, was his estimate. It is something with which she is permitted—by her husband, and also, he admitted, by the dispensation of providence—to wile away her idle hours; and it could never be seriously considered in the arrangement of a household. She was sure that his feeling was that this was his household, she his wife: it was the feeling of property, of which, she acknowledged, she had accused him at the end of all their quarrels. She seems to have brooded over this after he left the room in dudgeon. At any rate, she wound up by following him to his own room, standing in the door and making a speech to him. “What do you want, if we come down to it? Why on earth didn’t you marry Gertrude Cuyler? She wouldn’t have objected to your kisses when her mind was at work, because she hasn’t a mind.” She came back to it: she said that the quality in him which invariably egged her on to saying more than she had intended saying was his trick of silently looking at her. “He looks! He, merely, looks!” She said that she was thinking to herself: “He should take me by my back hair and sling me around.” She said that, standing in his door, she came to the realization that she wanted him to dominate her, and she knew that she would want to kill him if he did. She wanted him to be more brilliant than she, and she knew that it would be frightful for her if he were.
She broke her narrative to tell me that his hair was ruffled like a terrier’s. “You know how I adore terriers?” she interpolated. It occurred to her to think of describing him as he looked now to her softened eyes. But she knew that the words at the back of her head would not today come at her bidding: he had done this to her. She said to herself: “I give up!”
To give up to Nicholas meant that he took it for granted she had given up in everything.
What was the use of experience, if one could not find the words for using the fruits of it in one’s books? Those prismatic words that had glittered in her brain were gone. She had, at the time, made a frenzied plea to her mind to remember. She seems to have spent the better part of an hour at her writing-table, although she told me that it had been a spiritual lifetime; Nicholas had faded—dimmed—gone into the past; and she was a novelist who used words to portray emotions. She was in despair. She told herself that creation is of two kinds, that of the mind and that of the body; if she wished to use the creativeness that came from her mind she must be careful how she prostituted it. Resentment flared up against him. She should be on her guard against him, if she wished to save the integrity of her work.
I interrupted to say that she was trying to sublimate herself; and as I spoke I wondered if she had come into the world sublimated. She paid no attention to my comment, but went on to tell me that she had finally gone back to his room and explained all of this to him. That is, she amended with her little gurgling laugh that was so much lower in pitch than her voice, she had tried to make him see, but—naturally—he had been unable to look at it in her way. “I do believe the silly man is jealous of Spencer Mapes!”
“Why do you think that? How—” I enquired witheringly—“how could anyone be jealous of Spence?”
“I know he is,” she told me, “because he is forever saying he isn’t. But that isn’t of the slightest importance; why did you take me up on it? I was going to tell you about the prophets crying in the wilderness ‘Repent ye!’ Nick’s crowd make the summer and the winter noisy with their clamour.”
“You don’t think, then, that our crowd cry in the wilderness?” I was unable to resist this dig at Eva, who, with her horror of realism, had the most amazingly fatuous outlook on her immediate surroundings. She vigorously denied the possibility. “Ah you are hopeless!” I sighed.
“But you were born a pessimist,” she pointed out.
I dropped it. “You were going to tell me of some interference on the part of—which of your husband’s friends was it?” I asked with resignation.
She laughed. Hers was never the coarsened laughter of those of us who had a wider view of the meanness of life. Her merriment tinkled, without a touch of childishness. It was the detached amusement of the fairies. “Not interference, darling: comments. Comments on whatever Nick and I decide to do. In this case, my last summer’s trip to Europe. They share Nick’s obsession of the decency of a husband and wife being continually seen in each other’s company. I went in to see my mother-in-law, whom I adore; and I overheard this attack on me.”
“You mean, you listened?”
“I mean just that. Did you never listen when you shouldn’t?”
To everything that had been told me about Eva I had listened; and this, while not eavesdropping, was prying. I contented myself with “What did you hear?”
“They were drinking tea. It’s a rite in the good old manner, at my mother-in-law’s. The Ingoldsby sisters and Mr. Tappan Tillinghast—isn’t that a delicious name, Dinah, if one uses the sonorous whole of it?—sat politely, watching my mother-in-law handle the fat silver teapot. She has the grand manner when she pours tea; and she’s intelligent enough to know it and to therefore cling to the custom—although I believe she would scorn to play to the gallery of even her intimate friends. It was delightful, and I stood around the door jamb and admired it.” This was the only excuse she offered for her nefarious act.
She made me see it, as she had seen it from around the door jamb. Mr. Tappan Tillinghast had sat looking at the elder Miss Ingoldsby. He gave the illusion of sitting, as now, his small head thrust towards her and his mild eyes respectfully adoring her, for a greater length of time than the lady would care to admit; and Miss Augusta had for years pretended, as she pretended today, to be in ignorance of his regard for her. His long hands, loosely clasped, drooped between his elegant knees. Eva said she was convinced that the criticism he now made on Miss Augusta was his first: “I think, Augusta, that you’re hard on her.”
The elder Miss Ingoldsby drew her handsome form up to its full display of well preserved opulence, while her clear skin flushed with annoyance. “And why, pray, do you think such a thing?”
Eva said it was evident that he would deprecate any point of difference between them. “Ladies understand each other,” he seems to have murmured like a poltroon. Thus released from supervision of her admirer, the elder Miss Ingoldsby turned upon Mrs. Van Suydam the fine flame of her substantial backing. But Mrs. Van Suydam’s eyes clung persistently to what her hands were about. She stated firmly that she had expressed no opinion. “That,” Miss Augusta had then criticized, “is where you make your mistake, Lavinia. You hold off from directing these two young people. If you would listen to me——” And the younger Miss Ingoldsby had then incontinently burst into giggles. She clapped her plump hand over her mouth and rolled her eyes at her sister’s confident face. “How can Lavinia have a word to say about it, when it’s a question of Nicholas’ wife running away to get out of having a baby?”
“So that has come up!” I interjected. “I’ve been wondering when it would.”
“Oh, it bobs up like the spring flowers,” said Eva lightly. “But it wasn’t a remark that went down at the Van Suydam establishment. Miss Augusta bristled. She spoke from her chest when she said ‘As a topic of conversation between unmarried ladies and a gentleman, I should scarcely select that of—of——Ahem!’ With intolerant delicacy she dropped out of the chat the future of the Van Suydam family tree. ‘Enough!’ she decreed, when Miss Lois again pried into my affairs.”
Bored by desultory chatter, Eva talked as she wrote, painstakingly although with unusual rapidity. I saw the room into which she peeped, the hostess pouring tea with her nice attention to details. The open windows admitted the first soft air of spring; outside was Washington Square in its new raiment of pale green leaves. The setting sun cast lances of yellow light through the branches of the gnarled old trees. The winding paths were thronged with excitedly jabbering Italians, who made way for their children on roller-skates and closed in again like the sea. Even with this breath of outdoors, and with the room gay with cut hyacinths, Mrs. Van Suydam’s house smelled of lavender, of lemon verbena, and of dried rose leaves. “I always say that your house is the only place left in New York where I feel at home, Lavinia,” had almost sighed Mr. Tillinghast. His faded eyes became quite vacant, as if he looked inward at his memory of another house, now, alas, fallen. “Did you ever think that houses may have souls—souls as individual as our own immortal souls?” He was of a generation not ashamed to speak openly of the immortal soul which they took for granted resided temporarily within their mortal bodies. “Don’t you think the call of a house like this is a loud call? I sometimes wonder if Nicholas hears it—yet?”
“Wasn’t that too adorable, Dinah?” Eva interrupted her story to ask. “He so fitted in with the smell of lavender. And Miss Augusta briskly called him to task for being impractical. There’s a man who adores a woman in the right way! He said to her that when he spoke of creeping age he alluded only to himself! I almost ran in to hug him; but I thought I’d best wait and see what else they had to say about me. I could see that I only stood knee-high with the Misses Ingoldsby, who went into a squabble at this moment. They wanted to know why Nick was staying behind, permitting me to go unattended to Europe. They took the position that poor dear Nicholas couldn’t afford to go; and they left it to be inferred that I was bankrupting him. Miss Augusta threw a censuring look at Mr. Tillinghast and announced that I am far too pretty to go traipsing over Europe alone. ‘I never—’ she said—‘did trust Frenchmen.’ She sank into deep thought and open doubts. She stirred her tea, efficiently crushing the slice of lemon with her spoon and avoiding the splash that a more frivolous woman would have brought about. ‘Ahem!’ she finally produced triumphantly. ‘I could have told you the line to take, Lavinia. I’m very fond of young people, and have given time and thought to their ways; and I know that they need the guiding hand of more experienced persons through the pitfalls of their life together. One must gain the confidence of young people. Do you think that if I were to talk to Eva it would do any good?’ ‘I think,’ said my mother-in-law distinctly, ‘that it is none of your business.’ ‘Well!’ snorted Miss Augusta, sitting back in her chair. For my part—lurking in the hall and beginning to think what I should say if Miss Augusta did give me a rowing up salt river—I wanted to clap my hands when Miss Lois remarked to Mr. Tillinghast ‘Gussie talks too much.’ I walked in on them. I was very nice about it. But they were scandalized at my having listened.”
I was having a splendid time. “How about this matter of a child?” I asked, to keep her going.
She became merry over it. “It all came out of my leaving Nick alone in the summers. Poor old Nick! He’s sentimental. After the first summer, he told me that my study had gleamed with coppery flashes of a threat. The summer is dreadful, in New York, isn’t it?”
I laughed at her. “Had you no remorse at leaving him in a caldron?”
She said that she always arranged the house beautifully for him, with dust covers gay as a summer resort. The window-boxes, she stated virtuously, were festively in bloom. And there was always Mattie to see to his comfort. There was no excuse, beyond his sentimentality, for the habit into which he dropped of staying late at his office. Mattie had reported that he never came home to dinner. However, his explanation, given to Eva upon her return in the autumn, was the point upon which her sympathy for his plight laughingly rested. The fact that construction of the new city went on relentlessly, undampened by the weather, meant nothing to her; the fact that he worked under pressure brought forth from her the comment that American men were almost revolting in their frenzy over their drab business; but when he told her that he could better conceive of the ultimate in height when gazing from the high windows of his office at the panorama of the city by night she understood. Somewhere in the jewelled pattern of this city surrounded by water there lay, also brightly jewelled, the inspiration that he had felt to be failing him. Until the squares of light that were windows had turned black, he told her, he would lean from his own window and look down on this fabric of the latest assumption of man.
I interrupted: “Are you putting this into his mouth?”
She shook her head. “No. Isn’t it amazing? Why, it’s poetry, Dinah; and he’s just an ordinary sort of man!” He dreaded returning to the house, and every night put off until a later hour his dismal acceptance of its shadowy taunt. A man’s home—it was so dreadfully evident that Nicholas’ dominant instinct was that life must bring him a home—should be the expression of his hopes; but in this small house there was loneliness and a sense of frustration. It did not speak of the establishing of a family: there was no sound in the house. He had found himself listening to the Italian families as they straggled past on their way to bed; the lifted voices of the parents, wrangling with their children, began to be the deep voice of life. It brought what he supposed was a bewildered smile to his face, to realize that he wanted children. “Do you see how he got it into his head?” asked Eva of me. “It was being without me. Poor old Nick!”
The second summer had not helped to clear things up. He had got into the way of going to his mother’s: Eva suspected her of staying in town so that she might give harbourage to her son. She had not said so; but she had the faculty of saying things by refraining from saying them. Eva told me: “I reminded him that in the big house in Washington Square there is no sound; and he came back at me with the statement that in every nook and cranny it conveys that it has always cherished the sounds of the private life of a family. She is still gospel to him. It appears that she walked around here with him one evening; and all those things for the solution of which he had delved through agony of spirit, all the things that—undoubtedly from his life with me—he had begun dimly to see, were contained in his mother’s simple denial of individual liberty. She said to him: ‘Leave it to God, my child. He is still able to manage these questions. He—and nature—always have.’”
Eva was one of those women who, even through hard work, with loss of sleep, are themselves so shining that before the man’s jaded eyes, in a gloomy New York room, on a winter’s day, Aphrodite might have arisen from the foam all iridescent loveliness. She had a way of smiling wistfully. Whether outdoors the sun shone or not, she had the sun in her hair. I was impelled to ask: “Tell me this: is he still in love with you?”
“Oh, my God!” said Eva.
“It’s a funny thing, though,” she resumed, after a pause during which she smiled secretly. “He’s jealous of my fame.” Fame is a word that, self-applied, makes me wince. But she said it simply, surely, and un-self-consciously. “It started at a reception his mother gave for me when we were first married.” She looked at me curiously. “What is the matter, Dinah? It’s disconcerting, to have you burble with your amusement when I can’t see that this is so very amusing.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m making no mystery of it. But I am getting slants—oh, very different ones, I assure you!—on practically everything you’ve done since your marriage; I haven’t seen one person yet who hasn’t at once given their version.”
“I apologize for my repetitions,” she said huffily.
“Oh, don’t! I’m crazy to hear what you noticed at the parties and the like. You have no idea how fascinating it is, to get all the sides of the prism.”
She had a divine disposition. I had never known her to sulk. By the time Mattie had come in with tea for Eva and a cocktail for me, and Eva had called me a toper and had reminded me that hard liquor ages a woman, she was ready to go on sweetly with her tale. “And besides,” she crowed over the others who might have told me the same thing, “they can’t know what I mean to tell you. Wait and see! I was nervous about that reception, for I didn’t know how the two crowds—Nick’s and mine—would get on with each other. And—” with her half-smile—“I daresay I wanted to make a smashing impression on Nick’s crowd. And Nick made me frantic by continuing to tell me not to be nervous. I’ll not deny that I was hateful. I loitered upstairs in the dressing-room until he came for me; and he began running down the stairs, holding on to my arm; and he said he was sorry I slipped, but that he had forgotten I had not run, and slid, down those stairs since I was born. He may not have intended it, but he was superior about it. Of course I was furious; and I said I had forgotten to powder my nose and went back to the dressing-room.”
“Childish, wasn’t it?” I wanted to know.
“Um-m-m. I’m not so sure. I did deeply resent his manner. Looking back on it, I believe it was his own nervousness. He was more afraid of his mother’s scolding the nearer he got to it; and he glowered, and muttered at me to know if I didn’t realize that it was unpardonably rude to be late at a reception given for one. He said those things weren’t done, amongst his mother’s friends. What would you have said to that? I said ‘I’m accustomed to doing as I see fit and letting people wait for me.’ I was sure he’d take it, and that his mother wouldn’t. And,” she cried tragically, “he laughed at me! Quite gaily laughed at me! He got over his bad temper, and stood on the stairs laughing at me. He said ‘Wait until you see them! Look here, my dear: they haven’t the remotest—’ Of course I knew what he had intended saying. He had been about to say that those frumps had never heard of me until I married him. And after meeting them—and having them try to run my life for me, with the coolest assumption of omniscience—I can believe it. Their ignorance, my dear, of what goes on in the world——! Well: I lifted my eyebrows. But he whispered to me ‘Be a good girl, won’t you? And look perfectly beautiful, for my sake?’ And I knew that he was dreading what they would say about me.”
Eva said that Mrs. Van Suydam was an adept at the oblique rebuke. She had an eye like a naked blade that cut through any defense and withdrew itself into the scabbard of an old lady’s control. She wore a black velvet creation by Worth, made—so Eva afterwards found out—by the same design when its predecessor had served its day; and to this severely plain frock her maid had added snippets of old lace. Eva began to enjoy it. The smell of dying flowers was through the house; and, bathed in this sad aroma, Eva’s friends looked artificially bleached, dissipatedly fagged, while Mrs. Van Suydam’s old cronies were the dried rose leaves in the ginger jars. Charles Glidden had hung around the elderly lady, watching her like a cat at a mouse-hole; Eva saw in his eye that he meant to use her in a book. The orchestra, having eaten supper, had begun that tentative picking at strings which, in Mrs. Van Suydam’s girlhood, had indicated the resumption of the romance of posturing before respectful young men who wished to invite to the dance. Mrs. Van Suydam’s smile at Glidden was almost coquettish. The richness of her memories had, while attenuating this smile, at the same time warmed it. Fascinated, Eva drew nearer. But Spencer Mapes, with his silent pressure of attention, went with her; he talked into her ear upon impersonal subjects, and yet she knew that what he said was aimed at her marriage.
“Take Hamlet, as an example of the behaviour of a man who comes at the end of a played-out old family. Hamlet—” expounded Mapes.
“Bother Hamlet!” Eva had exclaimed impatiently.
“—Knew that he should have been man enough to kill—and what did he do? He used foul language to the women in the case. If he had acted on his impulse, and killed——”
She surveyed him with a passing contempt. “Would you kill? I doubt if you’d even use bad language.”
He said: “The mind is my weapon.”
I broke in with “What is Spence driving at?”
She sighed. “Oh, dear me! Nick is eternally harping on that same thing! And he’s driving at nothing.” She reminded me that she was endeavouring to lay before me the case of Nicholas’ jealousy of her reputation.
“It must be because he is, undoubtedly, old-fashioned. It sticks in his craw, one might say, that his wife works along a line quite independent of him,” I explained it.
“My eye!” said Eva, to settle that. “He, as an architect, is jealous of me as a novelist.” She said that Glidden had started it by his effort to boost Eva with her mother-in-law. His dictum had swept the rooms, so that in the end they had thronged around Eva with this new conception of her in their eyes. Except Mrs. Van Suydam: she held tightly to her own notions. The old lace at her throat and wrists was no more redolent of a cedar closet than her notions. “You know how, at a thing that has taken you aback, the muscles of your face slip, you think, for the rest of your life? Hers had slipped, at the shock of finding that there are those who consider me greater than the Van Suydams, into the inflexible front that she meant from then on to show. She, simply, won’t acknowledge it.”
In fairness to the absent Nicholas, I suggested that possibly he had had no pang of jealousy.
She gave me a long look. “I saw his face. He said to me—laughing it off: ‘A prophet in his own country, eh? A man’s reputation never exists in his family.’ The cronies were coming up to say goodnight; and they said ‘Nick, we never before realized what a famous woman you had married. You certainly did look high!’ Of course, the next morning I tried to smooth it over.”
I almost moaned: “Oh, Eva! Eva!”
She looked surprised. “Why not? Don’t you think it was the kind thing to do?”
I started to say “Kind?” But she was so kindly sure that she had been considerate!
She went on: “Nick is simple, sometimes. He began on a certain shame that he had got up over it; and naturally I realized how painful it would be if he acknowledged all of it—I had an idea that he’d brood over it—so I brought the talk to an end. He gave every evidence, besides, of getting hateful about it; for he said something about it not being so bad with my work. ‘With your flow of words—your beloved words—what’s to prevent your turning them loose on your book—finishing your book?’ He said that when a man wanted to build the greatest building of a great city, and the thing escaped, the fantastic idea was always beyond him because at the front of the poor man’s head was trouble and on the vision of the poor man’s strained imagination were the knocks of fortune: what was a man to do, in such case? The Devil, he reminded me, had helped the architect who designed the Cologne Cathedral; but the devils who were poking their fingers in this pie were not helpful visitants. He overlooked, you see, the self-evident fact that his mother’s friends are the bad visitants.”
I fear that I showed my astonishment. “He was appealing to you for sympathy. You wanted his understanding of the problems—the agonies—of your work, and he asked you to consider his problem. Don’t you feel this?”
None with so glassy a surface as Eva when she refused to be halted on a line of thought. “He has a way of saying things harshly. I can’t bear harshness. When things happen that hurt your heart, your brain doesn’t work. I had had a bad night—hopeless agony of mind because I couldn’t recapture a dream. And I said to him ‘You can’t understand!’ If he had said something! But how was I to know how he took it, when he didn’t say a word?”
I began explaining as if she were a child. “He wanted to say ‘Will you kindly, mercifully, put it into words—say, out loud, what you think of my work, of my potential ability to do great work?’”
She burst out laughing. “Dinah, darling: Nick isn’t at all like that. He’s a Dutchman. He’s solid and calm to the point of being nearly phlegmatic; he’s—— No, he isn’t stodgy, bless him! He’s a dear.”
“He might merely be reticent,” I suggested. I knew nothing about him. But I judged him by other reserved men. This desire of his, to know the worst, was something that was now, and would always be, a thing that in decency he would keep from her. The reticences of life were one thing; they were established by form; but, beyond and entombed, were the reticences of the heart, and of the spirit, and of these a man found it impossible to speak. I said: “You must often have rubbed it in on him that you don’t think much of his ability.”
Her knit brow revealed her difficulty over this. “I don’t see why you say such a thing. Look here: I’m going to tell you all we said, that morning. Then you can see for yourself. I tried to let him down easily. I said ‘I knew, last night, that something had gone wrong with you’.”
I sat watching her face. It was difficult to believe that she had carried on her part of the conversation as she now reported it to me. She had, however, so phenomenal a memory for conversations that it was impossible to doubt the essential truth of her complete misunderstanding. “He didn’t meet me half-way,” she complained. “He was rather mean. ‘Let us not bring it down to a struggle between us,’ he said to me. I said: ‘You know that I believe in you, don’t you?’ He came at me with one of those hateful counter questions: ‘Do you?’ So I looked straight at him and asked ‘You’ve never believed in me, have you?’ He said—as if this were quite sufficient: ‘I’ve loved you.’”
“Why wasn’t it sufficient?” I put it to her. A man loves a woman, I explained; this emotion does not presuppose belief in anything about her, beyond her fidelity. His belief in Eva was founded on the evidence of his eyes. A man would argue that behind a face so sweet there must lie womanliness.
She bit her lip. She was losing patience with me. “You don’t try to understand,” she complained.
“You’re wrong. I understand only too well.” I, on my part, was losing patience. Usually, I lost patience with Eva towards the end of a long talk. “You don’t want love; you want adoration—little Bodhisattvas sitting at your feet.”
She said angrily: “I shall lift him!”
She was devastating. “You mean, you will jerk him up?”
“Anyone would think,” she advanced plaintively, “that you were in love with him.”
“I scarcely know him,” I said shortly. But my sympathy was shifting towards him. As he was trying to make up his mind to let his work stay in a background made so much the richer for her work, so she had decided to put the force of her will behind and push him up. This much was plain. And nothing could well be more disastrous.
She said: “He laughed!”
I said: “Why shouldn’t he laugh?” It was impossible for them to bolster each other’s courage. And besides, Eva had never needed an outside influence to bolster her courage; her belief in herself would always hold her up. I asked: “What had you said, to make him laugh?”
“I told him that I was going to help him.”
“No wonder he laughed,” I replied.
Eva said sadly: “He used to seem so proud, and so completely happy. His very arm felt happy, when he put it around me as we showed the house to his mother. He had forgotten, Dinah,” she said, with her sudden understanding, “that he had chosen between his mother and me.”
I thought: “Poor man!” What had the choice been, after all, but the desire of a man for happiness at any cost? And—again after all—what is it to love a woman, except in one way or another to shed your life’s blood at her feet? I said: “Oh—let’s drop it, Eva; shall we? Why should we quarrel over it?”
It was dark, in the street outside. I had forgotten to stop to speak to Mattie.