PART ONE (continued 2)

IV

I left Florence Quincy’s cautioning myself that i had come back to do a particular thing: the particular book was planned and waiting for tranquillity in order to be written. But already New York pounded on the door of my mind. New York teased that tomorrow would be time enough for work; today, if I knew what was what, should be given up to talk. And talk—until I had heard all that they had to say—would consist of fragmentary information about Eva Litchfield’s marriage. I had growled to Florence that I wondered why I had come back; and she had jeered that we had come here of our own free will, and that we all came back and would try to come back from the grave. It was true. New York is a contagious disease.

I hurried home to be ready when Molly Underhill should call for me.

I waited for her: one always waited for her: and eventually I forgot that I expected her. It took a great deal to erase Molly Underhill from a nervous woman’s consciousness. In this case, the great deal was the voice of the streets, which might be bellowing a threat to the creature leaning from a balcony thirty storeys above the sidewalk. The creature chid herself: “What business of yours is the growth of New York? You’re a small-sized widow-woman who had deliberately come back: now put up with it.” I had informed Florence Quincy’s guests that I had come back to discover what my friends were doing, who they were doing up brown, and what they would do to me. That they were briskly up to something I did not doubt; New York lends a spurious energy to those who stay long enough and not too long. We had rushed in from all sections of the country, to conquer the metropolis if it did not kill us first. It was growing faster than were we.

Gazing at a sky-line still largely composed of the bare steel ribs of buildings that tomorrow would be completed, this newest New York seemed, suddenly and devastatingly, an entity too powerful to cope with. My head swam from the immensity of this conception of a city. Here were buildings striving titanically to reach the skies, and a people battling to preserve an individuality already dwarfed by their own vast feats of masonry; and this mass of the structures erected by themselves was so mighty, this monster born of their ambition was so ruthless in its demands that they keep up with it, that these constructive pigmies would be terrified if the hurry of their existence did not sweep them irresistibly on. Seen from the height where I clung bewildered, they crawled like insects through the streets. The confused roar of their activities, and of the machinery set in motion by their intelligence, came up to me in a paean of praise of themselves. But these people who, thus defeated by their fate, rushed madly along the sidewalks, these poor things who, believing they held their heads proudly, lived their apology to the buildings that they themselves achieved, these victims maddened by their selected careers: even these beings might occasionally pause and listen to a silence. For at intervals there fell upon the dreadful bellow of the traffic a hush so profound that it was as if the hand of God had lifted in warning.

No need for me to remind myself that I was being melodramatic. I was frightened. Noise, to me, has always seemed a personal threat. My nerves rasped by the roar, my thoughts confused by the silences falling with the change of traffic lights, I would not have been surprised if on the now flaming sky the finger of doom had written. Against which of us would the finger trace its denunciation? I qualified my self-arraignment: I was becoming absurd. We could only be hurt by people and, mainly, by ourselves.

For a moment of glory, the city was bathed in a sanguine light. The sunset withdrew through the cross streets and left behind chasms spangled with lamps. But on the tops of the buildings, lingeringly, the ruddy light still frolicked; it might be the soul of New York playing with destruction, bantering ruin. This optimism sparkled on the towers, and glinted down towards the pavements and never reached the ground, and in the end, possibly, forgot that underneath the city there lay the earth itself. The land, foundation for this jubilance over the possibilities of man, might not exist. It was never seen. Before leaving for my temporary residence in France, I had said to Eva Litchfield that they were covering up the earth, and how, I asked, without the feel of the land under his feet could the New Yorker of the future write? She had replied, characteristically, that one could write with passion of England, for instance, if one came from Oshkosh where they make the trunks with the red bands around their middles. Intermittently, Eva liked New York. She had concluded her correction of my notion with the statement: “I’m frightened by nothing in the way of a town, a place. I’m only afraid of the things that men do to our spirits.” I decided to say to her, when I should see her: “It would be the right thing to hang one’s spirit so high that it can’t be reached: New York has the idea.” I would tell her about the soul of New York playing fitfully on the tops of the new tall buildings; and she would, of course, laugh at me as a dabbler in spiritualism. And Winnie Conant, with her aggravating tendency to manage the affairs of those few whom she liked—while she liked them: she would squawk with mirth and tell me to banish fear and adjust myself to grandeur. Winnie would say that some cities have souls, but that New York has strength for the struggle against the gods; her breath is vigour, her noise vitality, her every aspect that of superhuman effort; she is a lusty flout to the world, and often she taunts her own: who cares? Not those who are worthy of New York—would declare Winnie, who came here from Maine.

I must have stayed out on the balcony for a long time—I had watched the sky darken and the lights of late workers prick in until each office building was a paper cut-out—and my excitement might have been the effect of the cold that had penetrated my heavy coat. The jingling of the telephone broke a spell.

“Mrs. Underhill calling for Mrs. Avery, and she says will you please hurry as it’s very late?” came parrot-like from the hotel desk.

“I must say,” remarked Molly as I stepped into her taxi, “that if I’d realized you had located in such an inaccessible place I’d never have come by for you. Do you realize that I’ve wandered for hours?” But the meter did not bear her out. “Now—” she leaned back, and put her feet up on the folding seat, and lit a cigarette—“now we’ll talk over Eva Litchfield’s affairs.” She paid no attention to my possibly antagonistic reaction; the talk was the thing. And with Molly talk was a matter of personalities. She prated on aesthetics and told the baldest facts. The grunt that she now gave might have come from the lurching of the taxi, but I wondered if she did not derive a porcine joy from rooting and snuffling into private lives.

She had an uncanny way of reading minds which were being withheld from her. She said that she had a cold in her head. “Have you forgotten that no one can avoid colds in the head, in New York in the winter? It’s a feature of the brilliancy of the season.” Her nose was red.

The clangour of the traffic and the clack of her voice served to bring home to me that in counting on preserving my acquired attitude of detachment I had reckoned without the tentacles which now tightened around me. During our progression through the streets, our hitching starts and violent halts, our series of back-breaking jolts—the experience, I was to rediscover, of getting anywhere in town—and during the resulting nervous exasperation over what no one can remedy since they have built this city, I might have been shaking, stretching, straining to encompass the changes into which by easy stages my friends had slipped without shock.

She screamed persistent confidences above the din. Some of what she told me reached my ears and some escaped me, and it was only significant because it impressed me with the fact that I was again a member in good standing of a racket. I was not interested in what she told, for, in spite of her proposed plan of revelation in which she was to concentrate on Eva Litchfield, she told shattering details of the love life of persons with whom I had the barest acquaintance. And I had been away for so long that even the activities of my old friends had faded into the background of the trivial.

But she finally got around to it: she always did. She asked if I had seen Eva during the past summer, which she had spent in Europe.

I had not seen Eva since I had gone abroad. But it is not unethical to lie to another woman. I said—unnecessarily, for Eva was always shiningly beautiful: “She made a great sensation.”

Molly’s eyes shifted, on this. “Then you must have seen that something was wrong? And what sort of sensation do you mean?”

I said cheerfully: “Oh, in the way of her appearance, and also in the way of her books, which you must acknowledge one wouldn’t expect from so lovely a woman. London takes the position that they are fine enough to have been written by an ugly woman.”

Eva’s beauty was a slap in Molly’s face, her genius an affront to the lesser gift. She preserved a dashed silence. In the obscurity of the taxi I felt that she waited to spring. “It’s a fortunate thing that you and I didn’t start life as beauties,” she eventually assured me. “I’ve always thought, Dinah, that you don’t fit together. Have you ever noticed that your face isn’t the type that should go with your body—if nature happened to be squeamish, which she isn’t?” She then discounted my amusement. “No use in saying what you were thinking of saying. I know I’m a wreck. It’s only Eva who can work like a slave, and live on a tension, and come out of it looking like an angel.”

Eva had, always, looked like an angel. Gossip, sticking to her like pitch, had not spoiled the loveliness of her face. The one woman among us whose love affairs were front page news, shrinking from it, hating it, and always adding to it, there was about Eva a helplessness that made me rush to her defense. I said, now, staring Molly in the eye: “You’ve been insinuating, and have told nothing—which, after all, I remember to be characteristic of you. Come out with it.”

“My dear!” she protested. “I’m as crazy over her as you are. How can you think I was going to tell something against her?”

“Oh, I’m not going to tell her what you say.”

“My love, what a spitfire you’ve become,” she said sweetly. She insisted that she knew nothing definite, that Eva was in no trouble, that, in short, the real trouble had fallen upon her friends; they found it difficult to keep the peace with her new husband, who was an unacceptable nuisance. “It’s a pity,” she commented, “that men no longer beat their wives; so much the most potent means of displaying connubial disapproval—and so much pleasanter for the casual guest, who doesn’t often find himself present during the performance.”

We had reached our destination, and stood with basement steps backing us and an iron grille forbiddingly confronting us; and in the flickering light from the lantern that threw over the speakeasy entrance the disguise of the picturesque, Molly’s long eyes shone like a wolf’s. The usual reserved orb peered at us through the locked grating; the customary smile greeted us upon our eventual admission; we scuttled the length of the narrow hallway to the rear of the house, squeezing past a fat policeman who lounged inside the barroom door and feelingly averted his gaze. The bar was crowded with our friends, our enemies, and those who had not yet made up their minds about us. They suspended the interchange of their code words, their juggling with words, and Molly seemed gratified at their silence and flattered by the affronted stares directed at her by those whose books she had recently reviewed. A book must be more or less open to ridicule in order to be reviewed by Molly Underhill. I thought: “How strange it is, that I didn’t notice silence, abroad.” But a different language is a barrier and at the same time a protection: if one speaks it, one is still guarded, by its ultimate strangeness, from too close an encroachment. As never in New York, one’s thoughts remain inviolably one’s own.

A fat Italian stood before us, beaming professionally. “Mrs. Avery! And Miss Underhill! But how sad it is to see you here without Miss Litchfield!”

“What did I tell you?” demanded Molly’s lifted eyebrows.

Whatever she intended telling me—and I doubted her ability, if not her willingness, to tell me anything definite about Eva Litchfield—was broken into by the approach of Winnie Conant and her husband, Addis Wickersham. Winnie gushed “Again we meet!” but plainly made mental reservations as to the benefit to New York of my return. In her torrent of words she contrived to nicely mingle sly digs at Eva with encomiums on the proprietor of the speakeasy. “What with living expenses being beyond reason, where would we be without him to cash our checks which we’ve no means of knowing to be good, to give us credit when checks are out of the question——” Having done her duty to the amenities, she fixed me with her glitter. “As I tried to tell you this afternoon—only Florence talks so much——” She went on to inform me that Nicholas Van Suydam was patently destined to ruin Eva’s career. “Such a shame, for a brilliant novelist, as Eva is now acknowledged to be——”

I received, squarely between the eyes, Molly’s glance. She enquired, but not as if she solely wished to give Eva her dues: “Does anyone deny that she’s outstripped all of you?”

Here, then, were two women who had it in for Eva. Winnie purred that it was not as if Eva had been starved for love; and laughed riotously, and administered a visual dig to her own husband. What can be expected of the husband of a jealous wife, besides a certain hint of duplicity? In the case of Addis Wickersham, this tinge of deceit was so blended with the suggestion thrown out by his sonorous voice, which rolled like an organ and, like an organ, seemed always to be accompanying the praise of God, that the impression left upon the listener was that of a man who was all but grandly noble. He might have been a great biographer; but he talked it out, he talked himself out, he talked not only his own ideas but the world itself into a frazzle from which nothing could be salvaged. His one passion was talk—his talk. He gave the impression of listening to his words with rapture; and his joy in the achievements of his larynx was so intense that in its glow his approbation of the content of his remarks dropped out of sight. He intoned. For minutes after he had lapsed into mute satisfaction the room would vibrate with the sound waves he had released. He said: “I was deeply gratified to see that Eva’s last book received from London the enthusiastic praise that we in New York had already given it.” He considered himself the discoverer of Eva Litchfield and dragged in New York from the kindness of his heart. Winnie was at once torn between her intense admiration of the show he made and her desire to shout at him “How dare you praise a beautiful woman?”

But there was present at the bar another discoverer of Eva Litchfield. Spencer Mapes rested his saturnine dark face on his extraordinarily long and thin hand and laughed at Addis. Molly wanted to know for what date the next discovery of genius in New York was scheduled: and yawned, and laughed at both of them. Leaning on the rail of the bar, she was so slender that her backward droop was almost a contortion.

A stranger slid along to stand beside her, holding on to the rail and facing her with a childlike eager appraisal. “My dear lady,” remarked this gentleman, “I never saw you before, and I haven’t the least idea who you are, but I feel sure you’re famous. I came down here because I was told that I’d see all the famous people. Damn it!” shouted the stranger, no longer able to restrain his disappointment, “I insist that you’re famous! And if you ain’t, then show me one of ’em? I came down here to look at celebrated persons. Show me the celebrated persons, will you, my good creature?” I judged that he had decided that none of us came up to his dream.

In the twitch of Molly’s sharp elbow there was a mental jog to my ribs. “Do—please—ask that question of the barkeep?” she modestly suggested to the strange gentleman. She had a trick of waiting, hanging on a man’s lips until he said something personal to her. Her long eyes languished, now, at the stranger. Triumph lit her face, and I saw that again she had misunderstood a man. She had a passion for translating all masculine glances into the caresses of love.

Winnie whispered to me: “Notice a change in her?”

“What’s it from?” I asked.

“Ah that’s what we don’t know,” said Winnie. “She’s trying her best to make us believe that she is involved in some affair. And of course her telling it makes it sound as if it were not true, and we know her so well that we are sure she’d tell it if it were true.”

“She looks wretchedly,” I said in the same low voice.

“You’ll find we all do,” said Winnie briefly.

I laughed. “Eva’s husband, I daresay you mean me to infer?”

“Wait till you see,” she told me ominously.

I asked her if Spencer Mapes were still Eva’s encroaching background. “Oh, encroaching!” she groaned.

As he came up to us, I endeavoured to hold my greeting to a friendly indifference. He looked as if he were concealing some deep anxiety, and said at once: “I am thankful you’ve at last returned, Dinah. I always feel that you can be counted on to stand by Eva.”

My recollections of Eva Litchfield, which before I had believed to be clear as daylight, had, through this confusion of innuendo, become a jumble of muggy half-tones. I thought: For God’s sake, Eva, why do you allow people to so use up your vital energy, blotting the flow of your inspiration as such interruptions must do some time if they haven’t done it already? From a long continued warm friendship, my attachment to her flared at this moment into idealization. I reproached myself that invariably I had been conscious of listening to her perplexities with avidity. I had said to her: “It comes down to this: one isn’t a novelist unless one has a consuming and all-embracing curiosity about people—all people—even those of whom one is fond—every human worm and every superhuman bore?” She had replied with her charming seriousness: “Of course.” And all the time I was conscious that she herself had no pure and cold-blooded curiosity about people whose problems did not touch her; when she listened to the recitals of those outside her life, she did it with warmth. Her good heart showed in her tolerance of the everlasting jabber of her friends—said I to myself, glancing forbiddingly at those whom Molly had invited to her little dinner in my honour. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I occasionally see when I am making a fool of myself. “Snap out of it, you hypocrite!” I began on myself. “You have every intention of hanging around Eva, of questioning, listening, and otherwise poking your nose—which Molly is right in dubbing a misfit—into things that are in no way your business, until you get at the bottom of this marriage. Don’t cavil at the right of others to do likewise.”

Doubtless my expression as I so took myself to task led Spencer Mapes on to say: “You must really go at once to see her. She has one of those little red brick houses in West Eleventh Street just off Fifth Avenue: did you know?”

I was surprised that she could afford a house. Her quality was too fine, too attenuated, to make of her a best seller. That the effulgently gifted Eva should live in a cramped apartment, under the almost sordid conditions with which the rest of us struggled, had always impressed us as an ironical twist of fate. Not that we consciously conceded these superior points to her; we did not, except in so far as we conceded the same to ourselves; but, looking back on the years that we had spent in New York—washed up on this beach from remote spots on the map of the country, brought together by our common interest in literature and held together by our fear of taking our eyes off each other’s development—our wish to succeed in juxtaposition with our desire for the other fellow to fail, or at the most to keep his distance a few paces in the rear—we all, I think, brought up points against Eva out of our conviction of her possession of every gift in the power of a fairy godmother to bestow. At least, so it seemed to me, this evening, standing looking intently and deceitfully into Spencer Mapes’ equally dissembling fixed stare. We had had a way of saying, or suggesting: “Oh, yes, she’s perfectly beautiful, and she writes like a seraph, but for God’s sake why does she do those things?” And Eva said of herself that she had not, at any rate, an immoral impulse; why then, she asked tragically, did people go out of their way to talk about her? Her offense lay in being too pretty to allow other women to forgive her her talents.

In the light of Spencer Mapes’ surface glassiness, I saw that the truth was that Eva needed a protection which so far life had not granted her. Children and animals saw this. Although she was only intermittently fond of children, and then almost theoretically, they invariably assumed towards her the indulgent fondness of very old and wise persons; they might have been watching through the play hour that this innocent should not harm herself. Her Negro maid hovered over her, quite simply assuming, so far as she could, the part of mother.

I scowled at Spencer Mapes. “Why don’t you keep away from her? She’s incapable of seeing through you.”

He was light in his reply. “And what do you see—you with your singleness of purpose?”

Afterwards, I regretted having replied; for I gave her away as I saw her. Also, his smile, which he preserved in its initial spontaneity, made me doubt my motive: was I pleading for Eva or solely striving to inflict a scratch on this immovable, taunting man? I told him that he played upon her weaknesses. I reminded him that, although she did the ugliest things, she was driven by a strong sense of harmony. Ridden by some nervous instinct that she had no great amount of time, she wasted much time in bewailing the world’s misunderstanding of her life: was it good for her that he should so deliberately add to this game of cross purposes? Having blurted out these lucidities, and thinking along lines thus engendered, I stood looking at him in that abstraction which throws a dulling veil over the sight but with the feeling in my flesh that a cat gives me. I wondered how he sprung. He would never do a thing so physically definite as to spring, I told myself. I was certain that he had not taken the constructive step of endeavouring to marry Eva, because, possibly, he had not been able to make up his mind that he could not do without her. His eyes gleamed at me with enjoyment of my suspicions. Doubtless he still devoted all his spare time to hanging around her. I should find him, as we had always found him, at the parties where he knew he would meet her, sitting in sight of her and directing his remarks at, or to, her. In this fashion he played the cat with the worried mouse, letting her out with praise, dragging her back with judiciously placed destructive criticism. He was always faintly derogatory.

Faint derogation was in his tone when he asked if I had ever met the man who was now Eva’s husband; his emphasis docketed the marriage with passing experiments. “She insists she did it for love of him,” he said with quiet amusement; his amusement was never hearty. James Pomeroy, who could say coarse things with impunity, once remarked that belly laughter had never escaped Mapes’ chiselled lips. “But, as you know and will never admit, there’s a good deal of the snob in our Eva. She thoroughly believes, poor girl, that what she wants of life is the social security which every now and then she so deliberately chucks overboard.”

I said that I had not come back to play blind man’s buff. “I intend to see her tomorrow; and I’ll find out for myself these equivocal secrets at which all of you hint. If there’s anything I detest—” I almost gnashed my teeth at him—“it’s to be played!”

His soft laughter, his “My dear Dinah!” brought me to the point whither he had wished to lead me: I asked him what he was trying to do about Eva’s marriage.

He looked, conventionally, shocked. “My dear Dinah!” he once more breathed. He was compassionate of my imbecility when he said that for no consideration would he throw a stumbling block in Eva’s path to the eventual stabilization of her life; but with every word he spoke I became more suspicious. “Try to be fair, old girl,” I admonished myself. “Try to come to conclusions as a man would, personal likes and dislikes aside.” Glancing along the bar, I amended this to: “Be as fair as men tell us they are.”

I said finally that it was his choice of words. “You know, and I know, that very deliberately you’ve confused the state of affairs, so that when I see Eva tomorrow—and I’ve every intention of seeing her as soon as I decently can, and shall tell her everything you’ve said——”

He asked pleasantly: “What have I said?”

This pushed me into the fury of a baffled woman. There was nothing left except to cry that I did not believe a word of it, a blunder which he promptly capped by remarking that he had said nothing for me to believe or disbelieve. “You won’t be helping Eva by fighting her other friends,” he concluded.

“Friends?” I came back at him. “Friends, Iago?”

He looked, if anything, pleasanter than ever. “Our own dear Dinah!” he murmured.

I listened, with determination, to the hubbub of the bar. The strange gentleman’s voice rose at measured intervals, as if he chanted. Winnie Conant screamed at Molly Underhill: “My good woman, you may be my hostess, but keep your hands off Mr. W. I won’t stand for personal liberties. Liberties with my spirit will go down all right; but just you lay off Mr. W.” Addis Wickersham cleared his throat; and even this prosaic act was in the grand manner.

Molly shouted: “Don’t be a wattled turkey gobbler. I’m your hostess, as you so graphically put it; and we’re going upstairs this minute and dine; and try to be a good Arab and eat my salt without spitting in my eye.”

Noise went up the stairs with us, entering into the dining-room and colliding with noise already established there. I had been out of it for so long that it occurred to me to wonder why we should assert that we gathered together because of our interest in each other’s talk, as seldom did we listen to what was being said. It came to our ears in a concatenation robbed of all meaning; only when a chance remark struck against a particular interest did one of us hear with the intelligence. Molly’s latest pet sat beside her, gulping down whatever she chose to say; he, of us all, was fresh enough to mourn over a lost word. “I work,” expounded Molly, “under the driving power of the most fundamental of all instincts. I mean—that instinct which draws men and women together. I mean,” she went into it more fully but still languidly, “I can’t—I simply can’t—work except under the influence of blasted love. When the affair is going on I give myself up to the sweep of the wings of the angels. Then, during the inevitable resulting blight, I work.” She drooped over the very young man. “It had occurred to me, on the spur of the moment, that the souse at the bar downstairs might treat me to a good blight.”

“Tell us more,” Winnie urged. “How did you lose him?”

Molly seemed already to have the blight upon her. “As usual with his sex, he wanted to see Eva Litchfield. Said he had gloated over her picture. That latest photograph doesn’t look like her in the least.”

I pinned her down. “She’s changed, then?”

Molly shrugged. “Wouldn’t she be showing wear?” she drawled. When in this mood she said something spiteful, one felt that the pauses between her words were insufferable. Her manner was a blend of the prostitute and the acidulated spinster. I thought of Eva, whose manner charmed me; hers was a tenuous aloofness that under a strain might give way but never descend. Hers was the cool pride of a head held high and eyes that looked straight. Her brows levelled, she threw at the world, by the power of this direct regard, that a vast disgust of all physical contact held her imagination.

The very young man begged Molly: “Go on talking? Don’t stop?”