He wrinkled his brows good-humouredly. “Well, so I would, with joy–at this particular minute. Don’t you think perhaps you’d better take advantage of it? I don’t wish to insist–but I foresee that I’m much too rich not to become stingy.”
She gave a slight shrug. “At present there’s nothing I loathe more than pearls and chinchilla, or anything else in the world that’s expensive and enviable ….”
Suddenly she broke off, colouring with the consciousness that she had said exactly the kind of thing that all the women who were trying for him (except the very cleverest) would be sure to say; and that he would certainly suspect her of attempting the conventional comedy of disinterestedness, than which nothing was less likely to deceive or to flatter him.
His twinkling eyes played curiously over her face, and she went on, meeting them with a smile: “But don’t imagine, all the same, that if I should … decide … it would be altogether for your beaux yeux ….”
He laughed, she thought, rather drily. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose that’s ever likely to happen to me again.”
“Oh, Streff–” she faltered with compunction. It was odd-once upon a time she had known exactly what to say to the man of the moment, whoever he was, and whatever kind of talk he required; she had even, in the difficult days before her marriage, reeled off glibly enough the sort of lime-light sentimentality that plunged poor Fred Gillow into such speechless beatitude. But since then she had spoken the language of real love, looked with its eyes, embraced with its hands; and now the other trumpery art had failed her, and she was conscious of bungling and groping like a beginner under Strefford’s ironic scrutiny.
They had reached their obscure destination and he opened the door and glanced in.
“It’s jammed–not a table. And stifling! Where shall we go? Perhaps they could give us a room to ourselves–” he suggested.
She assented, and they were led up a cork-screw staircase to a squat-ceilinged closet lit by the arched top of a high window, the lower panes of which served for the floor below. Strefford opened the window, and Susy, throwing her cloak on the divan, leaned on the balcony while he ordered luncheon.
On the whole she was glad they were to be alone. Just because she felt so sure of Strefford it seemed ungenerous to keep him longer in suspense. The moment had come when they must have a decisive talk, and in the crowded rooms below it would have been impossible.
Strefford, when the waiter had brought the first course and left them to themselves, made no effort to revert to personal matters. He turned instead to the topic always most congenial to him: the humours and ironies of the human comedy, as presented by his own particular group. His malicious commentary on life had always amused Susy because of the shrewd flashes of philosophy he shed on the social antics they had so often watched together. He was in fact the one person she knew (excepting Nick) who was in the show and yet outside of it; and she was surprised, as the talk proceeded, to find herself so little interested in his scraps of gossip, and so little amused by his comments on them.
With an inward shrug of discouragement she said to herself that probably nothing would ever really amuse her again; then, as she listened, she began to understand that her disappointment arose from the fact that Strefford, in reality, could not live without these people whom he saw through and satirized, and that the rather commonplace scandals he narrated interested him as much as his own racy considerations on them; and she was filled with terror at the thought that the inmost core of the richly- decorated life of the Countess of Altringham would be just as poor and low-ceilinged a place as the little room in which he and she now sat, elbow to elbow yet so unapproachably apart.
If Strefford could not live without these people, neither could she and Nick; but for reasons how different! And if his opportunities had been theirs, what a world they would have created for themselves! Such imaginings were vain, and she shrank back from them into the present. After all, as Lady Altringham she would have the power to create that world which she and Nick had dreamed … only she must create it alone. Well, that was probably the law of things. All human happiness was thus conditioned and circumscribed, and hers, no doubt, must always be of the lonely kind, since material things did not suffice for it, even though it depended on them as Grace Fulmer’s, for instance, never had. Yet even Grace Fulmer had succumbed to Ursula’s offer, and had arrived at Ruan the day before Susy left, instead of going to Spain with her husband and Violet Melrose. But then Grace was making the sacrifice for her children, and somehow one had the feeling that in giving up her liberty she was not surrendering a tittle of herself. All the difference was there ….
“How I do bore you!” Susy heard Strefford exclaim. She became aware that she had not been listening: stray echoes of names of places and people–Violet Melrose, Ursula, Prince Altineri, others of their group and persuasion–had vainly knocked at her barricaded brain; what had he been telling her about them? She turned to him and their eyes met; his were full of a melancholy irony.
“Susy, old girl, what’s wrong?”
She pulled herself together. “I was thinking, Streff, just now–when I said I hated the very sound of pearls and chinchilla–how impossible it was that you should believe me; in fact, what a blunder I’d made in saying it.”
He smiled. “Because it was what so many other women might be likely to say so awfully unoriginal, in fact?”
She laughed for sheer joy at his insight. “It’s going to be easier than I imagined,” she thought. Aloud she rejoined: “Oh, Streff–how you’re always going to find me out! Where on earth shall I ever hide from you?”
“Where?” He echoed her laugh, laying his hand lightly on hers. “In my heart, I’m afraid.”
In spite of the laugh his accent shook her: something about it took all the mockery from his retort, checked on her lips the: “What? A valentine!” and made her suddenly feel that, if he were afraid, so was she. Yet she was touched also, and wondered half exultingly if any other woman had ever caught that particular deep inflexion of his shrill voice. She had never liked him as much as at that moment; and she said to herself, with an odd sense of detachment, as if she had been rather breathlessly observing the vacillations of someone whom she longed to persuade but dared not: “Now–NOW, if he speaks, I shall say yes!”
He did not speak; but abruptly, and as startlingly to her as if she had just dropped from a sphere whose inhabitants had other methods of expressing their sympathy, he slipped his arm around her and bent his keen ugly melting face to hers ….
It was the lightest touch–in an instant she was free again. But something within her gasped and resisted long after his arm and his lips were gone, and he was proceeding, with a too- studied ease, to light a cigarette and sweeten his coffee.
He had kissed her …. Well, naturally: why not? It was not the first time she had been kissed. It was true that one didn’t habitually associate Streff with such demonstrations; but she had not that excuse for surprise, for even in Venice she had begun to notice that he looked at her differently, and avoided her hand when he used to seek it.
No–she ought not to have been surprised; nor ought a kiss to have been so disturbing. Such incidents had punctuated the career of Susy Branch: there had been, in particular, in far- off discarded times, Fred Gillow’s large but artless embraces. Well–nothing of that kind had seemed of any more account than the click of a leaf in a woodland walk. It had all been merely epidermal, ephemeral, part of the trivial accepted “business” of the social comedy. But this kiss of Strefford’s was what Nick’s had been, under the New Hampshire pines, on the day that had decided their fate. It was a kiss with a future in it: like a ring slipped upon her soul. And now, in the dreadful pause that followed–while Strefford fidgeted with his cigarette-case and rattled the spoon in his cup, Susy remembered what she had seen through the circle of Nick’s kiss: that blue illimitable distance which was at once the landscape at their feet and the future in their souls ….
Perhaps that was what Strefford’s sharply narrowed eyes were seeing now, that same illimitable distance that she had lost forever–perhaps he was saying to himself, as she had said to herself when her lips left Nick’s: “Each time we kiss we shall see it all again ….” Whereas all she herself had felt was the gasping recoil from Strefford’s touch, and an intenser vision of the sordid room in which he and she sat, and of their two selves, more distant from each other than if their embrace had been a sudden thrusting apart ….
The moment prolonged itself, and they sat numb. How long had it lasted? How long ago was it that she had thought: “It’s going to be easier than I imagined”? Suddenly she felt Strefford’s queer smile upon her, and saw in his eyes a look, not of reproach or disappointment, but of deep and anxious comprehension. Instead of being angry or hurt, he had seen, he had understood, he was sorry for her!
Impulsively she slipped her hand into his, and they sat silent for another moment. Then he stood up and took her cloak from the divan. “Shall we go now! I’ve got cards for the private view of the Reynolds exhibition at the Petit Palais. There are some portraits from Altringham. It might amuse you.”
In the taxi she had time, through their light rattle of talk, to readjust herself and drop back into her usual feeling of friendly ease with him. He had been extraordinarily considerate, for anyone who always so undisguisedly sought his own satisfaction above all things; and if his considerateness were just an indirect way of seeking that satisfaction now, well, that proved how much he cared for her, how necessary to his happiness she had become. The sense of power was undeniably pleasant; pleasanter still was the feeling that someone really needed her, that the happiness of the man at her side depended on her yes or no. She abandoned herself to the feeling, forgetting the abysmal interval of his caress, or at least saying to herself that in time she would forget it, that really there was nothing to make a fuss about in being kissed by anyone she liked as much as Streff ….
She had guessed at once why he was taking her to see the Reynoldses. Fashionable and artistic Paris had recently discovered English eighteenth century art. The principal collections of England had yielded up their best examples of the great portrait painter’s work, and the private view at the Petit Palais was to be the social event of the afternoon. Everybody– Strefford’s everybody and Susy’s–was sure to be there; and these, as she knew, were the occasions that revived Strefford’s intermittent interest in art. He really liked picture shows as much as the races, if one could be sure of seeing as many people there. With Nick how different it would have been! Nick hated openings and varnishing days, and worldly aesthetics in general; he would have waited till the tide of fashion had ebbed, and slipped off with Susy to see the pictures some morning when they were sure to have the place to themselves.
But Susy divined that there was another reason for Strefford’s suggestion. She had never yet shown herself with him publicly, among their own group of people: now he had determined that she should do so, and she knew why. She had humbled his pride; he had understood, and forgiven her. But she still continued to treat him as she had always treated the Strefford of old, Charlie Strefford, dear old negligible impecunious Streff; and he wanted to show her, ever so casually and adroitly, that the man who had asked her to marry him was no longer Strefford, but Lord Altringham.
At the very threshold, his Ambassador’s greeting marked the difference: it was followed, wherever they turned, by ejaculations of welcome from the rulers of the world they moved in. Everybody rich enough or titled enough, or clever enough or stupid enough, to have forced a way into the social citadel, was there, waving and flag-flying from the battlements; and to all of them Lord Altringham had become a marked figure. During their slow progress through the dense mass of important people who made the approach to the pictures so well worth fighting for, he never left Susy’s side, or failed to make her feel herself a part of his triumphal advance. She heard her name mentioned: “Lansing–a Mrs. Lansing–an American … Susy Lansing? Yes, of course …. You remember her? At Newport, At St. Moritz? Exactly…. Divorced already? They say so … Susy darling! I’d no idea you were here … and Lord Altringham! You’ve forgotten me, I know, Lord Altringham …. Yes, last year, in Cairo … or at Newport … or in Scotland … Susy, dearest, when will you bring Lord Altringham to dine? Any night that you and he are free I’ll arrange to be ….”
“You and he”: they were “you and he” already!
“Ah, there’s one of them–of my great-grandmothers,” Strefford explained, giving a last push that drew him and Susy to the front rank, before a tall isolated portrait which, by sheer majesty of presentment, sat in its great carved golden frame as on a throne above the other pictures.
Susy read on the scroll beneath it: “The Hon’ble Diana Lefanu, fifteenth Countess of Altringham”–and heard Strefford say: “Do you remember? It hangs where you noticed the empty space above the mantel-piece, in the Vandyke room. They say Reynolds stipulated that it should be put with the Vandykes.”
She had never before heard him speak of his possessions, whether ancestral or merely material, in just that full and satisfied tone of voice: the rich man’s voice. She saw that he was already feeling the influence of his surroundings, that he was glad the portrait of a Countess of Altringham should occupy the central place in the principal room of the exhibition, that the crowd about it should be denser there than before any of the other pictures, and that he should be standing there with Susy, letting her feel, and letting all the people about them guess, that the day she chose she could wear the same name as his pictured ancestress.
On the way back to her hotel, Strefford made no farther allusion to their future; they chatted like old comrades in their respective corners of the taxi. But as the carriage stopped at her door he said: “I must go back to England the day after to- morrow, worse luck! Why not dine with me to-night at the Nouveau Luxe? I’ve got to have the Ambassador and Lady Ascot, with their youngest girl and my old Dunes aunt, the Dowager Duchess, who’s over here hiding from her creditors; but I’ll try to get two or three amusing men to leaven the lump. We might go on to a boite afterward, if you’re bored. Unless the dancing amuses you more ….”
She understood that he had decided to hasten his departure rather than linger on in uncertainty; she also remembered having heard the Ascots’ youngest daughter, Lady Joan Senechal, spoken of as one of the prettiest girls of the season; and she recalled the almost exaggerated warmth of the Ambassador’s greeting at the private view.
“Of course I’ll come, Streff dear!” she cried, with an effort at gaiety that sounded successful to her own strained ears, and reflected itself in the sudden lighting up of his face.
She waved a good-bye from the step, saying to herself, as she looked after him: “He’ll drive me home to-night, and I shall say ‘yes’; and then he’ll kiss me again. But the next time it won’t be nearly as disagreeable.”
She turned into the hotel, glanced automatically at the empty pigeon-hole for letters under her key-hook, and mounted the stairs following the same train of images. “Yes, I shall say ‘yes’ to-night,” she repeated firmly, her hand on the door of her room. “That is, unless, they’ve brought up a letter ….” She never re-entered the hotel without imagining that the letter she had not found below had already been brought up.
Opening the door, she turned on the light and sprang to the table on which her correspondence sometimes awaited her.
There was no letter; but the morning papers, still unread, lay at hand, and glancing listlessly down the column which chronicles the doings of society, she read:
“After an extended cruise in the AEgean and the Black Sea on their steam-yacht Ibis, Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Hicks and their daughter are established at the Nouveau Luxe in Rome. They have lately had the honour of entertaining at dinner the Reigning Prince of Teutoburger-Waldhain and his mother the Princess Dowager, with their suite. Among those invited to meet their Serene Highnesses were the French and Spanish Ambassadors, the Duchesse de Vichy, Prince and Princess Bagnidilucca, Lady Penelope Pantiles–” Susy’s eye flew impatiently on over the long list of titles–“and Mr. Nicholas Lansing of New York, who has been cruising with Mr. and Mrs. Hicks on the Ibis for the last few months.”
XX
THE Mortimer Hickses were in Rome; not, as they would in former times have been, in one of the antiquated hostelries of the Piazza di Spagna or the Porta del Popolo, where of old they had so gaily defied fever and nourished themselves on local colour; but spread out, with all the ostentation of philistine millionaires, under the piano nobile ceilings of one of the high-perched “Palaces,” where, as Mrs. Hicks shamelessly declared, they could “rely on the plumbing,” and “have the privilege of over-looking the Queen Mother’s Gardens.”
It was that speech, uttered with beaming aplomb at a dinner- table surrounded by the cosmopolitan nobility of the Eternal City, that had suddenly revealed to Lansing the profound change in the Hicks point of view.
As he looked back over the four months since he had so unexpectedly joined the Ibis at Genoa, he saw that the change, at first insidious and unperceived, dated from the ill-fated day when the Hickses had run across a Reigning Prince on his travels.
Hitherto they had been proof against such perils: both Mr. and Mrs. Hicks had often declared that the aristocracy of the intellect was the only one which attracted them. But in this case the Prince possessed an intellect, in addition to his few square miles of territory, and to one of the most beautiful Field Marshal’s uniforms that had ever encased a royal warrior. The Prince was not a warrior, however; he was stooping, pacific and spectacled, and his possession of the uniform had been revealed to Mrs. Hicks only by the gift of a full-length photograph in a Bond Street frame, with Anastasius written slantingly across its legs. The Prince–and herein lay the Hickses’ undoing–the Prince was an archaeologist: an earnest anxious enquiring and scrupulous archaeologist. Delicate health (so his suite hinted) banished him for a part of each year from his cold and foggy principality; and in the company of his mother, the active and enthusiastic Dowager Princess, he wandered from one Mediterranean shore to another, now assisting at the exhumation of Ptolemaic mummies, now at the excavation of Delphic temples or of North African basilicas. The beginning of winter usually brought the Prince and his mother to Rome or Nice, unless indeed they were summoned by family duties to Berlin, Vienna or Madrid; for an extended connection with the principal royal houses of Europe compelled them, as the Princess Mother said, to be always burying or marrying a cousin. At other moments they were seldom seen in the glacial atmosphere of courts, preferring to royal palaces those of the other, and more modern type, in one of which the Hickses were now lodged.
Yes: the Prince and his mother (they gaily avowed it) revelled in Palace Hotels; and, being unable to afford the luxury of inhabiting them, they liked, as often as possible, to be invited to dine there by their friends–“or even to tea, my dear,” the Princess laughingly avowed, “for I’m so awfully fond of buttered scones; and Anastasius gives me so little to eat in the desert.”
The encounter with these ambulant Highnesses had been fatal– Lansing now perceived it–to Mrs. Hicks’s principles. She had known a great many archaeologists, but never one as agreeable as the Prince, and above all never one who had left a throne to camp in the desert and delve in Libyan tombs. And it seemed to her infinitely pathetic that these two gifted beings, who grumbled when they had to go to “marry a cousin” at the Palace of St. James or of Madrid, and hastened back breathlessly to the far-off point where, metaphorically speaking, pick-axe and spade had dropped from their royal hands–that these heirs of the ages should be unable to offer themselves the comforts of up-to-date hotel life, and should enjoy themselves “like babies” when they were invited to the other kind of “Palace,” to feast on buttered scones and watch the tango.
She simply could not bear the thought of their privations; and neither, after a time, could Mr. Hicks, who found the Prince more democratic than anyone he had ever known at Apex City, and was immensely interested by the fact that their spectacles came from the same optician.
But it was, above all, the artistic tendencies of the Prince and his mother which had conquered the Hickses. There was fascination in the thought that, among the rabble of vulgar uneducated royalties who overran Europe from Biarritz to the Engadine, gambling, tangoing, and sponging on no less vulgar plebeians, they, the unobtrusive and self-respecting Hickses, should have had the luck to meet this cultivated pair, who joined them in gentle ridicule of their own frivolous kinsfolk, and whose tastes were exactly those of the eccentric, unreliable and sometimes money-borrowing persons who had hitherto represented the higher life to the Hickses.
Now at last Mrs. Hicks saw the possibility of being at once artistic and luxurious, of surrendering herself to the joys of modern plumbing and yet keeping the talk on the highest level. “If the poor dear Princess wants to dine at the Nouveau Luxe why shouldn’t we give her that pleasure?” Mrs. Hicks smilingly enquired; “and as for enjoying her buttered scones like a baby, as she says, I think it’s the sweetest thing about her.”
Coral Hicks did not join in this chorus; but she accepted, with her curious air of impartiality, the change in her parents’ manner of life, and for the first time (as Nick observed) occupied herself with her mother’s toilet, with the result that Mrs. Hicks’s outline became firmer, her garments soberer in hue and finer in material; so that, should anyone chance to detect the daughter’s likeness to her mother, the result was less likely to be disturbing.
Such precautions were the more needful–Lansing could not but note because of the different standards of the society in which the Hickses now moved. For it was a curious fact that admission to the intimacy of the Prince and his mother– who continually declared themselves to be the pariahs, the outlaws, the Bohemians among crowned heads nevertheless involved not only living in Palace Hotels but mixing with those who frequented them. The Prince’s aide-de-camp–an agreeable young man of easy manners–had smilingly hinted that their Serene Highnesses, though so thoroughly democratic and unceremonious, were yet accustomed to inspecting in advance the names of the persons whom their hosts wished to invite with them; and Lansing noticed that Mrs. Hicks’s lists, having been “submitted,” usually came back lengthened by the addition of numerous wealthy and titled guests. Their Highnesses never struck out a name; they welcomed with enthusiasm and curiosity the Hickses’ oddest and most inexplicable friends, at most putting off some of them to a later day on the plea that it would be “cosier” to meet them on a more private occasion; but they invariably added to the list any friends of their own, with the gracious hint that they wished these latter (though socially so well-provided for) to have the “immense privilege” of knowing the Hickses. And thus it happened that when October gales necessitated laying up the Ibis, the Hickses, finding again in Rome the august travellers from whom they had parted the previous month in Athens, also found their visiting-list enlarged by all that the capital contained of fashion.
It was true enough, as Lansing had not failed to note, that the Princess Mother adored prehistoric art, and Russian music, and the paintings of Gauguin and Matisse; but she also, and with a beaming unconsciousness of perspective, adored large pearls and powerful motors, caravan tea and modern plumbing, perfumed cigarettes and society scandals; and her son, while apparently less sensible to these forms of luxury, adored his mother, and was charmed to gratify her inclinations without cost to himself–“Since poor Mamma,” as he observed, “is so courageous when we are roughing it in the desert.”
The smiling aide-de-camp, who explained these things to Lansing, added with an intenser smile that the Prince and his mother were under obligations, either social or cousinly, to most of the titled persons whom they begged Mrs. Hicks to invite; “and it seems to their Serene Highnesses,” he added, “the most flattering return they can make for the hospitality of their friends to give them such an intellectual opportunity.”
The dinner-table at which their Highnesses’ friends were seated on the evening in question represented, numerically, one of the greatest intellectual opportunities yet afforded them. Thirty guests were grouped about the flower-wreathed board, from which Eldorada and Mr. Beck had been excluded on the plea that the Princess Mother liked cosy parties and begged her hosts that there should never be more than thirty at table. Such, at least, was the reason given by Mrs. Hicks to her faithful followers; but Lansing had observed that, of late, the same skilled hand which had refashioned the Hickses’ social circle usually managed to exclude from it the timid presences of the two secretaries. Their banishment was the more displeasing to Lansing from the fact that, for the last three months, he had filled Mr. Buttles’s place, and was himself their salaried companion. But since he had accepted the post, his obvious duty was to fill it in accordance with his employers’ requirements; and it was clear even to Eldorada and Mr. Beck that he had, as Eldorada ungrudgingly said, “Something of Mr. Buttles’s marvellous social gifts. “
During the cruise his task had not been distasteful to him. He was glad of any definite duties, however trivial, he felt more independent as the Hickses’ secretary than as their pampered guest, and the large cheque which Mr. Hicks handed over to him on the first of each month refreshed his languishing sense of self-respect.
He considered himself absurdly over-paid, but that was the Hickses’ affair; and he saw nothing humiliating in being in the employ of people he liked and respected. But from the moment of the ill-fated encounter with the wandering Princes, his position had changed as much as that of his employers. He was no longer, to Mr. and Mrs. Hicks, a useful and estimable assistant, on the same level as Eldorada and Mr. Beck; he had become a social asset of unsuspected value, equalling Mr. Buttles in his capacity for dealing with the mysteries of foreign etiquette, and surpassing him in the art of personal attraction. Nick Lansing, the Hickses found, already knew most of the Princess Mother’s rich and aristocratic friends. Many of them hailed him with enthusiastic “Old Nicks”, and he was almost as familiar as His Highness’s own aide-de-camp with all those secret ramifications of love and hate that made dinner-giving so much more of a science in Rome than at Apex City.
Mrs. Hicks, at first, had hopelessly lost her way in this labyrinth of subterranean scandals, rivalries and jealousies; and finding Lansing’s hand within reach she clung to it with pathetic tenacity. But if the young man’s value had risen in the eyes of his employers it had deteriorated in his own. He was condemned to play a part he had not bargained for, and it seemed to him more degrading when paid in bank-notes than if his retribution had consisted merely in good dinners and luxurious lodgings. The first time the smiling aide-de-camp had caught his eye over a verbal slip of Mrs. Hicks’s, Nick had flushed to the forehead and gone to bed swearing that he would chuck his job the next day.
Two months had passed since then, and he was still the paid secretary. He had contrived to let the aide-de-camp feel that he was too deficient in humour to be worth exchanging glances with; but even this had not restored his self-respect, and on the evening in question, as he looked about the long table, he said to himself for the hundredth time that he would give up his position on the morrow.
Only–what was the alternative? The alternative, apparently, was Coral Hicks. He glanced down the line of diners, beginning with the tall lean countenance of the Princess Mother, with its small inquisitive eyes perched as high as attic windows under a frizzled thatch of hair and a pediment of uncleaned diamonds; passed on to the vacuous and overfed or fashionably haggard masks of the ladies next in rank; and finally caught, between branching orchids, a distant glimpse of Miss Hicks.
In contrast with the others, he thought, she looked surprisingly noble. Her large grave features made her appear like an old monument in a street of Palace Hotels; and he marvelled at the mysterious law which had brought this archaic face out of Apex City, and given to the oldest society of Europe a look of such mixed modernity.
Lansing perceived that the aide-de-camp, who was his neighbour, was also looking at Miss Hicks. His expression was serious, and even thoughtful; but as his eyes met Lansing’s he readjusted his official smile.
“I was admiring our hostess’s daughter. Her absence of jewels is–er–an inspiration,” he remarked in the confidential tone which Lansing had come to dread.
“Oh, Miss Hicks is full of inspirations,” he returned curtly, and the aide-de-camp bowed with an admiring air, as if inspirations were rarer than pearls, as in his milieu they undoubtedly were. “She is the equal of any situation, I am sure,” he replied; and then abandoned the subject with one of his automatic transitions.
After dinner, in the embrasure of a drawing-room window, he surprised Nick by returning to the same topic, and this time without thinking it needful to readjust his smile. His face remained serious, though his manner was studiously informal.
“I was admiring, at dinner, Miss Hicks’s invariable sense of appropriateness. It must permit her friends to foresee for her almost any future, however exalted.”
Lansing hesitated, and controlled his annoyance. Decidedly he wanted to know what was in his companion’s mind.
“What do you mean by exalted?” he asked, with a smile of faint amusement.
“Well–equal to her marvellous capacity for shining in the public eye.”
Lansing still smiled. “The question is, I suppose, whether her desire to shine equals her capacity.”
The aide-de-camp stared. “You mean, she’s not ambitious?”
“On the contrary; I believe her to be immeasurably ambitious.”
“Immeasurably?” The aide-de-camp seemed to try to measure it. “But not, surely, beyond–” “beyond what we can offer,” his eyes completed the sentence; and it was Lansing’s turn to stare. The aide-de-camp faced the stare. “Yes,” his eyes concluded in a flash, while his lips let fall: “The Princess Mother admires her immensely.” But at that moment a wave of Mrs. Hicks’s fan drew them hurriedly from their embrasure.
“Professor Darchivio had promised to explain to us the difference between the Sassanian and Byzantine motives in Carolingian art; but the Manager has sent up word that the two new Creole dancers from Paris have arrived, and her Serene Highness wants to pop down to the ball-room and take a peep at them …. She’s sure the Professor will understand ….”
“And accompany us, of course,” the Princess irresistibly added.
Lansing’s brief colloquy in the Nouveau Luxe window had lifted the scales from his eyes. Innumerable dim corners of memory had been flooded with light by that one quick glance of the aide-de- camp’s: things he had heard, hints he had let pass, smiles, insinuations, cordialities, rumours of the improbability of the Prince’s founding a family, suggestions as to the urgent need of replenishing the Teutoburger treasury ….
Miss Hicks, perforce, had accompanied her parents and their princely guests to the ballroom; but as she did not dance, and took little interest in the sight of others so engaged, she remained aloof from the party, absorbed in an archaeological discussion with the baffled but smiling savant who was to have enlightened the party on the difference between Sassanian and Byzantine ornament.
Lansing, also aloof, had picked out a post from which he could observe the girl: she wore a new look to him since he had seen her as the centre of all these scattered threads of intrigue. Yes; decidedly she was growing handsomer; or else she had learned how to set off her massive lines instead of trying to disguise them. As she held up her long eye-glass to glance absently at the dancers he was struck by the large beauty of her arm and the careless assurance of the gesture. There was nothing nervous or fussy about Coral Hicks; and he was not surprised that, plastically at least, the Princess Mother had discerned her possibilities.
Nick Lansing, all that night, sat up and stared at his future. He knew enough of the society into which the Hickses had drifted to guess that, within a very short time, the hint of the Prince’s aide-de-camp would reappear in the form of a direct proposal. Lansing himself would probably–as the one person in the Hicks entourage with whom one could intelligibly commune-be entrusted with the next step in the negotiations: he would be asked, as the aide-de-camp would have said, “to feel the ground.” It was clearly part of the state policy of Teutoburg to offer Miss Hicks, with the hand of its sovereign, an opportunity to replenish its treasury.
What would the girl do? Lansing could not guess; yet he dimly felt that her attitude would depend in a great degree upon his own. And he knew no more what his own was going to be than on the night, four months earlier, when he had flung out of his wife’s room in Venice to take the midnight express for Genoa.
The whole of his past, and above all the tendency, on which he had once prided himself, to live in the present and take whatever chances it offered, now made it harder for him to act. He began to see that he had never, even in the closest relations of life, looked ahead of his immediate satisfaction. He had thought it rather fine to be able to give himself so intensely to the fullness of each moment instead of hurrying past it in pursuit of something more, or something else, in the manner of the over-scrupulous or the under-imaginative, whom he had always grouped together and equally pitied. It was not till he had linked his life with Susy’s that he had begun to feel it reaching forward into a future he longed to make sure of, to fasten upon and shape to his own wants and purposes, till, by an imperceptible substitution, that future had become his real present, his all-absorbing moment of time.
Now the moment was shattered, and the power to rebuild it failed him. He had never before thought about putting together broken bits: he felt like a man whose house has been wrecked by an earthquake, and who, for lack of skilled labour, is called upon for the first time to wield a trowel and carry bricks. He simply did not know how.
Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree oneself to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting their burden on others. The making of the substance called character was a process about as slow and arduous as the building of the Pyramids; and the thing itself, like those awful edifices, was mainly useful to lodge one’s descendants in, after they too were dust. Yet the Pyramid-instinct was the one which had made the world, made man, and caused his fugitive joys to linger like fading frescoes on imperishable walls ….
XXI
ON the drive back from her dinner at the Nouveau Luxe, events had followed the course foreseen by Susy.
She had promised Strefford to seek legal advice about her divorce, and he had kissed her; and the promise had been easier to make than she had expected, the kiss less difficult to receive.
She had gone to the dinner a-quiver with the mortification of learning that her husband was still with the Hickses. Morally sure of it though she had been, the discovery was a shock, and she measured for the first time the abyss between fearing and knowing. No wonder he had not written–the modern husband did not have to: he had only to leave it to time and the newspapers to make known his intentions. Susy could imagine Nick’s saying to himself, as he sometimes used to say when she reminded him of an unanswered letter: “But there are lots of ways of answering a letter–and writing doesn’t happen to be mine.”
Well–he had done it in his way, and she was answered. For a minute, as she laid aside the paper, darkness submerged her, and she felt herself dropping down into the bottomless anguish of her dreadful vigil in the Palazzo Vanderlyn. But she was weary of anguish: her healthy body and nerves instinctively rejected it. The wave was spent, and she felt herself irresistibly struggling back to light and life and youth. He didn’t want her! Well, she would try not to want him! There lay all the old expedients at her hand–the rouge for her white lips, the atropine for her blurred eyes, the new dress on her bed, the thought of Strefford and his guests awaiting her, and of the conclusions that the diners of the Nouveau Luxe would draw from seeing them together. Thank heaven no one would say: “Poor old Susy–did you know Nick had chucked her?” They would all say: “Poor old Nick! Yes, I daresay she was sorry to chuck him; but Altringham’s mad to marry her, and what could she do? “
And once again events had followed the course she had foreseen. Seeing her at Lord Altringham’s table, with the Ascots and the old Duchess of Dunes, the interested spectators could not but regard the dinner as confirming the rumour of her marriage. As Ellie said, people didn’t wait nowadays to announce their “engagements” till the tiresome divorce proceedings were over. Ellie herself, prodigally pearled and ermined, had floated in late with Algie Bockheimer in her wake, and sat, in conspicuous tete-a-tete, nodding and signalling her sympathy to Susy. Approval beamed from every eye: it was awfully exciting, they all seemed to say, seeing Susy Lansing pull it off! As the party, after dinner, drifted from the restaurant back into the hall, she caught, in the smiles and hand-pressures crowding about her, the scarcely-repressed hint of official congratulations; and Violet Melrose, seated in a corner with Fulmer, drew her down with a wan jade-circled arm, to whisper tenderly: “It’s most awfully clever of you, darling, not to be wearing any jewels.”
In all the women’s eyes she read the reflected lustre of the jewels she could wear when she chose: it was as though their glitter reached her from the far-off bank where they lay sealed up in the Altringham strong-box. What a fool she had been to think that Strefford would ever believe she didn’t care for them!
The Ambassadress, a blank perpendicular person, had been a shade less affable than Susy could have wished; but then there was Lady Joan–and the girl was handsome, alarmingly handsome to account for that: probably every one in the room had guessed it. And the old Duchess of Dunes was delightful. She looked rather like Strefford in a wig and false pearls (Susy was sure they were as false as her teeth); and her cordiality was so demonstrative that the future bride found it more difficult to account for than Lady Ascot’s coldness, till she heard the old lady, as they passed into the hall, breathe in a hissing whisper to her nephew: “Streff, dearest, when you have a minute’s time, and can drop in at my wretched little pension, I know you can explain in two words what I ought to do to pacify those awful money-lenders …. And you’ll bring your exquisite American to see me, won’t you! … No, Joan Senechal’s too fair for my taste …. Insipid…”
“
Yes: the taste of it all was again sweet on her lips. A few days later she began to wonder how the thought of Strefford’s endearments could have been so alarming. To be sure he was not lavish of them; but when he did touch her, even when he kissed her, it no longer seemed to matter. An almost complete absence of sensation had mercifully succeeded to the first wild flurry of her nerves.
And so it would be, no doubt, with everything else in her new life. If it failed to provoke any acute reactions, whether of pain or pleasure, the very absence of sensation would make for peace. And in the meanwhile she was tasting what, she had begun to suspect, was the maximum of bliss to most of the women she knew: days packed with engagements, the exhilaration of fashionable crowds, the thrill of snapping up a jewel or a bibelot or a new “model” that one’s best friend wanted, or of being invited to some private show, or some exclusive entertainment, that one’s best friend couldn’t get to. There was nothing, now, that she couldn’t buy, nowhere that she couldn’t go: she had only to choose and to triumph. And for a while the surface-excitement of her life gave her the illusion of enjoyment.
Strefford, as she had expected, had postponed his return to England, and they had now been for nearly three weeks together in their new, and virtually avowed, relation. She had fancied that, after all, the easiest part of it would be just the being with Strefford–the falling back on their old tried friendship to efface the sense of strangeness. But, though she had so soon grown used to his caresses, he himself remained curiously unfamiliar: she was hardly sure, at times, that it was the old Strefford she was talking to. It was not that his point of view had changed, but that new things occupied and absorbed him. In all the small sides of his great situation he took an almost childish satisfaction; and though he still laughed at both its privileges and its obligations, it was now with a jealous laughter.
It amused him inexhaustibly, for instance, to be made up to by all the people who had always disapproved of him, and to unite at the same table persons who had to dissemble their annoyance at being invited together lest they should not be invited at all. Equally exhilarating was the capricious favouring of the dull and dowdy on occasions when the brilliant and disreputable expected his notice. It enchanted him, for example, to ask the old Duchess of Dunes and Violet Melrose to dine with the Vicar of Altringham, on his way to Switzerland for a month’s holiday, and to watch the face of the Vicar’s wife while the Duchess narrated her last difficulties with book-makers and money- lenders, and Violet proclaimed the rights of Love and Genius to all that had once been supposed to belong exclusively to Respectability and Dulness.
Susy had to confess that her own amusements were hardly of a higher order; but then she put up with them for lack of better, whereas Strefford, who might have had what he pleased, was completely satisfied with such triumphs.
Somehow, in spite of his honours and his opportunities, he seemed to have shrunk. The old Strefford had certainly been a larger person, and she wondered if material prosperity were always a beginning of ossification. Strefford had been much more fun when he lived by his wits. Sometimes, now, when he tried to talk of politics, or assert himself on some question of public interest, she was startled by his limitations. Formerly, when he was not sure of his ground, it had been his way to turn the difficulty by glib nonsense or easy irony; now he was actually dull, at times almost pompous. She noticed too, for the first time, that he did not always hear clearly when several people were talking at once, or when he was at the theatre; and he developed a habit of saying over and over again: “Does so- and-so speak indistinctly? Or am I getting deaf, I wonder?” which wore on her nerves by its suggestion of a corresponding mental infirmity.
These thoughts did not always trouble her. The current of idle activity on which they were both gliding was her native element as well as his; and never had its tide been as swift, its waves as buoyant. In his relation to her, too, he was full of tact and consideration. She saw that he still remembered their frightened exchange of glances after their first kiss; and the sense of this little hidden spring of imagination in him was sometimes enough for her thirst.
She had always had a rather masculine punctuality in keeping her word, and after she had promised Strefford to take steps toward a divorce she had promptly set about doing it. A sudden reluctance prevented her asking the advice of friends like Ellie Vanderlyn, whom she knew to be in the thick of the same negotiations, and all she could think of was to consult a young American lawyer practicing in Paris, with whom she felt she could talk the more easily because he was not from New York, and probably unacquainted with her history.
She was so ignorant of the procedure in such matters that she was surprised and relieved at his asking few personal questions; but it was a shock to learn that a divorce could not be obtained, either in New York or Paris, merely on the ground of desertion or incompatibility.
“I thought nowadays … if people preferred to live apart … it could always be managed,” she stammered, wondering at her own ignorance, after the many conjugal ruptures she had assisted at.
The young lawyer smiled, and coloured slightly. His lovely client evidently intimidated him by her grace, and still more by her inexperience.
“It can be–generally,” he admitted; “and especially so if … as I gather is the case … your husband is equally anxious ….”
“Oh, quite!” she exclaimed, suddenly humiliated by having to admit it.
“Well, then–may I suggest that, to bring matters to a point, the best way would be for you to write to him?”
She recoiled slightly. It had never occurred to her that the lawyers would not “manage it” without her intervention.
“Write to him … but what about?”
“Well, expressing your wish … to recover your freedom …. The rest, I assume,” said the young lawyer, “may be left to Mr. Lansing.”
She did not know exactly what he meant, and was too much perturbed by the idea of having to communicate with Nick to follow any other train of thought. How could she write such a letter? And yet how could she confess to the lawyer that she had not the courage to do so? He would, of course, tell her to go home and be reconciled. She hesitated perplexedly.
“Wouldn’t it be better,” she suggested, “if the letter were to come from–from your office?”
He considered this politely. “On the whole: no. If, as I take it, an amicable arrangement is necessary–to secure the requisite evidence then a line from you, suggesting an interview, seems to me more advisable.”
“An interview? Is an interview necessary?” She was ashamed to show her agitation to this cautiously smiling young man, who must wonder at her childish lack of understanding; but the break in her voice was uncontrollable.
“Oh, please write to him–I can’t! And I can’t see him! Oh, can’t you arrange it for me?” she pleaded.
She saw now that her idea of a divorce had been that it was something one went out–or sent out–to buy in a shop: something concrete and portable, that Strefford’s money could pay for, and that it required no personal participation to obtain. What a fool the lawyer must think her! Stiffening herself, she rose from her seat.
“My husband and I don’t wish to see each other again …. I’m sure it would be useless … and very painful.”
“You are the best judge, of course. But in any case, a letter from you, a friendly letter, seems wiser … considering the apparent lack of evidence ….”
“Very well, then; I’ll write,” she agreed, and hurried away, scarcely hearing his parting injunction that she should take a copy of her letter.
That night she wrote. At the last moment it might have been impossible, if at the theatre little Breckenridge had not bobbed into her box. He was just back from Rome, where he had dined with the Hickses (“a bang-up show–they’re really lances-you wouldn’t know them!”), and had met there Lansing, whom he reported as intending to marry Coral “as soon as things were settled”. “You were dead right, weren’t you, Susy,” he snickered, “that night in Venice last summer, when we all thought you were joking about their engagement? Pity now you chucked our surprise visit to the Hickses, and sent Streff up to drag us back just as we were breaking in! You remember?”
He flung off the “Streff” airily, in the old way, but with a tentative side-glance at his host; and Lord Altringham, leaning toward Susy, said coldly: “Was Breckenridge speaking about me? I didn’t catch what he said. Does he speak indistinctly–or am I getting deaf, I wonder?”
After that it seemed comparatively easy, when Strefford had dropped her at her hotel, to go upstairs and write. She dashed off the date and her address, and then stopped; but suddenly she remembered Breckenridge’s snicker, and the words rushed from her. “Nick dear, it was July when you left Venice, and I have had no word from you since the note in which you said you had gone for a few days, and that I should hear soon again.
“You haven’t written yet, and it is five months since you left me. That means, I suppose, that you want to take back your freedom and give me mine. Wouldn’t it be kinder, in that case, to tell me so? It is worse than anything to go on as we are now. I don’t know how to put these things but since you seem unwilling to write to me perhaps you would prefer to send your answer to Mr. Frederic Spearman, the American lawyer here. His address is 100, Boulevard Haussmann. I hope–“
She broke off on the last word. Hope? What did she hope, either for him or for herself? Wishes for his welfare would sound like a mockery–and she would rather her letter should seem bitter than unfeeling. Above all, she wanted to get it done. To have to re-write even those few lines would be torture. So she left “I hope,” and simply added: “to hear before long what you have decided.”
She read it over, and shivered. Not one word of the past-not one allusion to that mysterious interweaving of their lives which had enclosed them one in the other like the flower in its sheath! What place had such memories in such a letter? She had the feeling that she wanted to hide that other Nick away in her own bosom, and with him the other Susy, the Susy he had once imagined her to be …. Neither of them seemed concerned with the present business.
The letter done, she stared at the sealed envelope till its presence in the room became intolerable, and she understood that she must either tear it up or post it immediately. She went down to the hall of the sleeping hotel, and bribed the night- porter to carry the letter to the nearest post office, though he objected that, at that hour, no time would be gained. “I want it out of the house,” she insisted: and waited sternly by the desk, in her dressing-gown, till he had performed the errand.
As she re-entered her room, the disordered writing-table struck her; and she remembered the lawyer’s injunction to take a copy of her letter. A copy to be filed away with the documents in “Lansing versus Lansing!” She burst out laughing at the idea. What were lawyers made of, she wondered? Didn’t the man guess, by the mere look in her eyes and the sound of her voice, that she would never, as long as she lived, forget a word of that letter–that night after night she would lie down, as she was lying down to-night, to stare wide-eyed for hours into the darkness, while a voice in her brain monotonously hammered out: “Nick dear, it was July when you left me …” and so on, word after word, down to the last fatal syllable?
XXII
STREFFORD was leaving for England.
Once assured that Susy had taken the first step toward freeing herself, he frankly regarded her as his affianced wife, and could see no reason for further mystery. She understood his impatience to have their plans settled; it would protect him from the formidable menace of the marriageable, and cause people, as he said, to stop meddling. Now that the novelty of his situation was wearing off, his natural indolence reasserted itself, and there was nothing he dreaded more than having to be on his guard against the innumerable plans that his well-wishers were perpetually making for him. Sometimes Susy fancied he was marrying her because to do so was to follow the line of least resistance.
“To marry me is the easiest way of not marrying all the others,” she laughed, as he stood before her one day in a quiet alley of the Bois de Boulogne, insisting on the settlement of various preliminaries. “I believe I’m only a protection to you.”
An odd gleam passed behind his eyes, and she instantly guessed that he was thinking: “And what else am I to you?”
She changed colour, and he rejoined, laughing also: “Well, you’re that at any rate, thank the Lord!”
She pondered, and then questioned: “But in the interval-how are you going to defend yourself for another year?”
“Ah, you’ve got to see to that; you’ve got to take a little house in London. You’ve got to look after me, you know.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to flash back: “Oh, if that’s all you care–!” But caring was exactly the factor she wanted, as much as possible, to keep out of their talk and their thoughts. She could not ask him how much he cared without laying herself open to the same question; and that way terror lay. As a matter of fact, though Strefford was not an ardent wooer–perhaps from tact, perhaps from temperament, perhaps merely from the long habit of belittling and disintegrating every sentiment and every conviction–yet she knew he did care for her as much as he was capable of caring for anyone. If the element of habit entered largely into the feeling–if he liked her, above all, because he was used to her, knew her views, her indulgences, her allowances, knew he was never likely to be bored, and almost certain to be amused, by her; why, such ingredients though not of the fieriest, were perhaps those most likely to keep his feeling for her at a pleasant temperature. She had had a taste of the tropics, and wanted more equable weather; but the idea of having to fan his flame gently for a year was unspeakably depressing to her. Yet all this was precisely what she could not say. The long period of probation, during which, as she knew, she would have to amuse him, to guard him, to hold him, and to keep off the other women, was a necessary part of their situation. She was sure that, as little Breckenridge would have said, she could “pull it off”; but she did not want to think about it. What she would have preferred would have been to go away–no matter where and not see Strefford again till they were married. But she dared not tell him that either.
“A little house in London–?” She wondered.
“Well, I suppose you’ve got to have some sort of a roof over your head.”
“I suppose so.”
He sat down beside her. “If you like me well enough to live at Altringham some day, won’t you, in the meantime, let me provide you with a smaller and more convenient establishment?”
Still she hesitated. The alternative, she knew, would be to live on Ursula Gillow, Violet Melrose, or some other of her rich friends, any one of whom would be ready to lavish the largest hospitality on the prospective Lady Altringham. Such an arrangement, in the long run, would be no less humiliating to her pride, no less destructive to her independence, than Altringham’s little establishment. But she temporized. “I shall go over to London in December, and stay for a while with various people–then we can look about.”
“All right; as you like.” He obviously considered her hesitation ridiculous, but was too full of satisfaction at her having started divorce proceedings to be chilled by her reply.
“And now, look here, my dear; couldn’t I give you some sort of a ring?”
“A ring?” She flushed at the suggestion. “What’s the use, Streff, dear? With all those jewels locked away in London–“
“Oh, I daresay you’ll think them old-fashioned. And, hang it, why shouldn’t I give you something new, I ran across Ellie and Bockheimer yesterday, in the rue de la Paix, picking out sapphires. Do you like sapphires, or emeralds? Or just a diamond? I’ve seen a thumping one …. I’d like you to have it.”
Ellie and Bockheimer! How she hated the conjunction of the names! Their case always seemed to her like a caricature of her own, and she felt an unreasoning resentment against Ellie for having selected the same season for her unmating and re-mating.
“I wish you wouldn’t speak of them, Streff … as if they were like us! I can hardly bear to sit in the same room with Ellie Vanderlyn.”
“Hullo? What’s wrong? You mean because of her giving up Clarissa?”
“Not that only …. You don’t know …. I can’t tell you ….” She shivered at the memory, and rose restlessly from the bench where they had been sitting.
Strefford gave his careless shrug. “Well, my dear, you can hardly expect me to agree, for after all it was to Ellie I owed the luck of being so long alone with you in Venice. If she and Algie hadn’t prolonged their honeymoon at the villa–“
He stopped abruptly, and looked at Susy. She was conscious that every drop of blood had left her face. She felt it ebbing away from her heart, flowing out of her as if from all her severed arteries, till it seemed as though nothing were left of life in her but one point of irreducible pain.
“Ellie–at your villa? What do you mean? Was it Ellie and Bockheimer who–?”
Strefford still stared. “You mean to say you didn’t know?”
“Who came after Nick and me…?” she insisted.
“Why, do you suppose I’d have turned you out otherwise? That beastly Bockheimer simply smothered me with gold. Ah, well, there’s one good thing: I shall never have to let the villa again! I rather like the little place myself, and I daresay once in a while we might go there for a day or two …. Susy, what’s the matter?” he exclaimed.
She returned his stare, but without seeing him. Everything swam and danced before her eyes.
“Then she was there while I was posting all those letters for her–?”
“Letters–what letters? What makes you look so frightfully upset?”
She pursued her thought as if he had not spoken. “She and Algie Bockheimer arrived there the very day that Nick and I left?”
“I suppose so. I thought she’d told you. Ellie always tells everybody everything.”
“She would have told me, I daresay–but I wouldn’t let her.”
“Well, my dear, that was hardly my fault, was it? Though I really don’t see–“
But Susy, still blind to everything but the dance of dizzy sparks before her eyes, pressed on as if she had not heard him. “It was their motor, then, that took us to Milan! It was Algie Bockheimer’s motor!” She did not know why, but this seemed to her the most humiliating incident in the whole hateful business. She remembered Nick’s reluctance to use the motor-she remembered his look when she had boasted of her “managing.” The nausea mounted to her throat.
Strefford burst out laughing. “I say–you borrowed their motor? And you didn’t know whose it was?”
“How could I know? I persuaded the chauffeur … for a little tip …. It was to save our railway fares to Milan … extra luggage costs so frightfully in Italy ….”
“Good old Susy! Well done! I can see you doing it–“
“Oh, how horrible–how horrible!” she groaned.
“Horrible? What’s horrible?”
“Why, your not seeing … not feeling …” she began impetuously; and then stopped. How could she explain to him that what revolted her was not so much the fact of his having given the little house, as soon as she and Nick had left it, to those two people of all others–though the vision of them in the sweet secret house, and under the plane-trees of the terrace, drew such a trail of slime across her golden hours? No, it was not that from which she most recoiled, but from the fact that Strefford, living in luxury in Nelson Vanderlyn’s house, should at the same time have secretly abetted Ellie Vanderlyn’s love- affairs, and allowed her–for a handsome price–to shelter them under his own roof. The reproach trembled on her lip–but she remembered her own part in the wretched business, and the impossibility of avowing it to Strefford, and of revealing to him that Nick had left her for that very reason. She was not afraid that the discovery would diminish her in Strefford’s eyes: he was untroubled by moral problems, and would laugh away her avowal, with a sneer at Nick in his new part of moralist. But that was just what she could not bear: that anyone should cast a doubt on the genuineness of Nick’s standards, or should know how far below them she had fallen.
She remained silent, and Strefford, after a moment, drew her gently down to the seat beside him. “Susy, upon my soul I don’t know what you’re driving at. Is it me you’re angry with-or yourself? And what’s it all about! Are you disgusted because I let the villa to a couple who weren’t married! But, hang it, they’re the kind that pay the highest price and I had to earn my living somehow! One doesn’t run across a bridal pair every day ….”
She lifted her eyes to his puzzled incredulous face. Poor Streff! No, it was not with him that she was angry. Why should she be? Even that ill-advised disclosure had told her nothing she had not already known about him. It had simply revealed to her once more the real point of view of the people he and she lived among, had shown her that, in spite of the superficial difference, he felt as they felt, judged as they judged, was blind as they were-and as she would be expected to be, should she once again become one of them. What was the use of being placed by fortune above such shifts and compromises, if in one’s heart one still condoned them? And she would have to–she would catch the general note, grow blunted as those other people were blunted, and gradually come to wonder at her own revolt, as Strefford now honestly wondered at it. She felt as though she were on the point of losing some new-found treasure, a treasure precious only to herself, but beside which all he offered her was nothing, the triumph of her wounded pride nothing, the security of her future nothing.
“What is it, Susy?” he asked, with the same puzzled gentleness.
Ah, the loneliness of never being able to make him understand! She had felt lonely enough when the flaming sword of Nick’s indignation had shut her out from their Paradise; but there had been a cruel bliss in the pain. Nick had not opened her eyes to new truths, but had waked in her again something which had lain unconscious under years of accumulated indifference. And that re-awakened sense had never left her since, and had somehow kept her from utter loneliness because it was a secret shared with Nick, a gift she owed to Nick, and which, in leaving her, he could not take from her. It was almost, she suddenly felt, as if he had left her with a child.
“My dear girl,” Strefford said, with a resigned glance at his watch, “you know we’re dining at the Embassy ….”
At the Embassy? She looked at him vaguely: then she remembered. Yes, they were dining that night at the Ascots’, with Strefford’s cousin, the Duke of Dunes, and his wife, the handsome irreproachable young Duchess; with the old gambling Dowager Duchess, whom her son and daughter-in-law had come over from England to see; and with other English and French guests of a rank and standing worthy of the Duneses. Susy knew that her inclusion in such a dinner could mean but one thing: it was her definite recognition as Altringham’s future wife. She was “the little American” whom one had to ask when one invited him, even on ceremonial occasions. The family had accepted her; the Embassy could but follow suit.
“It’s late, dear; and I’ve got to see someone on business first,” Strefford reminded her patiently.
“Oh, Streff–I can’t, I can’t!” The words broke from her without her knowing what she was saying. “I can’t go with you–I can’t go to the Embassy. I can’t go on any longer like this ….” She lifted her eyes to his in desperate appeal. “Oh, understand-do please understand!” she wailed, knowing, while she spoke, the utter impossibility of what she asked.
Strefford’s face had gradually paled and hardened. From sallow it turned to a dusky white, and lines of obstinacy deepened between the ironic eyebrows and about the weak amused mouth.
“Understand? What do you want me to understand,” He laughed. “That you’re trying to chuck me already?”
She shrank at the sneer of the “already,” but instantly remembered that it was the only thing he could be expected to say, since it was just because he couldn’t understand that she was flying from him.
“Oh, Streff–if I knew how to tell you!”
“It doesn’t so much matter about the how. Is that what you’re trying to say?”
Her head drooped, and she saw the dead leaves whirling across the path at her feet, lifted on a sudden wintry gust.
“The reason,” he continued, clearing his throat with a stiff smile, “is not quite as important to me as the fact.”
She stood speechless, agonized by his pain. But still, she thought, he had remembered the dinner at the Embassy. The thought gave her courage to go on.
“It wouldn’t do, Streff. I’m not a bit the kind of person to make you happy.”
“Oh, leave that to me, please, won’t you?”
“No, I can’t. Because I should be unhappy too.”
He clicked at the leaves as they whirled past. “You’ve taken a rather long time to find it out.” She saw that his new-born sense of his own consequence was making him suffer even more than his wounded affection; and that again gave her courage.
“If I’ve taken long it’s all the more reason why I shouldn’t take longer. If I’ve made a mistake it’s you who would have suffered from it ….”
“Thanks,” he said, “for your extreme solicitude.”
She looked at him helplessly, penetrated by the despairing sense of their inaccessibility to each other. Then she remembered that Nick, during their last talk together, had seemed as inaccessible, and wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other’s vision. She would have liked to say this to Streff-but he would not have understood it either. The sense of loneliness once more enveloped her, and she groped in vain for a word that should reach him.
“Let me go home alone, won’t you?” she appealed to him.
“Alone?”
She nodded. “To-morrow–to-morrow ….”
He tried, rather valiantly, to smile. “Hang tomorrow! Whatever is wrong, it needn’t prevent my seeing you home.” He glanced toward the taxi that awaited them at the end of the deserted drive.
“No, please. You’re in a hurry; take the taxi. I want immensely a long long walk by myself … through the streets, with the lights coming out ….”
He laid his hand on her arm. “I say, my dear, you’re not ill?”
“No; I’m not ill. But you may say I am, to-night at the Embassy.”
He released her and drew back. “Oh, very well,” he answered coldly; and she understood by his tone that the knot was cut, and that at that moment he almost hated her. She turned away, hastening down the deserted alley, flying from him, and knowing, as she fled, that he was still standing there motionless, staring after her, wounded, humiliated, uncomprehending. It was neither her fault nor his ….
XXIII
AS she fled on toward the lights of the streets a breath of freedom seemed to blow into her face.
Like a weary load the accumulated hypocrisies of the last months had dropped from her: she was herself again, Nick’s Susy, and no one else’s. She sped on, staring with bright bewildered eyes at the stately facades of the La Muette quarter, the perspectives of bare trees, the awakening glitter of shop- windows holding out to her all the things she would never again be able to buy ….
In an avenue of shops she paused before a milliner’s window, and said to herself: “Why shouldn’t I earn my living by trimming hats?” She met work-girls streaming out under a doorway, and scattering to catch trams and omnibuses; and she looked with newly-wakened interest at their tired independent faces. “Why shouldn’t I earn my living as well as they do?” she thought. A little farther on she passed a Sister of Charity with softly trotting feet, a calm anonymous glance, and hands hidden in her capacious sleeves. Susy looked at her and thought: “Why shouldn’t I be a Sister, and have no money to worry about, and trot about under a white coif helping poor people?”
All these strangers on whom she smiled in passing, and glanced back at enviously, were free from the necessities that enslaved her, and would not have known what she meant if she had told them that she must have so much money for her dresses, so much for her cigarettes, so much for bridge and cabs and tips, and all kinds of extras, and that at that moment she ought to be hurrying back to a dinner at the British Embassy, where her permanent right to such luxuries was to be solemnly recognized and ratified.
The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as with stifling fumes. She stopped at a street-corner, drawing long panting breaths as if she had been running a race. Then, slowly and aimlessly, she began to saunter along a street of small private houses in damp gardens that led to the Avenue du Bois. She sat down on a bench. Not far off, the Arc de Triomphe raised its august bulk, and beyond it a river of lights streamed down toward Paris, and the stir of the city’s heart-beats troubled the quiet in her bosom. But not for long. She seemed to be looking at it all from the other side of the grave; and as she got up and wandered down the Champs Elysees, half empty in the evening lull between dusk and dinner, she felt as if the glittering avenue were really changed into the Field of Shadows from which it takes its name, and as if she were a ghost among ghosts.
Halfway home, a weakness of loneliness overcame her, and she seated herself under the trees near the Rond Point. Lines of motors and carriages were beginning to animate the converging thoroughfares, streaming abreast, crossing, winding in and out of each other in a tangle of hurried pleasure-seeking. She caught the light on jewels and shirt-fronts and hard bored eyes emerging from dim billows of fur and velvet. She seemed to hear what the couples were saying to each other, she pictured the drawing-rooms, restaurants, dance-halls they were hastening to, the breathless routine that was hurrying them along, as Time, the old vacuum-cleaner, swept them away with the dust of their carriage-wheels. And again the loneliness vanished in a sense of release ….
At the corner of the Place de la Concorde she stopped, recognizing a man in evening dress who was hailing a taxi. Their eyes met, and Nelson Vanderlyn came forward. He was the last person she cared to run across, and she shrank back involuntarily. What did he know, what had he guessed, of her complicity in his wife’s affairs? No doubt Ellie had blabbed it all out by this time; she was just as likely to confide her love-affairs to Nelson as to anyone else, now that the Bockheimer prize was landed.
“Well–well–well–so I’ve caught you at it! Glad to see you, Susy, my dear.” She found her hand cordially clasped in Vanderlyn’s, and his round pink face bent on her with all its old urbanity. Did nothing matter, then, in this world she was fleeing from, did no one love or hate or remember?
“No idea you were in Paris–just got here myself,” Vanderlyn continued, visibly delighted at the meeting. “Look here, don’t suppose you’re out of a job this evening by any chance, and would come and cheer up a lone bachelor, eh? No? You are? Well, that’s luck for once! I say, where shall we go? One of the places where they dance, I suppose? Yes, I twirl the light fantastic once in a while myself. Got to keep up with the times! Hold on, taxi! Here–I’ll drive you home first, and wait while you jump into your toggery. Lots of time.” As he steered her toward the carriage she noticed that he had a gouty limp, and pulled himself in after her with difficulty.
“Mayn’t I come as I am, Nelson, I don’t feel like dancing. Let’s go and dine in one of those nice smoky little restaurants by the Place de la Bourse.”
He seemed surprised but relieved at the suggestion, and they rolled off together. In a corner at Bauge’s they found a quiet table, screened from the other diners, and while Vanderlyn adjusted his eyeglasses to study the carte Susy stole a long look at him. He was dressed with even more than his usual formal trimness, and she detected, in an ultra-flat wrist-watch and discreetly expensive waistcoat buttons, an attempt at smartness altogether new. His face had undergone the same change: its familiar look of worn optimism had been, as it were, done up to match his clothes, as though a sort of moral cosmetic had made him pinker, shinier and sprightlier without really rejuvenating him. A thin veil of high spirits had merely been drawn over his face, as the shining strands of hair were skilfully brushed over his baldness.
“Here! Carte des vins, waiter! What champagne, Susy?” He chose, fastidiously, the best the cellar could produce, grumbling a little at the bourgeois character of the dishes. “Capital food of its kind, no doubt, but coarsish, don’t you think? Well, I don’t mind … it’s rather a jolly change from the Luxe cooking. A new sensation–I’m all for new sensations, ain’t you, my dear?” He re-filled their champagne glasses, flung an arm sideways over his chair, and smiled at her with a foggy benevolence.
As the champagne flowed his confidences flowed with it.
“Suppose you know what I’m here for–this divorce business? We wanted to settle it quietly without a fuss, and of course Paris is the best place for that sort of job. Live and let live; no questions asked. None of your dirty newspapers. Great country, this. No hypocrisy … they understand Life over here!”
Susy gazed and listened. She remembered that people had thought Nelson would make a row when he found out. He had always been addicted to truculent anecdotes about unfaithful wives, and the very formula of his perpetual ejaculation– “Caught you at it, eh?”–seemed to hint at a constant preoccupation with such ideas. But now it was evident that, as the saying was, he had “swallowed his dose” like all the others. No strong blast of indignation had momentarily lifted him above his normal stature: he remained a little man among little men, and his eagerness to rebuild his life with all the old smiling optimism reminded Susy of the patient industry of an ant remaking its ruined ant-heap.
“Tell you what, great thing, this liberty! Everything’s changed nowadays; why shouldn’t marriage be too? A man can get out of a business partnership when he wants to; but the parsons want to keep us noosed up to each other for life because we’ve blundered into a church one day and said ‘Yes’ before one of ’em. No, no–that’s too easy. We’ve got beyond that. Science, and all these new discoveries …. I say the Ten Commandments were made for man, and not man for the Commandments; and there ain’t a word against divorce in ’em, anyhow! That’s what I tell my poor old mother, who builds everything on her Bible. Find me the place where it says: ‘Thou shalt not sue for divorce.’ It makes her wild, poor old lady, because she can’t; and she doesn’t know how they happen to have left it out…. I rather think Moses left it out because he knew more about human nature than these snivelling modern parsons do. Not that they’ll always bear investigating either; but I don’t care about that. Live and let live, eh, Susy? Haven’t we all got a right to our Affinities? I hear you’re following our example yourself. First-rate idea: I don’t mind telling you I saw it coming on last summer at Venice. Caught you at it, so to speak! Old Nelson ain’t as blind as people think. Here, let’s open another bottle to the health of Streff and Mrs. Streff!”
She caught the hand with which he was signalling to the sommelier. This flushed and garrulous Nelson moved her more poignantly than a more heroic figure. “No more champagne, please, Nelson. Besides,” she suddenly added, “it’s not true.”
He stared. “Not true that you’re going to marry Altringham?”
“No.”
“By George then what on earth did you chuck Nick for? Ain’t you got an Affinity, my dear?”
She laughed and shook her head.
“Do you mean to tell me it’s all Nick’s doing, then?”
“I don’t know. Let’s talk of you instead, Nelson. I’m glad you’re in such good spirits. I rather thought–“
He interrupted her quickly. “Thought I’d cut up a rumpus-do some shooting? I know–people did.” He twisted his moustache, evidently proud of his reputation. “Well, maybe I did see red for a day or two–but I’m a philosopher, first and last. Before I went into banking I’d made and lost two fortunes out West. Well, how did I build ’em up again? Not by shooting anybody even myself. By just buckling to, and beginning all over again. That’s how … and that’s what I am doing now. Beginning all over again. ” His voice dropped from boastfulness to a note of wistful melancholy, the look of strained jauntiness fell from his face like a mask, and for an instant she saw the real man, old, ruined, lonely. Yes, that was it: he was lonely, desperately lonely, foundering in such deep seas of solitude that any presence out of the past was like a spar to which he clung. Whatever he knew or guessed of the part she had played in his disaster, it was not callousness that had made him greet her with such forgiving warmth, but the same sense of smallness, insignificance and isolation which perpetually hung like a cold fog on her own horizon. Suddenly she too felt old–old and unspeakably tired.
“It’s been nice seeing you, Nelson. But now I must be getting home.”
He offered no objection, but asked for the bill, resumed his jaunty air while he scattered largesse among the waiters, and sauntered out behind her after calling for a taxi.
They drove off in silence. Susy was thinking: “And Clarissa?” but dared not ask. Vanderlyn lit a cigarette, hummed a dance- tune, and stared out of the window. Suddenly she felt his hand on hers.
“Susy–do you ever see her?”
“See–Ellie?”
He nodded, without turning toward her.
“Not often … sometimes ….”
“If you do, for God’s sake tell her I’m happy … happy as a king … tell her you could see for yourself that I was ….” His voice broke in a little gasp. “I … I’ll be damned if … if she shall ever be unhappy about me … if I can help it ….” The cigarette dropped from his fingers, and with a sob he covered his face.
“Oh, poor Nelson–poor Nelson, ” Susy breathed. While their cab rattled across the Place du Carrousel, and over the bridge, he continued to sit beside her with hidden face. At last he pulled out a scented handkerchief, rubbed his eyes with it, and groped for another cigarette.
“I’m all right! Tell her that, will you, Susy? There are some of our old times I don’t suppose I shall ever forget; but they make me feel kindly to her, and not angry. I didn’t know it would be so, beforehand–but it is …. And now the thing’s settled I’m as right as a trivet, and you can tell her so …. Look here, Susy …” he caught her by the arm as the taxi drew up at her hotel …. “Tell her I understand, will you? I’d rather like her to know that …. “
“I’ll tell her, Nelson,” she promised; and climbed the stairs alone to her dreary room.
Susy’s one fear was that Strefford, when he returned the next day, should treat their talk of the previous evening as a fit of “nerves” to be jested away. He might, indeed, resent her behaviour too deeply to seek to see her at once; but his easygoing modern attitude toward conduct and convictions made that improbable. She had an idea that what he had most minded was her dropping so unceremoniously out of the Embassy Dinner.
But, after all, why should she see him again? She had had enough of explanations during the last months to have learned how seldom they explain anything. If the other person did not understand at the first word, at the first glance even, subsequent elucidations served only to deepen the obscurity. And she wanted above all–and especially since her hour with Nelson Vanderlyn–to keep herself free, aloof, to retain her hold on her precariously recovered self. She sat down and wrote to Strefford–and the letter was only a little less painful to write than the one she had despatched to Nick. It was not that her own feelings were in any like measure engaged; but because, as the decision to give up Strefford affirmed itself, she remembered only his kindness, his forbearance, his good humour, and all the other qualities she had always liked in him; and because she felt ashamed of the hesitations which must cause him so much pain and humiliation. Yes: humiliation chiefly. She knew that what she had to say would hurt his pride, in whatever way she framed her renunciation; and her pen wavered, hating its task. Then she remembered Vanderlyn’s words about his wife: “There are some of our old times I don’t suppose I shall ever forget–” and a phrase of Grace Fulmer’s that she had but half grasped at the time: “You haven’t been married long enough to understand how trifling such things seem in the balance of one’s memories.”
Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into the labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already dawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in mutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and denial.
“The real reason is that you’re not Nick” was what she would have said to Strefford if she had dared to set down the bare truth; and she knew that, whatever she wrote, he was too acute not to read that into it.
“He’ll think it’s because I’m still in love with Nick … and perhaps I am. But even if I were, the difference doesn’t seem to lie there, after all, but deeper, in things we’ve shared that seem to be meant to outlast love, or to change it into something different.” If she could have hoped to make Strefford understand that, the letter would have been easy enough to write–but she knew just at what point his imagination would fail, in what obvious and superficial inferences it would rest
“Poor Streff–poor me!” she thought as she sealed the letter.
After she had despatched it a sense of blankness descended on her. She had succeeded in driving from her mind all vain hesitations, doubts, returns upon herself: her healthy system naturally rejected them. But they left a queer emptiness in which her thoughts rattled about as thoughts might, she supposed, in the first moments after death–before one got used to it. To get used to being dead: that seemed to be her immediate business. And she felt such a novice at it–felt so horribly alive! How had those others learned to do without living? Nelson–well, he was still in the throes; and probably never would understand, or be able to communicate, the lesson when he had mastered it. But Grace Fulmer–she suddenly remembered that Grace was in Paris, and set forth to find her.
XXIV
NICK LANSING had walked out a long way into the Campagna. His hours were seldom his own, for both Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were becoming more and more addicted to sudden and somewhat imperious demands upon his time; but on this occasion he had simply slipped away after luncheon, and taking the tram to the Porta Salaria, had wandered on thence in the direction of the Ponte Nomentano.
He wanted to get away and think; but now that he had done it the business proved as unfruitful as everything he had put his hand to since he had left Venice. Think–think about what? His future seemed to him a negligible matter since he had received, two months earlier, the few lines in which Susy had asked him for her freedom.
The letter had been a shock–though he had fancied himself so prepared for it–yet it had also, in another sense, been a relief, since, now that at last circumstances compelled him to write to her, they also told him what to say. And he had said it as briefly and simply as possible, telling her that he would put no obstacle in the way of her release, that he held himself at her lawyer’s disposal to answer any further communication–and that he would never forget their days together, or cease to bless her for them.
That was all. He gave his Roman banker’s address, and waited for another letter; but none came. Probably the “formalities,” whatever they were, took longer than he had supposed; and being in no haste to recover his own liberty, he did not try to learn the cause of the delay. From that moment, however, he considered himself virtually free, and ceased, by the same token, to take any interest in his own future. His life seemed as flat as a convalescent’s first days after the fever has dropped.
The only thing he was sure of was that he was not going to remain in the Hickses’ employ: when they left Rome for Central Asia he had no intention of accompanying them. The part of Mr. Buttles’ successor was becoming daily more intolerable to him, for the very reasons that had probably made it most gratifying to Mr. Buttles. To be treated by Mr. and Mrs. Hicks as a paid oracle, a paraded and petted piece of property, was a good deal more distasteful than he could have imagined any relation with these kindly people could be. And since their aspirations had become frankly social he found his task, if easier, yet far less congenial than during his first months with them. He preferred patiently explaining to Mrs. Hicks, for the hundredth time, that Sassanian and Saracenic were not interchangeable terms, to unravelling for her the genealogies of her titled guests, and reminding her, when she “seated” her dinner-parties, that Dukes ranked higher than Princes. No–the job was decidedly intolerable; and he would have to look out for another means of earning his living. But that was not what he had really got away to think about. He knew he should never starve; he had even begun to believe again in his book. What he wanted to think of was Susy–or rather, it was Susy that he could not help thinking of, on whatever train of thought he set out.
Again and again he fancied he had established a truce with the past: had come to terms–the terms of defeat and failure with that bright enemy called happiness. And, in truth, he had reached the point of definitely knowing that he could never return to the kind of life that he and Susy had embarked on. It had been the tragedy, of their relation that loving her roused in him ideals she could never satisfy. He had fallen in love with her because she was, like himself, amused, unprejudiced and disenchanted; and he could not go on loving her unless she ceased to be all these things. From that circle there was no issue, and in it he desperately revolved.
If he had not heard such persistent rumours of her re-marriage to Lord Altringham he might have tried to see her again; but, aware of the danger and the hopelessness of a meeting, he was, on the whole, glad to have a reason for avoiding it. Such, at least, he honestly supposed to be his state of mind until he found himself, as on this occasion, free to follow out his thought to its end. That end, invariably, was Susy; not the bundle of qualities and defects into which his critical spirit had tried to sort her out, but the soft blur of identity, of personality, of eyes, hair, mouth, laugh, tricks of speech and gesture, that were all so solely and profoundly her own, and yet so mysteriously independent of what she might do, say, think, in crucial circumstances. He remembered her once saying to him: “After all, you were right when you wanted me to be your mistress,” and the indignant stare of incredulity with which he had answered her. Yet in these hours it was the palpable image of her that clung closest, till, as invariably happened, his vision came full circle, and feeling her on his breast he wanted her also in his soul.
Well–such all-encompassing loves were the rarest of human experiences; he smiled at his presumption in wanting no other. Wearily he turned, and tramped homeward through the winter twilight ….
At the door of the hotel he ran across the Prince of Teutoburg’s aide-de-camp. They had not met for some days, and Nick had a vague feeling that if the Prince’s matrimonial designs took definite shape he himself was not likely, after all, to be their chosen exponent. He had surprised, now and then, a certain distrustful coldness under the Princess Mother’s cordial glance, and had concluded that she perhaps suspected him of being an obstacle to her son’s aspirations. He had no idea of playing that part, but was not sorry to appear to; for he was sincerely attached to Coral Hicks, and hoped for her a more human fate than that of becoming Prince Anastasius’s consort.
This evening, however, he was struck by the beaming alacrity of the aide-de-camp’s greeting. Whatever cloud had hung between them had lifted: the Teutoburg clan, for one reason or another, no longer feared or distrusted him. The change was conveyed in a mere hand-pressure, a brief exchange of words, for the aide- de-camp was hastening after a well-known dowager of the old Roman world, whom he helped into a large coronetted brougham which looked as if it had been extracted, for some ceremonial purpose, from a museum of historic vehicles. And in an instant it flashed on Lansing that this lady had been the person chosen to lay the Prince’s offer at Miss Hicks’s feet.
The discovery piqued him; and instead of making straight for his own room he went up to Mrs. Hicks’s drawing-room.
The room was empty, but traces of elaborate tea pervaded it, and an immense bouquet of stiff roses lay on the centre table. As he turned away, Eldorada Tooker, flushed and tear-stained, abruptly entered.
“Oh, Mr. Lansing–we were looking everywhere for you.”
“Looking for me?”
“Yes. Coral especially … she wants to see you. She wants you to come to her own sitting-room.”
She led him across the ante-chamber and down the passage to the separate suite which Miss Hicks inhabited. On the threshold Eldorada gasped out emotionally: “You’ll find her looking lovely–” and jerked away with a sob as he entered.
Coral Hicks was never lovely: but she certainly looked unusually handsome. Perhaps it was the long dress of black velvet which, outlined against a shaded lamp, made her strong build seem slenderer, or perhaps the slight flush on her dusky cheek: a bloom of womanhood hung upon her which she made no effort to dissemble. Indeed, it was one of her originalities that she always gravely and courageously revealed the utmost of whatever mood possessed her.
“How splendid you look!” he said, smiling at her.
She threw her head back and gazed him straight in the eyes. “That’s going to be my future job.”
“To look splendid?”
“Yes.”
“And wear a crown?”
“And wear a crown ….”
They continued to consider each other without speaking. Nick’s heart contracted with pity and perplexity.
“Oh, Coral–it’s not decided?”
She scrutinized him for a last penetrating moment; then she looked away. “I’m never long deciding.”
He hesitated, choking with contradictory impulses, and afraid to formulate any, lest they should either mislead or pain her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he questioned lamely; and instantly perceived his blunder.
She sat down, and looked up at him under brooding lashes–had he ever noticed the thickness of her lashes before?
“Would it have made any difference if I had told you?”
“Any difference–?”
“Sit down by me,” she commanded. “I want to talk to you. You can say now whatever you might have said sooner. I’m not married yet: I’m still free.”
“You haven’t given your answer?”
“It doesn’t matter if I have.”
The retort frightened him with the glimpse of what she still expected of him, and what he was still so unable to give.
“That means you’ve said yes?” he pursued, to gain time.
“Yes or no–it doesn’t matter. I had to say something. What I want is your advice.”
“At the eleventh hour?”
“Or the twelfth.” She paused. “What shall I do?” she questioned, with a sudden accent of helplessness.
He looked at her as helplessly. He could not say: “Ask yourself–ask your parents.” Her next word would sweep away such frail hypocrisies. Her “What shall I do?” meant “What are you going to do?” and he knew it, and knew that she knew it.
“I’m a bad person to give any one matrimonial advice,” he began, with a strained smile; “but I had such a different vision for you.”
“What kind of a vision?” She was merciless.
“Merely what people call happiness, dear.”
“‘People call’–you see you don’t believe in it yourself! Well, neither do I–in that form, at any rate. “
He considered. “I believe in trying for it–even if the trying’s the best of it.”
“Well, I’ve tried, and failed. And I’m twenty-two, and I never was young. I suppose I haven’t enough imagination.” She drew a deep breath. “Now I want something different.” She appeared to search for the word. “I want to be–prominent,” she declared.
“Prominent?”
She reddened swarthily. “Oh, you smile–you think it’s ridiculous: it doesn’t seem worth while to you. That’s because you’ve always had all those things. But I haven’t. I know what father pushed up from, and I want to push up as high again– higher. No, I haven’t got much imagination. I’ve always liked Facts. And I find I shall like the fact of being a Princess– choosing the people I associate with, and being up above all these European grandees that father and mother bow down to, though they think they despise them. You can be up above these people by just being yourself; you know how. But I need a platform–a sky-scraper. Father and mother slaved to give me my education. They thought education was the important thing; but, since we’ve all three of us got mediocre minds, it has just landed us among mediocre people. Don’t you suppose I see through all the sham science and sham art and sham everything we’re surrounded with? That’s why I want to buy a place at the very top, where I shall be powerful enough to get about me the people I want, the big people, the right people, and to help them I want to promote culture, like those Renaissance women you’re always talking about. I want to do it for Apex City; do you understand? And for father and mother too. I want all those titles carved on my tombstone. They’re facts, anyhow! Don’t laugh at me ….” She broke off with one of her clumsy smiles, and moved away from him to the other end of the room.
He sat looking at her with a curious feeling of admiration. Her harsh positivism was like a tonic to his disenchanted mood, and he thought: “What a pity!”
Aloud he said: “I don’t feel like laughing at you. You’re a great woman.”
“Then I shall be a great Princess.”
“Oh–but you might have been something so much greater!”
Her face flamed again. “Don’t say that!”
He stood up involuntarily, and drew near her.
“Why not?”