ON the drive back from her dinner at the Nouveau Luxe, eventshad followed the course foreseen by Susy.
She had promised Strefford to seek legal advice about herdivorce, and he had kissed her; and the promise had been easierto make than she had expected, the kiss less difficult toreceive.
She had gone to the dinner a-quiver with the mortification oflearning that her husband was still with the Hickses. Morallysure of it though she had been, the discovery was a shock, andshe measured for the first time the abyss between fearing andknowing. No wonder he had not written--the modern husband didnot have to: he had only to leave it to time and the newspapersto make known his intentions. Susy could imagine Nick's sayingto himself, as he sometimes used to say when she reminded him ofan unanswered letter: "But there are lots of ways of answeringa letter--and writing doesn't happen to be mine."Well--he had done it in his way, and she was answered. For aminute, as she laid aside the paper, darkness submerged her, andshe felt herself dropping down into the bottomless anguish ofher dreadful vigil in the Palazzo Vanderlyn. But she was wearyof anguish: her healthy body and nerves instinctively rejectedit. The wave was spent, and she felt herself irresistiblystruggling back to light and life and youth. He didn't wanther! Well, she would try not to want him! There lay all theold expedients at her hand--the rouge for her white lips, theatropine for her blurred eyes, the new dress on her bed, thethought of Strefford and his guests awaiting her, and of theconclusions that the diners of the Nouveau Luxe would draw fromseeing them together. Thank heaven no one would say: "Poor oldSusy--did you know Nick had chucked her?" They would all say:
"Poor old Nick! Yes, I daresay she was sorry to chuck him; butAltringham'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 theold Duchess of Dunes, the interested spectators could not butregard the dinner as confirming the rumour of her marriage. AsEllie 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 inlate with Algie Bockheimer in her wake, and sat, in conspicuoustete-a-tete, nodding and signalling her sympathy to Susy.
Approval beamed from every eye: it was awfully exciting, theyall seemed to say, seeing Susy Lansing pull it off! As theparty, after dinner, drifted from the restaurant back into thehall, she caught, in the smiles and hand-pressures crowdingabout her, the scarcely-repressed hint of officialcongratulations; and Violet Melrose, seated in a corner withFulmer, drew her down with a wan jade-circled arm, to whispertenderly: "It's most awfully clever of you, darling, not to bewearing any jewels."In all the women's eyes she read the reflected lustre of thejewels she could wear when she chose: it was as though theirglitter reached her from the far-off bank where they lay sealedup in the Altringham strong-box. What a fool she had been tothink that Strefford would ever believe she didn't care forthem!
The Ambassadress, a blank perpendicular person, had been a shadeless affable than Susy could have wished; but then there wasLady Joan--and the girl was handsome, alarmingly handsome toaccount for that: probably every one in the room had guessedit. And the old Duchess of Dunes was delightful. She lookedrather like Strefford in a wig and false pearls (Susy was surethey were as false as her teeth); and her cordiality was sodemonstrative that the future bride found it more difficult toaccount for than Lady Ascot's coldness, till she heard the oldlady, as they passed into the hall, breathe in a hissing whisperto her nephew: "Streff, dearest, when you have a minute's time,and can drop in at my wretched little pension, I know you canexplain in two words what I ought to do to pacify those awfulmoney-lenders .... And you'll bring your exquisite American tosee me, won't you! ... No, Joan Senechal's too fair for mytaste .... Insipid...""Yes: the taste of it all was again sweet on her lips. A fewdays later she began to wonder how the thought of Strefford'sendearments could have been so alarming. To be sure he was notlavish of them; but when he did touch her, even when he kissedher, it no longer seemed to matter. An almost complete absenceof sensation had mercifully succeeded to the first wild flurryof her nerves.
And so it would be, no doubt, with everything else in her newlife. If it failed to provoke any acute reactions, whether ofpain or pleasure, the very absence of sensation would make forpeace. And in the meanwhile she was tasting what, she had begunto suspect, was the maximum of bliss to most of the women sheknew: days packed with engagements, the exhilaration offashionable crowds, the thrill of snapping up a jewel or abibelot or a new "model" that one's best friend wanted, or ofbeing invited to some private show, or some exclusiveentertainment, that one's best friend couldn't get to. Therewas nothing, now, that she couldn't buy, nowhere that shecouldn't go: she had only to choose and to triumph. And for awhile the surface-excitement of her life gave her the illusionof enjoyment.
Strefford, as she had expected, had postponed his return toEngland, and they had now been for nearly three weeks togetherin their new, and virtually avowed, relation. She had fanciedthat, after all, the easiest part of it would be just the beingwith Strefford--the falling back on their old tried friendshipto efface the sense of strangeness. But, though she had so soongrown used to his caresses, he himself remained curiouslyunfamiliar: she was hardly sure, at times, that it was the oldStrefford she was talking to. It was not that his point of viewhad changed, but that new things occupied and absorbed him. Inall the small sides of his great situation he took an almostchildish satisfaction; and though he still laughed at both itsprivileges and its obligations, it was now with a jealouslaughter.
It amused him inexhaustibly, for instance, to be made up to byall the people who had always disapproved of him, and to uniteat the same table persons who had to dissemble their annoyanceat being invited together lest they should not be invited atall. Equally exhilarating was the capricious favouring of thedull and dowdy on occasions when the brilliant and disreputableexpected his notice. It enchanted him, for example, to ask theold Duchess of Dunes and Violet Melrose to dine with the Vicarof Altringham, on his way to Switzerland for a month's holiday,and to watch the face of the Vicar's wife while the Duchessnarrated her last difficulties with book-makers and money-lenders, and Violet proclaimed the rights of Love and Genius toall that had once been supposed to belong exclusively toRespectability and Dulness.
Susy had to confess that her own amusements were hardly of ahigher order; but then she put up with them for lack of better,whereas Strefford, who might have had what he pleased, wascompletely satisfied with such triumphs.
Somehow, in spite of his honours and his opportunities, heseemed to have shrunk. The old Strefford had certainly been alarger person, and she wondered if material prosperity werealways a beginning of ossification. Strefford had been muchmore fun when he lived by his wits. Sometimes, now, when hetried to talk of politics, or assert himself on some question ofpublic interest, she was startled by his limitations. Formerly,when he was not sure of his ground, it had been his way to turnthe difficulty by glib nonsense or easy irony; now he wasactually dull, at times almost pompous. She noticed too, forthe first time, that he did not always hear clearly when severalpeople were talking at once, or when he was at the theatre; andhe 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 correspondingmental infirmity.
These thoughts did not always trouble her. The current of idleactivity on which they were both gliding was her native elementas well as his; and never had its tide been as swift, its wavesas buoyant. In his relation to her, too, he was full of tactand consideration. She saw that he still remembered theirfrightened exchange of glances after their first kiss; and thesense of this little hidden spring of imagination in him wassometimes enough for her thirst.
She had always had a rather masculine punctuality in keeping herword, and after she had promised Strefford to take steps towarda divorce she had promptly set about doing it. A suddenreluctance prevented her asking the advice of friends like EllieVanderlyn, whom she knew to be in the thick of the samenegotiations, and all she could think of was to consult a youngAmerican lawyer practicing in Paris, with whom she felt shecould talk the more easily because he was not from New York, andprobably unacquainted with her history.
She was so ignorant of the procedure in such matters that shewas surprised and relieved at his asking few personal questions;but it was a shock to learn that a divorce could not beobtained, either in New York or Paris, merely on the ground ofdesertion or incompatibility.
"I thought nowadays ... if people preferred to live apart ... itcould always be managed," she stammered, wondering at her ownignorance, after the many conjugal ruptures she had assisted at.
The young lawyer smiled, and coloured slightly. His lovelyclient evidently intimidated him by her grace, and still more byher inexperience.
"It can be--generally," he admitted; "and especially so if ...
as I gather is the case ... your husband is equallyanxious ....""Oh, quite!" she exclaimed, suddenly humiliated by having toadmit 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 thelawyers 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 muchperturbed by the idea of having to communicate with Nick tofollow any other train of thought. How could she write such aletter? And yet how could she confess to the lawyer that shehad not the courage to do so? He would, of course, tell her togo home and be reconciled. She hesitated perplexedly.
"Wouldn't it be better," she suggested, "if the letter were tocome from--from your office?"He considered this politely. "On the whole: no. If, as I takeit, an amicable arrangement is necessary--to secure therequisite evidence then a line from you, suggesting aninterview, seems to me more advisable.""An interview? Is an interview necessary?" She was ashamed toshow her agitation to this cautiously smiling young man, whomust wonder at her childish lack of understanding; but the breakin 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 wassomething one went out--or sent out--to buy in a shop:
something concrete and portable, that Strefford's money couldpay for, and that it required no personal participation toobtain. What a fool the lawyer must think her! Stiffeningherself, she rose from her seat.
"My husband and I don't wish to see each other again .... I'msure it would be useless ... and very painful.""You are the best judge, of course. But in any case, a letterfrom you, a friendly letter, seems wiser ... considering theapparent lack of evidence ....""Very well, then; I'll write," she agreed, and hurried away,scarcely hearing his parting injunction that she should take acopy of her letter.
That night she wrote. At the last moment it might have beenimpossible, if at the theatre little Breckenridge had not bobbedinto her box. He was just back from Rome, where he had dinedwith the Hickses ("a bang-up show--they're really lances-youwouldn't know them!"), and had met there Lansing, whom hereported as intending to marry Coral "as soon as things weresettled". "You were dead right, weren't you, Susy," hesnickered, "that night in Venice last summer, when we allthought you were joking about their engagement? Pity now youchucked our surprise visit to the Hickses, and sent Streff up todrag us back just as we were breaking in! You remember?"He flung off the "Streff" airily, in the old way, but with atentative side-glance at his host; and Lord Altringham, leaningtoward Susy, said coldly: "Was Breckenridge speaking about me?
I didn't catch what he said. Does he speak indistinctly--or amI getting deaf, I wonder?"After that it seemed comparatively easy, when Strefford haddropped her at her hotel, to go upstairs and write. She dashedoff the date and her address, and then stopped; but suddenly sheremembered Breckenridge's snicker, and the words rushed fromher. "Nick dear, it was July when you left Venice, and I havehad no word from you since the note in which you said you hadgone for a few days, and that I should hear soon again.
"You haven't written yet, and it is five months since you leftme. That means, I suppose, that you want to take back yourfreedom 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 arenow. I don't know how to put these things but since you seemunwilling to write to me perhaps you would prefer to send youranswer to Mr. Frederic Spearman, the American lawyer here. Hisaddress 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 wouldsound like a mockery--and she would rather her letter shouldseem bitter than unfeeling. Above all, she wanted to get itdone. To have to re-write even those few lines would betorture. So she left "I hope," and simply added: "to hearbefore long what you have decided."She read it over, and shivered. Not one word of the past-notone allusion to that mysterious interweaving of their liveswhich had enclosed them one in the other like the flower in itssheath! What place had such memories in such a letter? She hadthe feeling that she wanted to hide that other Nick away in herown bosom, and with him the other Susy, the Susy he had onceimagined her to be .... Neither of them seemed concerned withthe present business.
The letter done, she stared at the sealed envelope till itspresence in the room became intolerable, and she understood thatshe must either tear it up or post it immediately. She wentdown to the hall of the sleeping hotel, and bribed the night-porter to carry the letter to the nearest post office, though heobjected that, at that hour, no time would be gained. "I wantit out of the house," she insisted: and waited sternly by thedesk, in her dressing-gown, till he had performed the errand.
As she re-entered her room, the disordered writing-table struckher; and she remembered the lawyer's injunction to take a copyof 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, thatshe would never, as long as she lived, forget a word of thatletter--that night after night she would lie down, as she waslying down to-night, to stare wide-eyed for hours into thedarkness, while a voice in her brain monotonously hammered out:
"Nick dear, it was July when you left me ..." and so on, wordafter word, down to the last fatal syllable?
STREFFORD was leaving for England.
Once assured that Susy had taken the first step toward freeingherself, he frankly regarded her as his affianced wife, andcould see no reason for further mystery. She understood hisimpatience to have their plans settled; it would protect himfrom the formidable menace of the marriageable, and causepeople, as he said, to stop meddling. Now that the novelty ofhis situation was wearing off, his natural indolence reasserteditself, and there was nothing he dreaded more than having to beon his guard against the innumerable plans that his well-wisherswere perpetually making for him. Sometimes Susy fancied he wasmarrying her because to do so was to follow the line of leastresistance.
"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 ofthe Bois de Boulogne, insisting on the settlement of variouspreliminaries. "I believe I'm only a protection to you."An odd gleam passed behind his eyes, and she instantly guessedthat 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-howare you going to defend yourself for another year?""Ah, you've got to see to that; you've got to take a littlehouse 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'sall you care--!" But caring was exactly the factor she wanted,as much as possible, to keep out of their talk and theirthoughts. She could not ask him how much he cared withoutlaying herself open to the same question; and that way terrorlay. As a matter of fact, though Strefford was not an ardentwooer--perhaps from tact, perhaps from temperament, perhapsmerely from the long habit of belittling and disintegratingevery sentiment and every conviction--yet she knew he did carefor her as much as he was capable of caring for anyone. If theelement of habit entered largely into the feeling--if he likedher, above all, because he was used to her, knew her views, herindulgences, her allowances, knew he was never likely to bebored, and almost certain to be amused, by her; why, suchingredients though not of the fieriest, were perhaps those mostlikely to keep his feeling for her at a pleasant temperature.
She had had a taste of the tropics, and wanted more equableweather; but the idea of having to fan his flame gently for ayear was unspeakably depressing to her. Yet all this wasprecisely what she could not say. The long period of probation,during which, as she knew, she would have to amuse him, to guardhim, to hold him, and to keep off the other women, was anecessary part of their situation. She was sure that, as littleBreckenridge would have said, she could "pull it off"; but shedid not want to think about it. What she would have preferredwould have been to go away--no matter where and not seeStrefford again till they were married. But she dared not tellhim that either.
"A little house in London--?" She wondered.
"Well, I suppose you've got to have some sort of a roof overyour head.""I suppose so."He sat down beside her. "If you like me well enough to live atAltringham some day, won't you, in the meantime, let me provideyou with a smaller and more convenient establishment?"Still she hesitated. The alternative, she knew, would be tolive on Ursula Gillow, Violet Melrose, or some other of her richfriends, any one of whom would be ready to lavish the largesthospitality on the prospective Lady Altringham. Such anarrangement, in the long run, would be no less humiliating toher pride, no less destructive to her independence, thanAltringham's little establishment. But she temporized. "Ishall go over to London in December, and stay for a while withvarious people--then we can look about.""All right; as you like." He obviously considered herhesitation ridiculous, but was too full of satisfaction at herhaving started divorce proceedings to be chilled by her reply.
"And now, look here, my dear; couldn't I give you some sort of aring?""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 andBockheimer yesterday, in the rue de la Paix, picking outsapphires. Do you like sapphires, or emeralds? Or just adiamond? I've seen a thumping one .... I'd like you to haveit."Ellie and Bockheimer! How she hated the conjunction of thenames! Their case always seemed to her like a caricature of herown, and she felt an unreasoning resentment against Ellie forhaving selected the same season for her unmating and re-mating.
"I wish you wouldn't speak of them, Streff ... as if they werelike us! I can hardly bear to sit in the same room with EllieVanderlyn.""Hullo? What's wrong? You mean because of her giving upClarissa?""Not that only .... You don't know .... I can't tell you ...."She shivered at the memory, and rose restlessly from the benchwhere they had been sitting.
Strefford gave his careless shrug. "Well, my dear, you canhardly expect me to agree, for after all it was to Ellie I owedthe luck of being so long alone with you in Venice. If she andAlgie hadn't prolonged their honeymoon at the villa--"He stopped abruptly, and looked at Susy. She was conscious thatevery drop of blood had left her face. She felt it ebbing awayfrom her heart, flowing out of her as if from all her severedarteries, till it seemed as though nothing were left of life inher but one point of irreducible pain.
"Ellie--at your villa? What do you mean? Was it Ellie andBockheimer 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? Thatbeastly Bockheimer simply smothered me with gold. Ah, well,there's one good thing: I shall never have to let the villaagain! I rather like the little place myself, and I daresayonce 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 swamand danced before her eyes.
"Then she was there while I was posting all those letters forher--?""Letters--what letters? What makes you look so frightfullyupset?"She pursued her thought as if he had not spoken. "She and AlgieBockheimer arrived there the very day that Nick and I left?""I suppose so. I thought she'd told you. Ellie always tellseverybody 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 Ireally don't see--"But Susy, still blind to everything but the dance of dizzysparks before her eyes, pressed on as if she had not heard him.
"It was their motor, then, that took us to Milan! It was AlgieBockheimer's motor!" She did not know why, but this seemed toher the most humiliating incident in the whole hateful business.
She remembered Nick's reluctance to use the motor-sheremembered his look when she had boasted of her "managing." Thenausea 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 littletip .... It was to save our railway fares to Milan ... extraluggage 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 beganimpetuously; and then stopped. How could she explain to himthat what revolted her was not so much the fact of his havinggiven the little house, as soon as she and Nick had left it, tothose two people of all others--though the vision of them in thesweet secret house, and under the plane-trees of the terrace,drew such a trail of slime across her golden hours? No, it wasnot that from which she most recoiled, but from the fact thatStrefford, living in luxury in Nelson Vanderlyn's house, shouldat the same time have secretly abetted Ellie Vanderlyn's love-affairs, and allowed her--for a handsome price--to shelter themunder his own roof. The reproach trembled on her lip--but sheremembered her own part in the wretched business, and theimpossibility of avowing it to Strefford, and of revealing tohim that Nick had left her for that very reason. She was notafraid that the discovery would diminish her in Strefford'seyes: he was untroubled by moral problems, and would laugh awayher avowal, with a sneer at Nick in his new part of moralist.
But that was just what she could not bear: that anyone shouldcast a doubt on the genuineness of Nick's standards, or shouldknow how far below them she had fallen.
She remained silent, and Strefford, after a moment, drew hergently down to the seat beside him. "Susy, upon my soul I don'tknow what you're driving at. Is it me you're angry with-oryourself? And what's it all about! Are you disgusted because Ilet 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 myliving somehow! One doesn't run across a bridal pair everyday ...."She lifted her eyes to his puzzled incredulous face. PoorStreff! No, it was not with him that she was angry. Why shouldshe be? Even that ill-advised disclosure had told her nothingshe had not already known about him. It had simply revealed toher once more the real point of view of the people he and shelived among, had shown her that, in spite of the superficialdifference, he felt as they felt, judged as they judged, wasblind as they were-and as she would be expected to be, shouldshe once again become one of them. What was the use of beingplaced by fortune above such shifts and compromises, if in one'sheart one still condoned them? And she would have to--she wouldcatch the general note, grow blunted as those other people wereblunted, and gradually come to wonder at her own revolt, asStrefford now honestly wondered at it. She felt as though shewere on the point of losing some new-found treasure, a treasureprecious only to herself, but beside which all he offered herwas nothing, the triumph of her wounded pride nothing, thesecurity 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'sindignation had shut her out from their Paradise; but there hadbeen a cruel bliss in the pain. Nick had not opened her eyes tonew truths, but had waked in her again something which had lainunconscious under years of accumulated indifference. And thatre-awakened sense had never left her since, and had somehow kepther from utter loneliness because it was a secret shared withNick, a gift she owed to Nick, and which, in leaving her, hecould not take from her. It was almost, she suddenly felt, asif he had left her with a child.
"My dear girl," Strefford said, with a resigned glance at hiswatch, "you know we're dining at the Embassy ...."At the Embassy? She looked at him vaguely: then sheremembered. Yes, they were dining that night at the Ascots',with Strefford's cousin, the Duke of Dunes, and his wife, thehandsome irreproachable young Duchess; with the old gamblingDowager Duchess, whom her son and daughter-in-law had come overfrom England to see; and with other English and French guests ofa rank and standing worthy of the Duneses. Susy knew that herinclusion in such a dinner could mean but one thing: it was herdefinite recognition as Altringham's future wife. She was "thelittle American" whom one had to ask when one invited him, evenon ceremonial occasions. The family had accepted her; theEmbassy could but follow suit.
"It's late, dear; and I've got to see someone on businessfirst," Strefford reminded her patiently.
"Oh, Streff--I can't, I can't!" The words broke from herwithout her knowing what she was saying. "I can't go withyou--I can't go to the Embassy. I can't go on any longer likethis ...." 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 sallowit turned to a dusky white, and lines of obstinacy deepenedbetween 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 instantlyremembered that it was the only thing he could be expected tosay, since it was just because he couldn't understand that shewas 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'retrying to say?"Her head drooped, and she saw the dead leaves whirling acrossthe path at her feet, lifted on a sudden wintry gust.
"The reason," he continued, clearing his throat with a stiffsmile, "is not quite as important to me as the fact."She stood speechless, agonized by his pain. But still, shethought, he had remembered the dinner at the Embassy. Thethought gave her courage to go on.
"It wouldn't do, Streff. I'm not a bit the kind of person tomake 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 arather long time to find it out." She saw that his new-bornsense of his own consequence was making him suffer even morethan his wounded affection; and that again gave her courage.
"If I've taken long it's all the more reason why I shouldn'ttake longer. If I've made a mistake it's you who would havesuffered from it ....""Thanks," he said, "for your extreme solicitude."She looked at him helplessly, penetrated by the despairing senseof their inaccessibility to each other. Then she rememberedthat Nick, during their last talk together, had seemed asinaccessible, and wondered if, when human souls try to get toonear each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs toeach other's vision. She would have liked to say this toStreff-but he would not have understood it either. The senseof loneliness once more enveloped her, and she groped in vainfor 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! Whateveris wrong, it needn't prevent my seeing you home." He glancedtoward the taxi that awaited them at the end of the deserteddrive.
"No, please. You're in a hurry; take the taxi. I wantimmensely 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 theEmbassy."He released her and drew back. "Oh, very well," he answeredcoldly; 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 wasneither her fault nor his ....
AS she fled on toward the lights of the streets a breath offreedom seemed to blow into her face.
Like a weary load the accumulated hypocrisies of the last monthshad dropped from her: she was herself again, Nick's Susy, andno one else's. She sped on, staring with bright bewildered eyesat the stately facades of the La Muette quarter, theperspectives of bare trees, the awakening glitter of shop-windows holding out to her all the things she would never againbe able to buy ....
In an avenue of shops she paused before a milliner's window, andsaid to herself: "Why shouldn't I earn my living by trimminghats?" She met work-girls streaming out under a doorway, andscattering to catch trams and omnibuses; and she looked withnewly-wakened interest at their tired independent faces. "Whyshouldn't I earn my living as well as they do?" she thought. Alittle farther on she passed a Sister of Charity with softlytrotting feet, a calm anonymous glance, and hands hidden in hercapacious sleeves. Susy looked at her and thought: "Whyshouldn't I be a Sister, and have no money to worry about, andtrot about under a white coif helping poor people?"All these strangers on whom she smiled in passing, and glancedback at enviously, were free from the necessities that enslavedher, and would not have known what she meant if she had toldthem that she must have so much money for her dresses, so muchfor her cigarettes, so much for bridge and cabs and tips, andall kinds of extras, and that at that moment she ought to behurrying back to a dinner at the British Embassy, where herpermanent right to such luxuries was to be solemnly recognizedand ratified.
The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as withstifling fumes. She stopped at a street-corner, drawing longpanting breaths as if she had been running a race. Then, slowlyand aimlessly, she began to saunter along a street of smallprivate houses in damp gardens that led to the Avenue du Bois.
She sat down on a bench. Not far off, the Arc de Triompheraised its august bulk, and beyond it a river of lights streameddown toward Paris, and the stir of the city's heart-beatstroubled the quiet in her bosom. But not for long. She seemedto be looking at it all from the other side of the grave; and asshe got up and wandered down the Champs Elysees, half empty inthe evening lull between dusk and dinner, she felt as if theglittering avenue were really changed into the Field of Shadowsfrom which it takes its name, and as if she were a ghost amongghosts.
Halfway home, a weakness of loneliness overcame her, and sheseated herself under the trees near the Rond Point. Lines ofmotors and carriages were beginning to animate the convergingthoroughfares, streaming abreast, crossing, winding in and outof each other in a tangle of hurried pleasure-seeking. Shecaught the light on jewels and shirt-fronts and hard bored eyesemerging from dim billows of fur and velvet. She seemed to hearwhat the couples were saying to each other, she pictured thedrawing-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 theircarriage-wheels. And again the loneliness vanished in a senseof 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 thelast person she cared to run across, and she shrank backinvoluntarily. What did he know, what had he guessed, of hercomplicity in his wife's affairs? No doubt Ellie had blabbed itall out by this time; she was just as likely to confide herlove-affairs to Nelson as to anyone else, now that theBockheimer 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 inVanderlyn's, and his round pink face bent on her with all itsold urbanity. Did nothing matter, then, in this world she wasfleeing from, did no one love or hate or remember?
"No idea you were in Paris--just got here myself," Vanderlyncontinued, visibly delighted at the meeting. "Look here, don'tsuppose you're out of a job this evening by any chance, andwould come and cheer up a lone bachelor, eh? No? You are?
Well, that's luck for once! I say, where shall we go? One ofthe places where they dance, I suppose? Yes, I twirl the lightfantastic once in a while myself. Got to keep up with thetimes! Hold on, taxi! Here--I'll drive you home first, andwait while you jump into your toggery. Lots of time." As hesteered her toward the carriage she noticed that he had a goutylimp, 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 restaurantsby the Place de la Bourse."He seemed surprised but relieved at the suggestion, and theyrolled off together. In a corner at Bauge's they found a quiettable, screened from the other diners, and while Vanderlynadjusted his eyeglasses to study the carte Susy stole a longlook at him. He was dressed with even more than his usualformal trimness, and she detected, in an ultra-flat wrist-watchand discreetly expensive waistcoat buttons, an attempt atsmartness altogether new. His face had undergone the samechange: its familiar look of worn optimism had been, as itwere, done up to match his clothes, as though a sort of moralcosmetic had made him pinker, shinier and sprightlier withoutreally rejuvenating him. A thin veil of high spirits had merelybeen drawn over his face, as the shining strands of hair wereskilfully brushed over his baldness.
"Here! Carte des vins, waiter! What champagne, Susy?" Hechose, 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 youthink? Well, I don't mind ... it's rather a jolly change fromthe 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 afoggy benevolence.
As the champagne flowed his confidences flowed with it.
"Suppose you know what I'm here for--this divorce business? Wewanted to settle it quietly without a fuss, and of course Parisis the best place for that sort of job. Live and let live; noquestions 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 thoughtNelson would make a row when he found out. He had always beenaddicted to truculent anecdotes about unfaithful wives, and thevery formula of his perpetual ejaculation-- "Caught you at it,eh?"--seemed to hint at a constant preoccupation with suchideas. But now it was evident that, as the saying was, he had"swallowed his dose" like all the others. No strong blast ofindignation had momentarily lifted him above his normal stature:
he remained a little man among little men, and his eagerness torebuild his life with all the old smiling optimism reminded Susyof the patient industry of an ant remaking its ruined ant-heap.
"Tell you what, great thing, this liberty! Everything's changednowadays; why shouldn't marriage be too? A man can get out of abusiness partnership when he wants to; but the parsons want tokeep us noosed up to each other for life because we've blunderedinto a church one day and said 'Yes' before one of 'em. No,no--that's too easy. We've got beyond that. Science, and allthese new discoveries .... I say the Ten Commandments were madefor man, and not man for the Commandments; and there ain't aword against divorce in 'em, anyhow! That's what I tell my poorold mother, who builds everything on her Bible. Find me theplace where it says: 'Thou shalt not sue for divorce.' Itmakes her wild, poor old lady, because she can't; and shedoesn't know how they happen to have left it out.... I ratherthink Moses left it out because he knew more about human naturethan these snivelling modern parsons do. Not that they'llalways bear investigating either; but I don't care about that.
Live and let live, eh, Susy? Haven't we all got a right to ourAffinities? I hear you're following our example yourself.
First-rate idea: I don't mind telling you I saw it coming onlast summer at Venice. Caught you at it, so to speak! OldNelson ain't as blind as people think. Here, let's open anotherbottle to the health of Streff and Mrs. Streff!"She caught the hand with which he was signalling to thesommelier. This flushed and garrulous Nelson moved her morepoignantly 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 yougot 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 gladyou're in such good spirits. I rather thought--"He interrupted her quickly. "Thought I'd cut up a rumpus-dosome shooting? I know--people did." He twisted his moustache,evidently proud of his reputation. "Well, maybe I did see redfor a day or two--but I'm a philosopher, first and last. BeforeI went into banking I'd made and lost two fortunes out West.
Well, how did I build 'em up again? Not by shooting anybodyeven myself. By just buckling to, and beginning all over again.
That's how ... and that's what I am doing now. Beginning allover again. " His voice dropped from boastfulness to a noteof wistful melancholy, the look of strained jauntiness fell fromhis 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 solitudethat any presence out of the past was like a spar to which heclung. Whatever he knew or guessed of the part she had playedin his disaster, it was not callousness that had made him greether with such forgiving warmth, but the same sense of smallness,insignificance and isolation which perpetually hung like a coldfog on her own horizon. Suddenly she too felt old--old andunspeakably tired.
"It's been nice seeing you, Nelson. But now I must be gettinghome."He offered no objection, but asked for the bill, resumed hisjaunty air while he scattered largesse among the waiters, andsauntered 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 handon 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 aking ... 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 hecovered his face.
"Oh, poor Nelson--poor Nelson, " Susy breathed. While their cabrattled across the Place du Carrousel, and over the bridge, hecontinued to sit beside her with hidden face. At last he pulledout a scented handkerchief, rubbed his eyes with it, and gropedfor another cigarette.
"I'm all right! Tell her that, will you, Susy? There are someof our old times I don't suppose I shall ever forget; but theymake me feel kindly to her, and not angry. I didn't know itwould be so, beforehand--but it is .... And now the thing'ssettled 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 drewup at her hotel .... "Tell her I understand, will you? I'drather like her to know that .... ""I'll tell her, Nelson," she promised; and climbed the stairsalone to her dreary room.
Susy's one fear was that Strefford, when he returned the nextday, should treat their talk of the previous evening as a fit of"nerves" to be jested away. He might, indeed, resent herbehaviour too deeply to seek to see her at once; but hiseasygoing modern attitude toward conduct and convictions madethat improbable. She had an idea that what he had most mindedwas her dropping so unceremoniously out of the Embassy Dinner.
But, after all, why should she see him again? She had hadenough of explanations during the last months to have learnedhow seldom they explain anything. If the other person did notunderstand 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 withNelson Vanderlyn--to keep herself free, aloof, to retain herhold on her precariously recovered self. She sat down and wroteto Strefford--and the letter was only a little less painful towrite than the one she had despatched to Nick. It was not thather own feelings were in any like measure engaged; but because,as the decision to give up Strefford affirmed itself, sheremembered only his kindness, his forbearance, his good humour,and all the other qualities she had always liked in him; andbecause she felt ashamed of the hesitations which must cause himso much pain and humiliation. Yes: humiliation chiefly. Sheknew that what she had to say would hurt his pride, in whateverway she framed her renunciation; and her pen wavered, hating itstask. Then she remembered Vanderlyn's words about his wife:
"There are some of our old times I don't suppose I shall everforget--" and a phrase of Grace Fulmer's that she had but halfgrasped at the time: "You haven't been married long enough tounderstand how trifling such things seem in the balance of one'smemories."Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she intothe labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some ofits thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the otherhalf-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was alreadydawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun inmutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even inthe moment of flight and denial.
"The real reason is that you're not Nick" was what she wouldhave said to Strefford if she had dared to set down the baretruth; and she knew that, whatever she wrote, he was too acutenot to read that into it.
"He'll think it's because I'm still in love with Nick ... andperhaps I am. But even if I were, the difference doesn't seemto lie there, after all, but deeper, in things we've shared thatseem to be meant to outlast love, or to change it into somethingdifferent." If she could have hoped to make Streffordunderstand that, the letter would have been easy enough towrite--but she knew just at what point his imagination wouldfail, 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 onher. She had succeeded in driving from her mind all vainhesitations, doubts, returns upon herself: her healthy systemnaturally rejected them. But they left a queer emptiness inwhich her thoughts rattled about as thoughts might, shesupposed, in the first moments after death--before one got usedto it. To get used to being dead: that seemed to be herimmediate business. And she felt such a novice at it--felt sohorribly alive! How had those others learned to do withoutliving? Nelson--well, he was still in the throes; and probablynever would understand, or be able to communicate, the lessonwhen he had mastered it. But Grace Fulmer--she suddenlyremembered that Grace was in Paris, and set forth to find her.
NICK LANSING had walked out a long way into the Campagna. Hishours were seldom his own, for both Mr. and Mrs. Hicks werebecoming more and more addicted to sudden and somewhat imperiousdemands upon his time; but on this occasion he had simplyslipped away after luncheon, and taking the tram to the PortaSalaria, had wandered on thence in the direction of the PonteNomentano.
He wanted to get away and think; but now that he had done it thebusiness proved as unfruitful as everything he had put his handto since he had left Venice. Think--think about what? Hisfuture seemed to him a negligible matter since he had received,two months earlier, the few lines in which Susy had asked himfor her freedom.
The letter had been a shock--though he had fancied himself soprepared for it--yet it had also, in another sense, been arelief, since, now that at last circumstances compelled him towrite to her, they also told him what to say. And he had said itas briefly and simply as possible, telling her that he would putno obstacle in the way of her release, that he held himself ather lawyer's disposal to answer any further communication--andthat he would never forget their days together, or cease tobless her for them.
That was all. He gave his Roman banker's address, and waitedfor another letter; but none came. Probably the "formalities,"whatever they were, took longer than he had supposed; and beingin no haste to recover his own liberty, he did not try to learnthe cause of the delay. From that moment, however, heconsidered himself virtually free, and ceased, by the sametoken, to take any interest in his own future. His life seemedas flat as a convalescent's first days after the fever hasdropped.
The only thing he was sure of was that he was not going toremain in the Hickses' employ: when they left Rome for CentralAsia 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 gratifyingto Mr. Buttles. To be treated by Mr. and Mrs. Hicks as a paidoracle, a paraded and petted piece of property, was a good dealmore distasteful than he could have imagined any relation withthese kindly people could be. And since their aspirations hadbecome frankly social he found his task, if easier, yet far lesscongenial than during his first months with them. He preferredpatiently explaining to Mrs. Hicks, for the hundredth time, thatSassanian and Saracenic were not interchangeable terms, tounravelling for her the genealogies of her titled guests, andreminding her, when she "seated" her dinner-parties, that Dukesranked higher than Princes. No--the job was decidedlyintolerable; and he would have to look out for another means ofearning his living. But that was not what he had really gotaway to think about. He knew he should never starve; he hadeven begun to believe again in his book. What he wanted tothink of was Susy--or rather, it was Susy that he could not helpthinking of, on whatever train of thought he set out.
Again and again he fancied he had established a truce with thepast: had come to terms--the terms of defeat and failure withthat bright enemy called happiness. And, in truth, he hadreached the point of definitely knowing that he could neverreturn to the kind of life that he and Susy had embarked on. Ithad been the tragedy, of their relation that loving her rousedin him ideals she could never satisfy. He had fallen in lovewith her because she was, like himself, amused, unprejudiced anddisenchanted; and he could not go on loving her unless sheceased to be all these things. From that circle there was noissue, and in it he desperately revolved.
If he had not heard such persistent rumours of her re-marriageto 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, atleast, he honestly supposed to be his state of mind until hefound himself, as on this occasion, free to follow out histhought to its end. That end, invariably, was Susy; not thebundle of qualities and defects into which his critical spirithad tried to sort her out, but the soft blur of identity, ofpersonality, of eyes, hair, mouth, laugh, tricks of speech andgesture, that were all so solely and profoundly her own, and yetso mysteriously independent of what she might do, say, think, incrucial circumstances. He remembered her once saying to him:
"After all, you were right when you wanted me to be yourmistress," and the indignant stare of incredulity with which hehad answered her. Yet in these hours it was the palpable imageof her that clung closest, till, as invariably happened, hisvision came full circle, and feeling her on his breast he wantedher also in his soul.
Well--such all-encompassing loves were the rarest of humanexperiences; he smiled at his presumption in wanting no other.
Wearily he turned, and tramped homeward through the wintertwilight ....
At the door of the hotel he ran across the Prince of Teutoburg'saide-de-camp. They had not met for some days, and Nick had avague feeling that if the Prince's matrimonial designs tookdefinite shape he himself was not likely, after all, to be theirchosen exponent. He had surprised, now and then, a certaindistrustful coldness under the Princess Mother's cordial glance,and had concluded that she perhaps suspected him of being anobstacle to her son's aspirations. He had no idea of playingthat part, but was not sorry to appear to; for he was sincerelyattached to Coral Hicks, and hoped for her a more human fatethan that of becoming Prince Anastasius's consort.
This evening, however, he was struck by the beaming alacrity ofthe aide-de-camp's greeting. Whatever cloud had hung betweenthem had lifted: the Teutoburg clan, for one reason or another,no longer feared or distrusted him. The change was conveyed ina mere hand-pressure, a brief exchange of words, for the aide-de-camp was hastening after a well-known dowager of the oldRoman world, whom he helped into a large coronetted broughamwhich looked as if it had been extracted, for some ceremonialpurpose, from a museum of historic vehicles. And in an instantit flashed on Lansing that this lady had been the person chosento lay the Prince's offer at Miss Hicks's feet.
The discovery piqued him; and instead of making straight for hisown room he went up to Mrs. Hicks's drawing-room.
The room was empty, but traces of elaborate tea pervaded it, andan immense bouquet of stiff roses lay on the centre table. Ashe 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 youto come to her own sitting-room."She led him across the ante-chamber and down the passage to theseparate suite which Miss Hicks inhabited. On the thresholdEldorada gasped out emotionally: "You'll find her lookinglovely--" and jerked away with a sob as he entered.
Coral Hicks was never lovely: but she certainly lookedunusually handsome. Perhaps it was the long dress of blackvelvet which, outlined against a shaded lamp, made her strongbuild seem slenderer, or perhaps the slight flush on her duskycheek: a bloom of womanhood hung upon her which she made noeffort to dissemble. Indeed, it was one of her originalitiesthat she always gravely and courageously revealed the utmost ofwhatever 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'sheart contracted with pity and perplexity.
"Oh, Coral--it's not decided?"She scrutinized him for a last penetrating moment; then shelooked away. "I'm never long deciding."He hesitated, choking with contradictory impulses, and afraid toformulate any, lest they should either mislead or pain her.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he questioned lamely; and instantlyperceived his blunder.
She sat down, and looked up at him under brooding lashes--had heever 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. Youcan say now whatever you might have said sooner. I'm notmarried 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 stillexpected 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 Iwant is your advice.""At the eleventh hour?""Or the twelfth." She paused. "What shall I do?" shequestioned, with a sudden accent of helplessness.
He looked at her as helplessly. He could not say: "Askyourself--ask your parents." Her next word would sweep awaysuch frail hypocrisies. Her "What shall I do?" meant "What areyou 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 foryou.""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'sthe best of it.""Well, I've tried, and failed. And I'm twenty-two, and I neverwas young. I suppose I haven't enough imagination." She drew adeep breath. "Now I want something different." She appeared tosearch for the word. "I want to be--prominent," she declared.
"Prominent?"She reddened swarthily. "Oh, you smile--you think it'sridiculous: it doesn't seem worth while to you. That's becauseyou've always had all those things. But I haven't. I know whatfather pushed up from, and I want to push up as high again--higher. No, I haven't got much imagination. I've always likedFacts. And I find I shall like the fact of being a Princess--choosing the people I associate with, and being up above allthese European grandees that father and mother bow down to,though they think they despise them. You can be up above thesepeople by just being yourself; you know how. But I need aplatform--a sky-scraper. Father and mother slaved to give me myeducation. They thought education was the important thing; but,since we've all three of us got mediocre minds, it has justlanded us among mediocre people. Don't you suppose I seethrough all the sham science and sham art and sham everythingwe're surrounded with? That's why I want to buy a place at thevery top, where I shall be powerful enough to get about me thepeople I want, the big people, the right people, and to helpthem I want to promote culture, like those Renaissance womenyou're always talking about. I want to do it for Apex City; doyou understand? And for father and mother too. I want allthose titles carved on my tombstone. They're facts, anyhow!
Don't laugh at me ...." She broke off with one of her clumsysmiles, and moved away from him to the other end of the room.
He sat looking at her with a curious feeling of admiration. Herharsh positivism was like a tonic to his disenchanted mood, andhe thought: "What a pity!"Aloud he said: "I don't feel like laughing at you. You're agreat 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?""Because you're the only man with whom I can imagine the otherkind of greatness."It moved him--moved him unexpectedly. He got as far as sayingto himself: "Good God, if she were not so hideously rich--" andthen of yielding for a moment to the persuasive vision of allthat he and she might do with those very riches which hedreaded. After all, there was nothing mean in her ideals theywere hard and material, in keeping with her primitive andmassive person; but they had a certain grim nobility. And whenshe spoke of "the other kind of greatness" he knew that sheunderstood what she was talking of, and was not merely sayingsomething to draw him on, to get him to commit himself. Therewas not a drop of guile in her, except that which her veryhonesty distilled.
"The other kind of greatness?" he repeated.
"Well, isn't that what you said happiness was? I wanted to behappy ... but one can't choose."He went up to her. "No, one can't choose. And how can anyonegive you happiness who hasn't got it himself?" He took herhands, feeling how large, muscular and voluntary they were, evenas they melted in his palms.
"My poor Coral, of what use can I ever be to you? What you needis to be loved."She drew back and gave him one of her straight strong glances:
"No," she said gallantly, "but just to love."
IN the persistent drizzle of a Paris winter morning Susy Lansingwalked back alone from the school at which she had justdeposited the four eldest Fulmers to the little house in Passywhere, for the last two months, she had been living with them.
She had on ready-made boots, an old waterproof and a last year'shat; but none of these facts disturbed her, though she took noparticular pride in them. The truth was that she was too busyto think much about them. Since she had assumed the charge ofthe Fulmer children, in the absence of both their parents inItaly, she had had to pass through such an arduousapprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her wakinghours was packed with things to do at once, and other things toremember to do later. There were only five Fulmers; but attimes they were like an army with banners, and their power ofself-multiplication was equalled only by the manner in whichthey could dwindle, vanish, grow mute, and become as it were asingle tumbled brown head bent over a book in some corner of thehouse in which nobody would ever have thought of hunting forthem--and which, of course, were it the bonne's room in theattic, or the subterranean closet where the trunks were kept,had been singled out by them for that very reason.
These changes from ubiquity to invisibility would have seemed toSusy, a few months earlier, one of the most maddening of manycharacteristics not calculated to promote repose. But now shefelt differently. She had grown interested in her charges, andthe search for a clue to their methods, whether tribal orindividual, was as exciting to her as the development of adetective story.
What interested her most in the whole stirring business was thediscovery that they had a method. These little creatures,pitched upward into experience on the tossing waves of theirparents' agitated lives, had managed to establish a rough-and-ready system of self-government. Junie, the eldest (the one whoalready chose her mother's hats, and tried to put order in herwardrobe) was the recognized head of the state. At twelve sheknew lots of things which her mother had never thoroughlylearned, and Susy, her temporary mother, had never even guessedat: she spoke with authority on all vital subjects, fromcastor-oil to flannel under-clothes, from the fair sharing ofstamps or marbles to the number of helpings of rice-pudding orjam which each child was entitled to.
There was hardly any appeal from her verdict; yet each of hersubjects revolved in his or her own orbit of independence,according to laws which Junie acknowledged and respected; andthe interpreting of this mysterious charter of rights andprivileges had not been without difficulty for Susy.
Besides this, there were material difficulties to deal with.
The six of them, and the breathless bonne who cooked and slavedfor them all, had but a slim budget to live on; and, as Junieremarked, you'd have thought the boys ate their shoes, the waythey vanished. They ate, certainly, a great deal else, andmostly of a nourishing and expensive kind. They had definiteviews about the amount and quality of their food, and werecapable of concerted rebellion when Susy's catering fell beneaththeir standard. All this made her life a hurried and harassingbusiness, but never-- what she had most feared it would be adull or depressing one.
It was not, she owned to herself, that the society of the Fulmerchildren had roused in her any abstract passion for the humanyoung. She knew--had known since Nick's first kiss--how shewould love any child of his and hers; and she had cherished poorlittle Clarissa Vanderlyn with a shrinking and wistfulsolicitude. But in these rough young Fulmers she took apositive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clearto her. It was because, in the first place, they were allintelligent; and because their intelligence had been fed only onthings worth caring for. However inadequate Grace Fulmer'sbringing-up of her increasing tribe had been, they had heard inher company nothing trivial or dull: good music, good books andgood talk had been their daily food, and if at times theystamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed bysuch privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetryand spoke with the voice of wisdom.
That had been Susy's discovery: for the first time she wasamong awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty.
>From their cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and NatFulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations,shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the greatimages of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures thatstood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman households.
No, the task she had undertaken for want of a better gave Susyno sense of a missed vocation: "mothering" on a large scalewould never, she perceived, be her job. Rather it gave her, inodd ways, the sense of being herself mothered, of taking herfirst steps in the life of immaterial values which had begun toseem so much more substantial than any she had known.
On the day when she had gone to Grace Fulmer for counsel andcomfort she had little guessed that they would come to her inthis form. She had found her friend, more than ever distractedand yet buoyant, riding the large untidy waves of her life withthe splashed ease of an amphibian. Grace was probably the onlyperson among Susy's friends who could have understood why shecould not make up her mind to marry Altringham; but at themoment Grace was too much absorbed in her own problems to paymuch attention to her friend's, and, according to her wont, sheimmediately "unpacked" her difficulties.
Nat was not getting what she had hoped out of his Europeanopportunity. Oh, she was enough of an artist herself to knowthat there must be fallow periods--that the impact of newimpressions seldom produced immediate results. She had allowedfor all that. But her past experience of Nat's moods had taughther to know just when he was assimilating, when impressions werefructifying in him. And now they were not, and he knew it aswell as she did. There had been too much rushing about, toomuch excitement and sterile flattery ... Mrs. Melrose? Well,yes, for a while ... the trip to Spain had been a love-journey,no doubt. Grace spoke calmly, but the lines of her facesharpened: she had suffered, oh horribly, at his going to Spainwithout her. Yet she couldn't, for the children's sake, affordto miss the big sum that Ursula Gillow had given her for herfortnight at Ruan. And her playing had struck people, and led,on the way back, to two or three profitable engagements inprivate houses in London. Fashionable society had made "alittle fuss" about her, and it had surprised and pleased Nat,and given her a new importance in his eyes. "He was beginningto forget that I wasn't only a nursery-maid, and it's been agood thing for him to be reminded ... but the great thing isthat with what I've earned he and I can go off to southern Italyand Sicily for three months. You know I know how to manage ...
and, alone with me, Nat will settle down to work: to observing,feeling, soaking things in. It's the only way. Mrs. Melrosewants to take him, to pay all the expenses again-well sheshan't. I'll pay them." Her worn cheek flushed with triumph.
"And you'll see what wonders will come of it .... Only there'sthe problem of the children. Junie quite agrees that we can'ttake them ...."Thereupon she had unfolded her idea. If Susy was at a looseend, and hard up, why shouldn't she take charge of the childrenwhile their parents were in Italy? For three months at most-Grace could promise it shouldn't be longer. They couldn't payher much, of course, but at least she would be lodged and fed.
"And, you know, it will end by interesting you--I'm sure itwill," the mother concluded, her irrepressible hopefulnessrising even to this height, while Susy stood before her with ahesitating smile.
Take care of five Fulmers for three months! The prospect cowedher. If there had been only Junie and Geordie, the oldest andyoungest of the band, she might have felt less hesitation. Butthere was Nat, the second in age, whose motor-horn had drivenher and Nick out to the hill-side on their fatal day at theFulmers' and there were the twins, Jack and Peggy, of whom shehad kept memories almost equally disquieting. To rule thisuproarious tribe would be a sterner business than trying tobeguile Clarissa Vanderlyn's ladylike leisure; and she wouldhave refused on the spot, as she had refused once before, if theonly possible alternatives had not come to seem so much lessbearable, and if Junie, called in for advice, and standingthere, small, plain and competent, had not said in her quietgrown-up voice: "Oh, yes, I'm sure Mrs. Lansing and I canmanage while you're away--especially if she reads aloud well."Reads aloud well! The stipulation had enchanted Susy. She hadnever before known children who cared to be read aloud to; sheremembered with a shiver her attempts to interest Clarissa inanything but gossip and the fashions, and the tone in which thechild had said, showing Strefford's trinket to her father:
"Because I said I'd rather have it than a book."And here were children who consented to be left for three monthsby their parents, but on condition that a good reader wasprovided for them!
"Very well--I will! But what shall I be expected to read toyou?" she had gaily questioned; and Junie had answered, afterone of her sober pauses of reflection: "The little ones likenearly everything; but Nat and I want poetry particularly,because if we read it to ourselves we so often pronounce thepuzzling words wrong, and then it sounds so horrid.""Oh, I hope I shall pronounce them right," Susy murmured,stricken with self-distrust and humility.
Apparently she did; for her reading was a success, and even thetwins and Geordie, once they had grown used to her, seemed toprefer a ringing page of Henry V, or the fairy scenes from theMidsummer Night's Dream, to their own more specializedliterature, though that had also at times to be provided.
There were, in fact, no lulls in her life with the Fulmers; butits commotions seemed to Susy less meaningless, and thereforeless fatiguing, than those that punctuated the existence ofpeople like Altringham, Ursula Gillow, Ellie Vanderlyn and theirtrain; and the noisy uncomfortable little house at Passy wasbeginning to greet her with the eyes of home when she returnedthere after her tramps to and from the children's classes. Atany rate she had the sense of doing something useful and evennecessary, and of earning her own keep, though on so modest ascale; and when the children were in their quiet mood, anddemanded books or music (or, even, on one occasion, at thesurprising Junie's instigation, a collective visit to theLouvre, where they recognized the most unlikely pictures, andthe two elders emitted startling technical judgments, and calledtheir companion's attention to details she had not observed); onthese occasions, Susy had a surprised sense of being drawn backinto her brief life with Nick, or even still farther and deeper,into those visions of Nick's own childhood on which the triviallater years had heaped their dust.
It was curious to think that if he and she had remainedtogether, and she had had a child--the vision used to come toher, in her sleepless hours, when she looked at little Geordie,in his cot by her bed--their life together might have been verymuch like the life she was now leading, a small obscure businessto the outer world, but to themselves how wide and deep andcrowded!
She could not bear, at that moment, the thought of giving upthis mystic relation to the life she had missed. In spite ofthe hurry and fatigue of her days, the shabbiness and discomfortof everything, and the hours when the children were as "horrid"as any other children, and turned a conspiracy of hostile facesto all her appeals; in spite of all this she did not want togive them up, and had decided, when their parents returned, toask to go back to America with them. Perhaps, if Nat's successcontinued, and Grace was able to work at her music, they wouldneed a kind of governess-companion. At any rate, she couldpicture no future less distasteful.
She had not sent to Mr. Spearman Nick's answer to her letter.
In the interval between writing to him and receiving his replyshe had broken with Strefford; she had therefore no object inseeking her freedom. If Nick wanted his, he knew he had only toask for it; and his silence, as the weeks passed, woke a fainthope in her. The hope flamed high when she read one day in thenewspapers a vague but evidently "inspired" allusion to thepossibility of an alliance between his Serene Highness thereigning Prince of Teutoburg-Waldhain and Miss Coral Hicks ofApex City; it sank to ashes when, a few days later, her eye liton a paragraph wherein Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Hicks "requested tostate" that there was no truth in the report.
On the foundation of these two statements Susy raised one watch-tower of hope after another, feverish edifices demolished orrebuilt by every chance hint from the outer world wherein Nick'sname figured with the Hickses'. And still, as the days passedand she heard nothing, either from him or from her lawyer, herflag continued to fly from the quaking structures.
Apart from the custody of the children there was indeed littleto distract her mind from these persistent broodings. Shewinced sometimes at the thought of the ease with which herfashionable friends had let her drop out of sight. In theperpetual purposeless rush of their days, the feverish making ofwinter plans, hurrying off to the Riviera or St. Moritz, Egyptor New York, there was no time to hunt up the vanished or towait for the laggard. Had they learned that she had broken her"engagement" (how she hated the word!) to Strefford, and had thefact gone about that she was once more only a poor hanger-on, tobe taken up when it was convenient, and ignored in theintervals? She did not know; though she fancied Strefford'snewly-developed pride would prevent his revealing to any onewhat had passed between them. For several days after her abruptflight he had made no sign; and though she longed to write andask his forgiveness she could not find the words. Finally itwas he who wrote: a short note, from Altringham, typical of allthat was best in the old Strefford. He had gone down toAltringham, he told her, to think quietly over their last talk,and try to understand what she had been driving at. He had toown that he couldn't; but that, he supposed, was the very headand front of his offending. Whatever he had done to displeaseher, he was sorry for; but he asked, in view of his invincibleignorance, to be allowed not to regard his offence as a causefor a final break. The possibility of that, he found, wouldmake him even more unhappy than he had foreseen; as she knew,his own happiness had always been his first object in life, andhe therefore begged her to suspend her decision a little longer.
He expected to be in Paris within another two months, and beforearriving he would write again, and ask her to see him.
The letter moved her but did not make her waver. She simplywrote that she was touched by his kindness, and would willinglysee him if he came to Paris later; though she was bound to tellhim that she had not yet changed her mind, and did not believeit would promote his happiness to have her try to do so.
He did not reply to this, and there was nothing further to keepher thoughts from revolving endlessly about her inmost hopes andfears.
On the rainy afternoon in question, tramping home from the"cours" (to which she was to return at six), she had said toherself that it was two months that very day since Nick hadknown she was ready to release him--and that after such a delayhe was not likely to take any further steps. The thought filledher with a vague ecstasy. She had had to fix an arbitrary dateas the term of her anguish, and she had fixed that one; andbehold she was justified. For what could his silence mean butthat he too ....
On the hall-table lay a typed envelope with the Paris postage-mark. She opened it carelessly, and saw that the letter-headbore Mr. Spearman's office address. The words beneath spunround before her eyes .... "Has notified us that he is at yourdisposal ... carry out your wishes ... arriving in Paris ... fixan appointment with his lawyers ...."Nick--it was Nick the words were talking of! It was the fact ofNick's return to Paris that was being described in thosepreposterous terms! She sank down on the bench beside thedripping umbrella-stand and stared vacantly before her. It hadfallen at last--this blow in which she now saw that she hadnever really believed! And yet she had imagined she wasprepared for it, had expected it, was already planning herfuture life in view of it--an effaced impersonal life in theservice of somebody else's children--when, in reality, underthat thin surface of abnegation and acceptance, all the oldhopes had been smouldering red-hot in their ashes! What was theuse of any self-discipline, any philosophy, any experience, ifthe lawless self underneath could in an instant consume themlike tinder?
She tried to collect herself--to understand what had happened.
Nick was coming to Paris--coming not to see her but to consulthis lawyer! It meant, of course, that he had definitelyresolved to claim his freedom; and that, if he had made up hismind to this final step, after more than six months of inactionand seeming indifference, it could be only because somethingunforeseen and decisive had happened to him. Feverishly, sheput together again the stray scraps of gossip and the newspaperparagraphs that had reached her in the last months. It wasevident that Miss Hicks's projected marriage with the Prince ofTeutoburg-Waldhain had been broken off at the last moment; andbroken off because she intended to marry Nick. The announcementof his arrival in Paris and the publication of Mr. and Mrs.
Hicks's formal denial of their daughter's betrothal coincidedtoo closely to admit of any other inference. Susy tried tograsp the reality of these assembled facts, to picture toherself their actual tangible results. She thought of CoralHicks bearing the name of Mrs. Nick Lansing--her name, Susy'sown!--and entering drawing-rooms with Nick in her wake, gailywelcomed by the very people who, a few months before, hadwelcomed Susy with the same warmth. In spite of Nick's growingdislike of society, and Coral's attitude of intellectualsuperiority, their wealth would fatally draw them back into theworld to which Nick was attached by all his habits andassociations. And no doubt it would amuse him to re-enter thatworld as a dispenser of hospitality, to play the part of hostwhere he had so long been a guest; just as Susy had once fanciedit would amuse her to re-enter it as Lady Altringham .... But,try as she would, now that the reality was so close on her, shecould not visualize it or relate it to herself. The merejuxtaposition of the two names--Coral, Nick--which in old timesshe had so often laughingly coupled, now produced a blur in herbrain.
She continued to sit helplessly beside the hall-table, the tearsrunning down her cheeks. The appearance of the bonne arousedher. Her youngest charge, Geordie, had been feverish for a dayor two; he was better, but still confined to the nursery, and hehad heard Susy unlock the house-door, and could not imagine whyshe had not come straight up to him. He now began to manifesthis indignation in a series of racking howls, and Susy, shakenout of her trance, dropped her cloak and umbrella and hurriedup.
"Oh, that child!" she groaned.
Under the Fulmer roof there was little time or space for theindulgence of private sorrows. From morning till night therewas always some immediate practical demand on one's attention;and Susy was beginning to see how, in contracted households,children may play a part less romantic but not less useful thanthat assigned to them in fiction, through the mere fact ofgiving their parents no leisure to dwell on irremediablegrievances. Though her own apprenticeship to family life hadbeen so short, she had already acquired the knack of rapidmental readjustment, and as she hurried up to the nursery herprivate cares were dispelled by a dozen problems of temperature,diet and medicine.
Such readjustment was of course only momentary; yet each time ithappened it seemed to give her more firmness and flexibility oftemper. "What a child I was myself six months ago!" shethought, wondering that Nick's influence, and the tragedy oftheir parting, should have done less to mature and steady herthan these few weeks in a house full of children.
Pacifying Geordie was not easy, for he had long since learned touse his grievances as a pretext for keeping the offender at hisbeck with a continuous supply of stories, songs and games.
"You'd better be careful never to put yourself in the wrong withGeordie," the astute Junie had warned Susy at the outset,"because he's got such a memory, and he won't make it up withyou till you've told him every fairy-tale he's ever heardbefore."But on this occasion, as soon as he saw her, Geordie'sindignation melted. She was still in the doorway, compunctious,abject and racking her dazed brain for his favourite stories,when she saw, by the smoothing out of his mouth and the suddenserenity of his eyes, that he was going to give her thedelicious but not wholly reassuring shock of being a good boy.
Thoughtfully he examined her face as she knelt down beside thecot; then he poked out a finger and pressed it on her tearfulcheek.
"Poor Susy got a pain too," he said, putting his arms about her;and as she hugged him close, he added philosophically: "TellGeordie a new story, darling, and you'll forget all about it."
NICK Lansing arrived in Paris two days after his lawyer hadannounced his coming to Mr. Spearman.
He had left Rome with the definite purpose of freeing himselfand Susy; and though he was not pledged to Coral Hicks he hadnot concealed from her the object of his journey. In vain hadhe tried to rouse in himself any sense of interest in his ownfuture. Beyond the need of reaching a definite point in hisrelation to Susy his imagination could not travel. But he hadbeen moved by Coral's confession, and his reason told him thathe and she would probably be happy together, with the temperatehappiness based on a community of tastes and an enlargement ofopportunities. He meant, on his return to Rome, to ask her tomarry him; and he knew that she knew it. Indeed, if he had notspoken before leaving it was with no idea of evading his fate,or keeping her longer in suspense, but simply because of thestrange apathy that had fallen on him since he had receivedSusy's letter. In his incessant self-communings he dressed upthis apathy as a discretion which forbade his engaging Coral'sfuture till his own was assured. But in truth he knew thatCoral's future was already engaged, and his with it: in Romethe fact had seemed natural and even inevitable.
In Paris, it instantly became the thinnest of unrealities. Notbecause Paris was not Rome, nor because it was Paris; butbecause hidden away somewhere in that vast unheeding labyrinthwas the half-forgotten part of himself that was Susy .... Forweeks, for months past, his mind had been saturated with Susy:
she had never seemed more insistently near him than as theirseparation lengthened, and the chance of reunion became lessprobable. It was as if a sickness long smouldering in him hadbroken out and become acute, enveloping him in the Nessus-shirtof his memories. There were moments when, to his memory, theiractual embraces seemed perfunctory, accidental, compared withthis deep deliberate imprint of her soul on his.
Yet now it had become suddenly different. Now that he was inthe same place with her, and might at any moment run across her,meet her eyes, hear her voice, avoid her hand--now thatpenetrating ghost of her with which he had been living wassucked back into the shadows, and he seemed, for the first timesince their parting, to be again in her actual presence. Hewoke to the fact on the morning of his arrival, staring downfrom his hotel window on a street she would perhaps walk throughthat very day, and over a limitless huddle of roofs, one ofwhich covered her at that hour. The abruptness of thetransition startled him; he had not known that her meregeographical nearness would take him by the throat in that way.
What would it be, then, if she were to walk into the room?
Thank heaven that need never happen! He was sufficientlyinformed as to French divorce proceedings to know that theywould not necessitate a confrontation with his wife; and withordinary luck, and some precautions, he might escape even adistant glimpse of her. He did not mean to remain in Paris morethan a few days; and during that time it would be easy--knowing,as he did, her tastes and Altringham's--to avoid the placeswhere she was likely to be met. He did not know where she wasliving, but imagined her to be staying with Mrs. Melrose, orsome other rich friend, or else lodged, in prospectiveaffluence, at the Nouveau Luxe, or in a pretty flat of her own.
Trust Susy--ah, the pang of it--to "manage"!
His first visit was to his lawyer's; and as he walked throughthe familiar streets each approaching face, each distant figureseemed hers. The obsession was intolerable. It would not last,of course; but meanwhile he had the exposed sense of a fugitivein a nightmare, who feels himself the only creature visible in aghostly and besetting multitude. The eye of the metropolisseemed fixed on him in an immense unblinking stare.
At the lawyer's he was told that, as a first step to freedom, hemust secure a domicile in Paris. He had of course known of thisnecessity: he had seen too many friends through the DivorceCourt, in one country or another, not to be fairly familiar withthe procedure. But the fact presented a different aspect assoon as he tried to relate it to himself and Susy: it was asthough Susy's personality were a medium through which eventsstill took on a transfiguring colour. He found the "domicile"that very day: a tawdrily furnished rez-de-chaussee, obviouslydestined to far different uses. And as he sat there, after theconcierge had discreetly withdrawn with the first quarter'spayment in her pocket, and stared about him at the vulgar plushyplace, he burst out laughing at what it was about to figure inthe eyes of the law: a Home, and a Home desecrated by his ownact! The Home in which he and Susy had reared their precariousbliss, and seen it crumble at the brutal touch of hisunfaithfulness and his cruelty--for he had been told that hemust be cruel to her as well as unfaithful! He looked at thewalls hung with sentimental photogravures, at the shiny bronze"nudes," the moth-eaten animal-skins and the bedizened bed-andonce more the unreality, the impossibility, of all that washappening to him entered like a drug into his veins.
To rouse himself he stood up, turned the key on the hideousplace, and returned to his lawyer's. He knew that in the harddry atmosphere of the office the act of giving the address ofthe flat would restore some kind of reality to the phantasmaltransaction. And with wonder he watched the lawyer, as a matterof course, pencil the street and the number on one of the papersenclosed in a folder on which his own name was elaboratelyengrossed.
As he took leave it occurred to him to ask where Susy wasliving. At least he imagined that it had just occurred to him,and that he was making the enquiry merely as a measure ofprecaution, in order to know what quarter of Paris to avoid; butin reality the question had been on his lips since he had firstentered the office, and lurking in his mind since he had emergedfrom the railway station that morning. The fact of not knowingwhere she lived made the whole of Paris a meaninglessunintelligible place, as useless to him as the face of a hugeclock that has lost its hour hand.
The address in Passy surprised him: he had imagined that shewould be somewhere in the neighborhood of the Champs Elysees orthe Place de l'Etoile. But probably either Mrs. Melrose orEllie Vanderlyn had taken a house at Passy. Well--it wassomething of a relief to know that she was so far off. Nobusiness called him to that almost suburban region beyond theTrocadero, and there was much less chance of meeting her than ifshe had been in the centre of Paris.
All day he wandered, avoiding the fashionable quarters, thestreets in which private motors glittered five deep, and furredand feathered silhouettes glided from them into tea-rooms,picture-galleries and jewellers' shops. In some such scenesSusy was no doubt figuring: slenderer, finer, vivider, than theother images of clay, but imitating their gestures, chatteringtheir jargon, winding her hand among the same pearls and sables.
He struck away across the Seine, along the quays to the Cite,the net-work of old Paris, the great grey vaults of St.
Eustache, the swarming streets of the Marais. He gazed atmonuments dawdled before shop-windows, sat in squares and onquays, watching people bargain, argue, philander, quarrel, work-girls stroll past in linked bands, beggars whine on the bridges,derelicts doze in the pale winter sun, mothers in mourninghasten by taking children to school, and street-walkers beattheir weary rounds before the cafes.
The day drifted on. Toward evening he began to grow afraid ofhis solitude, and to think of dining at the Nouveau Luxe, orsome other fashionable restaurant where he would be fairly sureto meet acquaintances, and be carried off to a theatre, a boiteor a dancing-hall. Anything, anything now, to get away from themaddening round of his thoughts. He felt the same blank fear ofsolitude as months ago in Genoa .... Even if he were to runacross Susy and Altringham, what of it? Better get the jobover. People had long since ceased to take on tragedy airsabout divorce: dividing couples dined together to the last, andmet afterward in each other's houses, happy in the consciousnessthat their respective remarriages had provided two new centresof entertainment. Yet most of the couples who took their re-matings so philosophically had doubtless had their hour ofenchantment, of belief in the immortality of loving; whereas heand Susy had simply and frankly entered into a business contractfor their mutual advantage. The fact gave the last touch ofincongruity to his agonies and exaltations, and made him appearto himself as grotesque and superannuated as the hero of aromantic novel.
He stood up from a bench on which he had been lounging in theLuxembourg gardens, and hailed a taxi. Dusk had fallen, and hemeant to go back to his hotel, take a rest, and then go out todine. But instead, he threw Susy's address to the driver, andsettled down in the cab, resting both hands on the knob of hisumbrella and staring straight ahead of him as if he wereaccomplishing some tiresome duty that had to be got through withbefore he could turn his mind to more important things.
"It's the easiest way," he heard himself say.
At the street-corner--her street-corner--he stopped the cab, andstood motionless while it rattled away. It was a short vaguestreet, much farther off than he had expected, and fading awayat the farther end in a dusky blur of hoardings overhung bytrees. A thin rain was beginning to fall, and it was alreadynight in this inadequately lit suburban quarter. Lansing walkeddown the empty street. The houses stood a few yards apart, withbare-twigged shrubs between, and gates and railings dividingthem from the pavement. He could not, at first, distinguishtheir numbers; but presently, coming abreast of a street-lamp,he discovered that the small shabby facade it illuminated wasprecisely the one he sought. The discovery surprised him. Hehad imagined that, as frequently happened in the outlyingquarters of Passy and La Muette, the mean street would lead to astately private hotel, built upon some bowery fragment of an oldcountry-place. It was the latest whim of the wealthy toestablish themselves on these outskirts of Paris, where therewas still space for verdure; and he had pictured Susy behindsome pillared house-front, with lights pouring across glossyturf to sculptured gateposts. Instead, he saw a six-windowedhouse, huddled among neighbours of its kind, with the familywash fluttering between meagre bushes. The arc-light beatironically on its front, which had the worn look of a tiredwork-woman's face; and Lansing, as he leaned against theopposite railing, vainly tried to fit his vision of Susy into sohumble a setting.
The probable explanation was that his lawyer had given him thewrong address; not only the wrong number but the wrong street.
He pulled out the slip of paper, and was crossing over todecipher it under the lamp, when an errand-boy appeared out ofthe obscurity, and approached the house. Nick drew back, andthe boy, unlatching the gate, ran up the steps and gave the bella pull.
Almost immediately the door opened; and there stood Susy, thelight full upon her, and upon a red-checked child against hershoulder. The space behind them was dark, or so dimly lit thatit formed a black background to her vivid figure. She looked atthe errand-boy without surprise, took his parcel, and after hehad turned away, lingered a moment in the door, glancing downthe empty street.
That moment, to her watcher, seemed quicker than a flash yet aslong as a life-time. There she was, a stone's throw away, bututterly unconscious of his presence: his Susy, the old Susy,and yet a new Susy, curiously transformed, transfigured almost,by the new attitude in which he beheld her.
In the first shock of the vision he forgot his surprise at herbeing in such a place, forgot to wonder whose house she was in,or whose was the sleepy child in her arms. For an instant shestood out from the blackness behind her, and through the veil ofthe winter night, a thing apart, an unconditioned vision, theeternal image of the woman and the child; and in that instanteverything within him was changed and renewed. His eyes werestill absorbing her, finding again the familiar curves of herlight body, noting the thinness of the lifted arm that upheldthe little boy, the droop of the shoulder he weighed on, thebrooding way in which her cheek leaned to his even while shelooked away; then she drew back, the door closed, and thestreet-lamp again shone on blankness.
"But she's mine!" Nick cried, in a fierce triumph ofrecovery ...
His eyes were so full of her that he shut them to hold in thecrowding vision.
It remained with him, at first, as a complete picture; thengradually it broke up into its component parts, the childvanished, the strange house vanished, and Susy alone stoodbefore him, his own Susy, only his Susy, yet changed, worn,tempered--older, even--with sharper shadows under the cheek-bones, the brows drawn, the joint of the slim wrist moreprominent. It was not thus that his memory had evoked her, andhe recalled, with a remorseful pang, the fact that something inher look, her dress, her tired and drooping attitude, suggestedpoverty, dependence, seemed to make her after all a part of theshabby house in which, at first sight, her presence had seemedso incongruous.
"But she looks poor!" he thought, his heart tightening. Andinstantly it occurred to him that these must be the Fulmerchildren whom she was living with while their parents travelledin Italy. Rumours of Nat Fulmer's sudden ascension had reachedhim, and he had heard that the couple had lately been seen inNaples and Palermo. No one had mentioned Susy's name inconnection with them, and he could hardly tell why he hadarrived at this conclusion, except perhaps because it seemednatural that, if Susy were in trouble, she should turn to herold friend Grace.
But why in trouble? What trouble? What could have happened tocheck her triumphant career?
"That's what I mean to find out!" he exclaimed.
His heart was beating with a tumult of new hopes and oldmemories. The sight of his wife, so remote in mien and mannerfrom the world in which he had imagined her to be re-absorbed,changed in a flash his own relation to life, and flung a mist ofunreality over all that he had been trying to think most solidand tangible. Nothing now was substantial to him but the stonesof the street in which he stood, the front of the house whichhid her, the bell-handle he already felt in his grasp. Hestarted forward, and was halfway to the threshold when a privatemotor turned the corner, the twin glitter of its lamps carpetingthe wet street with gold to Susy's door.
Lansing drew back into the shadow as the motor swept up to thehouse. A man jumped out, and the light fell on Strefford'sshambling figure, its lazy disjointed movements so unmistakablythe same under his fur coat, and in the new setting ofprosperity.
Lansing stood motionless, staring at the door. Strefford rang,and waited. Would Susy appear again? Perhaps she had done sobefore only because she had been on the watch ....
But no: after a slight delay a bonne appeared --the breathlessmaid-of-all-work of a busy household--and at once effacedherself, letting the visitor in. Lansing was sure that not aword passed between the two, of enquiry on Lord Altringham'spart, or of acquiescence on the servant's. There could be nodoubt that he was expected.
The door closed on him, and a light appeared behind the blind ofthe adjoining window. The maid had shown the visitor into thesitting-room and lit the lamp. Upstairs, meanwhile, Susy was nodoubt running skilful fingers through her tumbled hair anddaubing her pale lips with red. Ah, how Lansing knew everymovement of that familiar rite, even to the pucker of the browand the pouting thrust-out of the lower lip! He was seized witha sense of physical sickness as the succession of rememberedgestures pressed upon his eyes .... And the other man? Theother man, inside the house, was perhaps at that very instantsmiling over the remembrance of the same scene!
At the thought, Lansing plunged away into the night.
SUSY and Lord Altringham sat in the little drawing-room, dividedfrom each other by a table carrying a smoky lamp and heaped withtattered school-books.
In another half hour the bonne, despatched to fetch the childrenfrom their classes, would be back with her flock; and at anymoment Geordie's imperious cries might summon his slave up tothe nursery. In the scant time allotted them, the two sat, andvisibly wondered what to say.
Strefford, on entering, had glanced about the dreary room, withits piano laden with tattered music, the children's toyslittering the lame sofa, the bunches of dyed grass and impaledbutterflies flanking the cast-bronze clock. Then he had turnedto Susy and asked simply: "Why on earth are you here?"She had not tried to explain; from the first, she had understoodthe impossibility of doing so. And she would not betray hersecret longing to return to Nick, now that she knew that Nickhad taken definite steps for his release. In dread lestStrefford should have heard of this, and should announce it toher, coupling it with the news of Nick's projected marriage, andlest, hearing her fears thus substantiated, she should lose herself-control, she had preferred to say, in a voice that shetried to make indifferent: "The 'proceedings,' or whatever thelawyers call them, have begun. While they're going on I like tostay quite by myself .... I don't know why ...."Strefford, at that, had looked at her keenly. "Ah," hemurmured; and his lips were twisted into their old mockingsmile. "Speaking of proceedings," he went on carelessly, "whatstage have Ellie's reached, I wonder? I saw her and Vanderlynand Bockheimer all lunching cheerfully together to-day atLarue's."The blood rushed to Susy's forehead. She remembered her tragicevening with Nelson Vanderlyn, only two months earlier, andthought to herself. "In time, then, I suppose, Nick and I ....
Aloud she said: "I can't imagine how Nelson and Ellie can everwant to see each other again. And in a restaurant, of allplaces!"Strefford continued to smile. "My dear, you're incorrigiblyold-fashioned. Why should two people who've done each other thebest turn they could by getting out of each other's way at theright moment behave like sworn enemies ever afterward? It's tooabsurd; the humbug's too flagrant. Whatever our generation hasfailed to do, it's got rid of humbug; and that's enough toimmortalize it. I daresay Nelson and Ellie never liked eachother better than they do to-day. Twenty years ago, they'd havebeen afraid to confess it; but why shouldn't they now?"Susy looked at Strefford, conscious that under his words was theache of the disappointment she had caused him; and yet consciousalso that that very ache was not the overwhelming penetratingemotion he perhaps wished it to be, but a pang on a par with adozen others; and that even while he felt it he foresaw the daywhen he should cease to feel it. And she thought to herselfthat this certainty of oblivion must be bitterer than anycertainty of pain.
A silence had fallen between them. He broke it by rising fromhis seat, and saying with a shrug: "You'll end by driving me tomarry Joan Senechal."Susy smiled. "Well, why not? She's lovely.""Yes; but she'll bore me.""Poor Streff! So should I--""Perhaps. But nothing like as soon--" He grinned sardonically.
"There'd be more margin." He appeared to wait for her to speak.
"And what else on earth are you going to do?" he concluded, asshe still remained silent.
"Oh, Streff, I couldn't marry you for a reason like that!" shemurmured at length.
"Then marry me, and find your reason afterward."Her lips made a movement of denial, and still in silence sheheld out her hand for good-bye. He clasped it, and then turnedaway; but on the threshold he paused, his screwed-up eyes fixedon her wistfully.
The look moved her, and she added hurriedly: "The only reason Ican find is one for not marrying you. It's because I can't yetfeel unmarried enough.""Unmarried enough? But I thought Nick was doing his best tomake you feel that.""Yes. But even when he has--sometimes I think even that won'tmake any difference."He still scrutinized her hesitatingly, with the gravest eyes shehad ever seen in his careless face.
"My dear, that's rather the way I feel about you," he saidsimply as he turned to go.
That evening after the children had gone to bed Susy sat up latein the cheerless sitting-room. She was not thinking ofStrefford but of Nick. He was coming to Paris--perhaps he hadalready arrived. The idea that he might be in the same placewith her at that very moment, and without her knowing it, was sostrange and painful that she felt a violent revolt of all herstrong and joy-loving youth. Why should she go on suffering sounbearably, so abjectly, so miserably? If only she could seehim, hear his voice, even hear him say again such cruel andhumiliating words as he had spoken on that dreadful day inVenice when that would be better than this blankness, this utterand final exclusion from his life! He had been cruel to her,unimaginably cruel: hard, arrogant, unjust; and had been so,perhaps, deliberately, because he already wanted to be free.
But she was ready to face even that possibility, to humbleherself still farther than he had humbled her--she was ready todo anything, if only she might see him once again.
She leaned her aching head on her hands and pondered. Doanything? But what could she do? Nothing that should hurt him,interfere with his liberty, be false to the spirit of theirpact: on that she was more than ever resolved. She had made abargain, and she meant to stick to it, not for any abstractreason, but simply because she happened to love him in that way.
Yes--but to see him again, only once!
Suddenly she remembered what Strefford had said about NelsonVanderlyn and his wife. "Why should two people who've just doneeach other the best turn they could behave like sworn enemiesever after?" If in offering Nick his freedom she had indeeddone him such a service as that, perhaps he no longer hated her,would no longer be unwilling to see her .... At any rate, whyshould she not write to him on that assumption, write in aspirit of simple friendliness, suggesting that they should meetand "settle things"? The business-like word "settle" (how shehated it) would prove to him that she had no secret designs uponhis liberty; and besides he was too unprejudiced, too modern,too free from what Strefford called humbug, not to understandand accept such a suggestion. After all, perhaps Strefford wasright; it was something to have rid human relations ofhypocrisy, even if, in the process, so many exquisite thingsseemed somehow to have been torn away with it ....
She ran up to her room, scribbled a note, and hurried with itthrough the rain and darkness to the post-box at the corner. Asshe returned through the empty street she had an odd feelingthat it was not empty--that perhaps Nick was already there,somewhere near her in the night, about to follow her to thedoor, enter the house, go up with her to her bedroom in the oldway. It was strange how close he had been brought by the merefact of her having written that little note to him!
In the bedroom, Geordie lay in his crib in ruddy slumber, andshe blew out the candle and undressed softly for fear of wakinghim.
Nick Lansing, the next day, received Susy's letter, transmittedto his hotel from the lawyer's office.
He read it carefully, two or three times over, weighing andscrutinizing the guarded words. She proposed that they shouldmeet to "settle things." What things? And why should he accedeto such a request? What secret purpose had prompted her? Itwas horrible that nowadays, in thinking of Susy, he shouldalways suspect ulterior motives, be meanly on the watch for somehidden tortuousness. What on earth was she trying to "manage"now, he wondered.
A few hours ago, at the sight of her, all his hardness hadmelted, and he had charged himself with cruelty, with injustice,with every sin of pride against himself and her; but theappearance of Strefford, arriving at that late hour, and soevidently expected and welcomed, had driven back the rising tideof tenderness.
Yet, after all, what was there to wonder at? Nothing waschanged in their respective situations. He had left his wife,deliberately, and for reasons which no subsequent experience hadcaused him to modify. She had apparently acquiesced in hisdecision, and had utilized it, as she was justified in doing, toassure her own future.
In all this, what was there to wail or knock the breast betweentwo people who prided themselves on looking facts in the face,and making their grim best of them, without vain repinings? Hehad been right in thinking their marriage an act of madness.
Her charms had overruled his judgment, and they had had theiryear ... their mad year ... or at least all but two or threemonths of it. But his first intuition had been right; and nowthey must both pay for their madness. The Fates seldom forgetthe bargains made with them, or fail to ask for compoundinterest. Why not, then, now that the time had come, pay upgallantly, and remember of the episode only what had made itseem so supremely worth the cost?
He sent a pneumatic telegram to Mrs. Nicholas Lansing to saythat he would call on her that afternoon at four. "That oughtto give us time," he reflected drily, "to 'settle things,' asshe calls it, without interfering with Strefford's afternoonvisit."
HER husband's note had briefly said:
"To-day at four o'clock. N.L."All day she pored over the words in an agony of longing, tryingto read into them regret, emotion, memories, some echo of thetumult in her own bosom. But she had signed "Susy," and hesigned "N.L." That seemed to put an abyss between them. Afterall, she was free and he was not. Perhaps, in view of hissituation, she had only increased the distance between them byher unconventional request for a meeting.
She sat in the little drawing-room, and the cast-bronze clockticked out the minutes. She would not look out of the window:
it might bring bad luck to watch for him. And it seemed to herthat a thousand invisible spirits, hidden demons of good andevil, pressed about her, spying out her thoughts, counting herheart-beats, ready to pounce upon the least symptom of over-confidence and turn it deftly to derision. Oh, for an altar onwhich to pour out propitiatory offerings! But what sweetercould they have than her smothered heart-beats, her choked-backtears?
The bell rang, and she stood up as if a spring had jerked her toher feet. In the mirror between the dried grasses her facelooked long pale inanimate. Ah, if he should find her toochanged--! If there were but time to dash upstairs and put on atouch of red ....
The door opened; it shut on him; he was there.
He said: "You wanted to see me?"She answered: "Yes." And her heart seemed to stop beating.
At first she could not make out what mysterious change had comeover him, and why it was that in looking at him she seemed to belooking at a stranger; then she perceived that his voice soundedas it used to sound when he was talking to other people; and shesaid to herself, with a sick shiver of understanding, that shehad become an "other person" to him.
There was a deathly pause; then she faltered out, not knowingwhat she said: "Nick--you'll sit down?"He said: "Thanks," but did not seem to have heard her, for hecontinued to stand motionless, half the room between them. Andslowly the uselessness, the hopelessness of his being thereovercame her. A wall of granite seemed to have built itself upbetween them. She felt as if it hid her from him, as if withthose remote new eyes of his he were staring into the wall andnot at her. Suddenly she said to herself: "He's suffering morethan I am, because he pities me, and is afraid to tell me thathe is going to be married."The thought stung her pride, and she lifted her head and met hiseyes with a smile.
"Don't you think," she said, "it's more sensible-witheverything so changed in our lives--that we should meet asfriends, in this way? I wanted to tell you that you needn'tfeel--feel in the least unhappy about me."A deep flush rose to his forehead. "Oh, I know--I know that--"he declared hastily; and added, with a factitious animation:
"But thank you for telling me.""There's nothing, is there," she continued, "to make our meetingin this way in the least embarrassing or painful to either ofus, when both have found ...." She broke off, and held her handout to him. "I've heard about you and Coral," she ended.
He just touched her hand with cold fingers, and let it drop.
"Thank you," he said for the third time.
"You won't sit down?"He sat down.
"Don't you think," she continued, "that the new way of ... ofmeeting as friends ... and talking things over without ill-will ... is much pleasanter and more sensible, after all?"He smiled. "It's immensely kind of you to feel that.""Oh, I do feel it!" She stopped short, and wondered what onearth she had meant to say next, and why she had so abruptlylost the thread of her discourse.
In the pause she heard him cough slightly and clear his throat.
"Let me say, then," he began, "that I'm glad too--immensely gladthat your own future is so satisfactorily settled."She lifted her glance again to his walled face, in which not amuscle stirred.
"Yes: it--it makes everything easier for you, doesn't it?""For you too, I hope." He paused, and then went on: "I wantalso to tell you that I perfectly understand--""Oh," she interrupted, "so do I; your point of view, I mean."They were again silent.
"Nick, why can't we be friends real friends? Won't it beeasier?" she broke out at last with twitching lips.
"Easier--?""I mean, about talking things over--arrangements. There arearrangements to be made, I suppose?""I suppose so." He hesitated. "I'm doing what I'm told-simplyfollowing out instructions. The business is easy enough,apparently. I'm taking the necessary steps--"She reddened a little, and drew a gasping breath. "Thenecessary steps: what are they? Everything the lawyers tellone is so confusing .... I don't yet understand--how it'sdone.""My share, you mean? Oh, it's very simple." He paused, andadded in a tone of laboured ease: "I'm going down toFontainebleau to-morrow--"She stared, not understanding. "To Fontainebleau--?"Her bewilderment drew from him his first frank smile. "Well--I chose Fontainebleau--I don't know why ... except that we'venever been there together."At that she suddenly understood, and the blood rushed to herforehead. She stood up without knowing what she was doing, herheart in her throat. "How grotesque--how utterly disgusting!"He gave a slight shrug. "I didn't make the laws ....""But isn't it too stupid and degrading that such things shouldbe necessary when two people want to part--?" She broke offagain, silenced by the echo of that fatal "want to part." ...
He seemed to prefer not to dwell farther on the legalobligations involved.
"You haven't yet told me," he suggested, "how you happen to beliving here.""Here--with the Fulmer children?" She roused herself, trying tocatch his easier note. "Oh, I've simply been governessing themfor a few weeks, while Nat and Grace are in Sicily." She didnot say: "It's because I've parted with Strefford." Somehow ithelped her wounded pride a little to keep from him the secret ofher precarious independence.
He looked his wonder. "All alone with that bewildered bonne?
But how many of them are there? Five? Good Lord!" Hecontemplated the clock with unseeing eyes, and then turned themagain on her face.
"I should have thought a lot of children would rather get onyour nerves.""Oh, not these children. They're so good to me.""Ah, well, I suppose it won't be for long."He sent his eyes again about the room, which his absent-mindedgaze seemed to reduce to its dismal constituent elements, andadded, with an obvious effort at small talk: "I hear theFulmers are not hitting it off very well since his success. Isit true that he's going to marry Violet Melrose?"The blood rose to Susy's face. "Oh, never, never! He and Graceare travelling together now.""Oh, I didn't know. People say things ...." He was visiblyembarrassed with the subject, and sorry that he had broached it.
"Some of the things that people say are true. But Grace doesn'tmind. She says she and Nat belong to each other. They can'thelp it, she thinks, after having been through such a lottogether.""Dear old Grace!"He had risen from his chair, and this time she made no effort todetain him. He seemed to have recovered his self-composure, andit struck her painfully, humiliatingly almost, that he shouldhave spoken in that light way of the expedition to Fontainebleauon the morrow .... Well, men were different, she supposed; sheremembered having felt that once before about Nick.
It was on the tip of her tongue to cry out: "But wait--wait!
I'm not going to marry Strefford after all!"--but to do so wouldseem like an appeal to his compassion, to his indulgence; andthat was not what she wanted. She could never forget that hehad left her because he had not been able to forgive her for"managing"--and not for the world would she have him think thatthis meeting had been planned for such a purpose.
"If he doesn't see that I am different, in spite ofappearances ... and that I never was what he said I was thatday--if in all these months it hasn't come over him, what's theuse of trying to make him see it now?" she mused. And then, herthoughts hurrying on: "Perhaps he's suffering too--I believe heis suffering-at any rate, he's suffering for me, if not forhimself. But if he's pledged to Coral, what can he do? Whatwould he think of me if I tried to make him break his word toher?"There he stood--the man who was "going to Fontainebleau to-morrow"; who called it "taking the necessary steps!" Who couldsmile as he made the careless statement! A world seemed todivide them already: it was as if their parting were alreadyover. All the words, cries, arguments beating loud wings in herdropped back into silence. The only thought left was: "Howmuch longer does he mean to go on standing there?"He may have read the question in her face, for turning back froman absorbed contemplation of the window curtains he said:
"There's nothing else?""Nothing else?""I mean: you spoke of things to be settled--"She flushed, suddenly remembering the pretext she had used tosummon him.
"Oh," she faltered, "I didn't know ... I thought there mightbe .... But the lawyers, I suppose ...."She saw the relief on his contracted face. "Exactly. I'vealways thought it was best to leave it to them. I assure you"--again for a moment the smile strained his lips-- "I shall donothing to interfere with a quick settlement."She stood motionless, feeling herself turn to stone. Heappeared already a long way off, like a figure vanishing down aremote perspective.
"Then--good-bye," she heard him say from its farther end.
"Oh,--good-bye," she faltered, as if she had not had the wordready, and was relieved to have him supply it.
He stopped again on the threshold, looked back at her, began tospeak. "I've--" he said; then he repeated "Good-bye," as thoughto make sure he had not forgotten to say it; and the door closedon him.
It was over; she had had her last chance and missed it. Now,whatever happened, the one thing she had lived and longed forwould never be. He had come, and she had let him go again ....
How had it come about? Would she ever be able to explain it toherself? How was it that she, so fertile in strategy, sopracticed in feminine arts, had stood there before him,helpless, inarticulate, like a school-girl a-choke with herfirst love-longing? If he was gone, and gone never to return,it was her own fault, and none but hers. What had she done tomove him, detain him, make his heart beat and his head swim ashers were beating and swimming? She stood aghast at her owninadequacy, her stony inexpressiveness ....
And suddenly she lifted her hands to her throbbing forehead andcried out: "But this is love! This must be love!"She had loved him before, she supposed; for what else was she tocall the impulse that had drawn her to him, taught her how toovercome his scruples, and whirled him away with her on theirmad adventure? Well, if that was love, this was something somuch larger and deeper that the other feeling seemed the meredancing of her blood in tune with his ....
But, no! Real love, great love, the love that poets sang, andprivileged and tortured beings lived and died of, that love hadits own superior expressiveness, and the sure command of itsmeans. The petty arts of coquetry were no farther from it thanthe numbness of the untaught girl. Great love was wise, strong,powerful, like genius, like any other dominant form of humanpower. It knew itself, and what it wanted, and how to attainits ends.
Not great love, then ... but just the common humble average ofhuman love was hers. And it had come to her so newly, sooverwhelmingly, with a face so grave, a touch so startling, thatshe had stood there petrified, humbled at the first look of itseyes, recognizing that what she had once taken for love wasmerely pleasure and spring-time, and the flavour of youth.
"But how was I to know? And now it's too late!" she wailed.
THE inhabitants of the little house in Passy were of necessityearly risers; but when Susy jumped out of bed the next morningno one else was astir, and it lacked nearly an hour of the callof the bonne's alarm-clock.
For a moment Susy leaned out of her dark room into the darkernight. A cold drizzle fell on her face, and she shivered anddrew back. Then, lighting a candle, and shading it, as herhabit was, from the sleeping child, she slipped on her dressing-gown and opened the door. On the threshold she paused to lookat her watch. Only half-past five! She thought withcompunction of the unkindness of breaking in on Junie Fulmer'sslumbers; but such scruples did not weigh an ounce in thebalance of her purpose. Poor Junie would have to oversleepherself on Sunday, that was all.
Susy stole into the passage, opened a door, and cast her lighton the girl's face.
"Junie! Dearest Junie, you must wake up!"Junie lay in the abandonment of youthful sleep; but at the soundof her name she sat up with the promptness of a grown person onwhom domestic burdens have long weighed.
"Which one of them is it?" she asked, one foot already out ofbed.
"Oh, Junie dear, no ... it's nothing wrong with the children ...
or with anybody," Susy stammered, on her knees by the bed.
In the candlelight, she saw Junie's anxious brow darkenreproachfully.
"Oh, Susy, then why--? I was just dreaming we were all drivingabout Rome in a great big motor-car with father and mother!""I'm so sorry, dear. What a lovely dream! I'm a brute to haveinterrupted it--"She felt the little girl's awakening scrutiny. "If there'snothing wrong with anybody, why are you crying, Susy? Is it youthere's something wrong with? What has happened?""Am I crying?" Susy rose from her knees and sat down on thecounterpane. "Yes, it is me. And I had to disturb you.""Oh, Susy, darling, what is it?" Junie's arms were about her ina flash, and Susy grasped them in burning fingers.
"Junie, listen! I've got to go away at once-- to leave you allfor the whole day. I may not be back till late this evening;late to-night; I can't tell. I promised your mother I'd neverleave you; but I've got to--I've got to."Junie considered her agitated face with fully awakened eyes.
"Oh, I won't tell, you know, you old brick, " she said withsimplicity.
Susy hugged her. "Junie, Junie, you darling! But that wasn'twhat I meant. Of course you may tell--you must tell. I shallwrite to your mother myself. But what worries me is the idea ofhaving to go away-- away from Paris--for the whole day, withGeordie still coughing a little, and no one but that sillyAngele to stay with him while you're out--and no one but you totake yourself and the others to school. But Junie, Junie, I'vegot to do it!" she sobbed out, clutching the child tighter.
Junie Fulmer, with her strangely mature perception of the case,and seemingly of every case that fate might call on her to dealwith, sat for a moment motionless in Susy's hold. Then shefreed her wrists with an adroit twist, and leaning back againstthe pillows said judiciously: "You'll never in the world bringup a family of your own if you take on like this over otherpeople's children."Through all her turmoil of spirit the observation drew a laughfrom Susy. "Oh, a family of my own--I don't deserve one, theway I'm behaving to your"Junie still considered her. "My dear, a change will do yougood: you need it," she pronounced.
Susy rose with a laughing sigh. "I'm not at all sure it will!
But I've got to have it, all the same. Only I do feelanxious--and I can't even leave you my address!"Junie still seemed to examine the case.
"Can't you even tell me where you're going?" she ventured, as ifnot quite sure of the delicacy of asking.
"Well--no, I don't think I can; not till I get back. Besides,even if I could it wouldn't be much use, because I couldn't giveyou my address there. I don't know what it will be.""But what does it matter, if you're coming back to-night?""Of course I'm coming back! How could you possibly imagine Ishould think of leaving you for more than a day?""Oh, I shouldn't be afraid--not much, that is, with the poker,and Nat's water-pistol," emended Junie, still judicious.
Susy again enfolded her vehemently, and then turned to morepractical matters. She explained that she wished if possible tocatch an eight-thirty train from the Gare de Lyon, and thatthere was not a moment to lose if the children were to bedressed and fed, and full instructions written out for Junie andAngele, before she rushed for the underground.
While she bathed Geordie, and then hurried into her own clothes,she could not help wondering at her own extreme solicitude forher charges. She remembered, with a pang, how often she haddeserted Clarissa Vanderlyn for the whole day, and even for twoor three in succession--poor little Clarissa, whom she knew tobe so unprotected, so exposed to evil influences. She had beentoo much absorbed in her own greedy bliss to be more thanintermittently aware of the child; but now, she felt, no sorrowhowever ravaging, no happiness however absorbing, would everagain isolate her from her kind.
And then these children were so different! The exquisiteClarissa was already the predestined victim of her surroundings:
her budding soul was divided from Susy's by the same barrier ofincomprehension that separated the latter from Mrs. Vanderlyn.
Clarissa had nothing to teach Susy but the horror of her ownhard little appetites; whereas the company of the noisyargumentative Fulmers had been a school of wisdom andabnegation.
As she applied the brush to Geordie's shining head and thehandkerchief to his snuffling nose, the sense of what she owedhim was so borne in on Susy that she interrupted the process tocatch him to her bosom.
"I'll have such a story to tell you when I get back to-night, ifyou'll promise me to be good all day," she bargained with him;and Geordie, always astute, bargained back: "Before I promise,I'd like to know what story."At length all was in order. Junie had been enlightened, andAngele stunned, by the minuteness of Susy's instructions; andthe latter, waterproofed and stoutly shod, descended thedoorstep, and paused to wave at the pyramid of heads yearning toher from an upper window.
It was hardly light, and still raining, when she turned into thedismal street. As usual, it was empty; but at the corner sheperceived a hesitating taxi, with luggage piled beside thedriver. Perhaps it was some early traveller, just arriving, whowould release the carriage in time for her to catch it, and thusavoid the walk to the metro, and the subsequent strap-hanging;for it was the work-people's hour. Susy raced toward thevehicle, which, overcoming its hesitation, was beginning to movein her direction. Observing this, she stopped to see where itwould discharge its load. Thereupon the taxi stopped also, andthe load discharged itself in front of her in the shape of NickLansing.
The two stood staring at each other through the rain till Nickbroke out: "Where are you going? I came to get you.""To get me? To get me?" she repeated. Beside the driver shehad suddenly remarked the old suit-case from which her husbandhad obliged her to extract Strefford's cigars as they wereleaving Como; and everything that had happened since seemed tofall away and vanish in the pang and rapture of that memory.
"To get you; yes. Of course." He spoke the words peremptorily,almost as if they were an order. "Where were you going?" herepeated.
Without answering, she turned toward the house. He followedher, and the laden taxi closed the procession.
"Why are you out in such weather without an umbrella?" hecontinued, in the same severe tone, drawing her under theshelter of his.
"Oh, because Junie's umbrella is in tatters, and I had to leaveher mine, as I was going away for the whole day." She spoke thewords like a person in a trance.
"For the whole day? At this hour? Where?"They were on the doorstep, and she fumbled automatically for herkey, let herself in, and led the way to the sitting-room. Ithad not been tidied up since the night before. The children'sschool books lay scattered on the table and sofa, and the emptyfireplace was grey with ashes. She turned to Nick in the pallidlight.
"I was going to see you," she stammered, "I was going to followyou to Fontainebleau, if necessary, to tell you ... to preventyou...."He repeated in the same aggressive tone: "Tell me what?
Prevent what?""Tell you that there must be some other way ... some decentway ... of our separating ... without that horror. that horrorof your going off with a woman ...."He stared, and then burst into a laugh. The blood rushed to herface. She had caught a familiar ring in his laugh, and itwounded her. What business had he, at such a time, to laugh inthe old way?
"I'm sorry; but there is no other way, I'm afraid. No other waybut one," he corrected himself.
She raised her head sharply. "Well?""That you should be the woman. --Oh, my dear!" He had droppedhis mocking smile, and was at her side, her hands in his. "Oh,my dear, don't you see that we've both been feeling the samething, and at the same hour? You lay awake thinking of it allnight, didn't you? So did I. Whenever the clock struck, I saidto myself: 'She's hearing it too.' And I was up beforedaylight, and packed my traps--for I never want to set footagain in that awful hotel where I've lived in hell for the lastthree days. And I swore to myself that I'd go off with a womanby the first train I could catch--and so I mean to, my dear."She stood before him numb. Yes, numb: that was the worst ofit! The violence of the reaction had been too great, and shecould hardly understand what he was saying. Instead, shenoticed that the tassel of the window-blind was torn off again(oh, those children!), and vaguely wondered if his luggage weresafe on the waiting taxi. One heard such stories ....
His voice came back to her. "Susy! Listen!" he was entreating.
"You must see yourself that it can't be. We're married--isn'tthat all that matters? Oh, I know--I've behaved like a brute:
a cursed arrogant ass! You couldn't wish that ass a worsekicking than I've given him! But that's not the point, you see.
The point is that we're married .... Married .... Doesn't itmean something to you, something--inexorable? It does to me. Ididn't dream it would--in just that way. But all I can say isthat I suppose the people who don't feel it aren't reallymarried-and they'd better separate; much better. As for us--"Through her tears she gasped out: "That's what I felt ...
that's what I said to Streff ...."He was upon her with a great embrace. "My darling! My darling!
You have told him?""Yes," she panted. "That's why I'm living here." She paused.
"And you've told Coral?"She felt his embrace relax. He drew away a little, stillholding her, but with lowered head.
"No ... I ... haven't.""Oh, Nick! But then--?"He caught her to him again, resentfully. "Well--then what?
What do you mean? What earthly difference does it make?""But if you've told her you were going to marry her--" (Try asshe would, her voice was full of silver chimes.)"Marry her? Marry her?" he echoed. "But how could I? Whatdoes marriage mean anyhow? If it means anything at all itmeans--you! And I can't ask Coral Hicks just to come and livewith me, can I?"Between crying and laughing she lay on his breast, and his handpassed over her hair.
They were silent for a while; then he began again: "You said ityourself yesterday, you know."She strayed back from sunlit distances. "Yesterday?""Yes: that Grace Fulmer says you can't separate two peoplewho've been through a lot of things--""Ah, been through them together--it's not the things, you see,it's the togetherness," she interrupted.
"The togetherness--that's it!" He seized on the word as if ithad just been coined to express their case, and his mind couldrest in it without farther labour.
The door-bell rang, and they started. Through the window theysaw the taxi-driver gesticulating enquiries as to the fate ofthe luggage.
"He wants to know if he's to leave it here," Susy laughed.
"No--no! You're to come with me," her husband declared.
"Come with you?" She laughed again at the absurdity of thesuggestion.
"Of course: this very instant. What did you suppose? That Iwas going away without you? Run up and pack your things," hecommanded.
"My things? My things? But I can't leave the children!"He stared, between indignation and amusement. "Can't leave thechildren? Nonsense! Why, you said yourself you were going tofollow me to Fontainebleau--"She reddened again, this time a little painfully "I didn't knowwhat I was doing .... I had to find you ... but I should havecome back this evening, no matter what happened.""No matter what?"She nodded, and met his gaze resolutely.
"No; but really--""Really, I can't leave the children till Nat and Grace comeback. I promised I wouldn't.""Yes; but you didn't know then .... Why on earth can't theirnurse look after them?""There isn't any nurse but me.""Good Lord!""But it's only for two weeks more," she pleaded. "Two weeks!
Do you know how long I've been without you!" He seized her byboth wrists, and drew them against his breast. "Come with me atleast for two days--Susy!" he entreated her.
"Oh," she cried, "that's the very first time you've said myname!""Susy, Susy, then--my Susy--Susy! And you've only said mineonce, you know.""Nick!" she sighed, at peace, as if the one syllable were amagic seed that hung out great branches to envelop them.
"Well, then, Susy, be reasonable. Come!""Reasonable--oh, reasonable!" she sobbed through laughter.
"Unreasonable, then! That's even better."She freed herself, and drew back gently. "Nick, I swore Iwouldn't leave them; and I can't. It's not only my promise totheir mother--it's what they've been to me themselves. Youdon't, know ... You can't imagine the things they've taught me.
They're awfully naughty at times, because they're so clever; butwhen they're good they're the wisest people I know." Shepaused, and a sudden inspiration illuminated her. "But whyshouldn't we take them with us?" she exclaimed.
Her husband's arms fell away from her, and he stood dumfounded.
"Take them with us?""Why not?""All five of them?""Of course--I couldn't possibly separate them. And Junie andNat will help us to look after the young ones.""Help us!" he groaned.
"Oh, you'll see; they won't bother you. Just leave it to me;I'll manage--" The word stopped her short, and an agony ofcrimson suffused her from brow to throat. Their eyes met; andwithout a word he stooped and laid his lips gently on the stainof red on her neck.
"Nick," she breathed, her hands in his.
"But those children--"Instead of answering, she questioned: "Where are we going?"His face lit up.
"Anywhere, dearest, that you choose.""Well--I choose Fontainebleau!" she exulted.
"So do I! But we can't take all those children to an hotel atFontainebleau, can we?" he questioned weakly. "You see, dear,there's the mere expense of it--"Her eyes were already travelling far ahead of him. "The expensewon't amount to much. I've just remembered that Angele, thebonne, has a sister who is cook there in a nice old-fashionedpension which must be almost empty at this time of year. I'msure I can ma--arrange easily," she hurried on, nearly trippingagain over the fatal word. "And just think of the treat it willbe to them! This is Friday, and I can get them let off fromtheir afternoon classes, and keep them in the country tillMonday. Poor darlings, they haven't been out of Paris formonths! And I daresay the change will cure Geordie's cough--Geordie's the youngest," she explained, surprised to findherself, even in the rapture of reunion, so absorbed in thewelfare of the Fulmers.
She was conscious that her husband was surprised also; butinstead of prolonging the argument he simply questioned: "WasGeordie the chap you had in your arms when you opened the frontdoor the night before last?"She echoed: "I opened the front door the night before last?""To a boy with a parcel.""Oh," she sobbed, "you were there? You were watching?"He held her to him, and the currents flowed between them warmand full as on the night of their moon over Como.
In a trice, after that, she had the matter in hand and herforces marshalled. The taxi was paid, Nick's luggage depositedin the vestibule, and the children, just piling down tobreakfast, were summoned in to hear the news.
It was apparent that, seasoned to surprises as they were, Nick'spresence took them aback. But when, between laughter andembraces, his identity, and his right to be where he was, hadbeen made clear to them, Junie dismissed the matter by askinghim in her practical way: "Then I suppose we may talk about youto Susy now?"--and thereafter all five addressed themselves tothe vision of their imminent holiday.
>From that moment the little house became the centre of awhirlwind. Treats so unforeseen, and of such magnitude, wererare in the young Fulmers' experience, and had it not been forJunie's steadying influence Susy's charges would have got out ofhand. But young Nat, appealed to by Nick on the ground of theircommon manhood, was induced to forego celebrating the event onhis motor horn (the very same which had tortured the NewHampshire echoes), and to assert his authority over his juniors;and finally a plan began to emerge from the chaos, and eachchild to fit into it like a bit of a picture puzzle.
Susy, riding the whirlwind with her usual firmness, neverthelessfelt an undercurrent of anxiety. There had been no time as yet,between her and Nick, to revert to money matters; and wherethere was so little money it could not, obviously, much matter.
But that was the more reason for being secretly aghast at herintrepid resolve not to separate herself from her charges. Athree days' honey-moon with five children in the party-andchildren with the Fulmer appetite--could not but be a costlybusiness; and while she settled details, packed them off toschool, and routed out such nondescript receptacles as the housecontained in the way of luggage, her thoughts remained fixed onthe familiar financial problem.
Yes--it was cruel to have it rear its hated head, even throughthe bursting boughs of her new spring; but there it was, theperpetual serpent in her Eden, to be bribed, fed, sent to sleepwith such scraps as she could beg, borrow or steal for it. Andshe supposed it was the price that fate meant her to pay for herblessedness, and was surer than ever that the blessedness wasworth it. Only, how was she to compound the business with hernew principles?
With the children's things to pack, luncheon to be got ready,and the Fontainebleau pension to be telephoned to, there waslittle time to waste on moral casuistry; and Susy asked herselfwith a certain irony if the chronic lack of time to deal withmoney difficulties had not been the chief cause of her previouslapses. There was no time to deal with this question either; notime, in short, to do anything but rush forward on a great galeof plans and preparations, in the course of which she whirledNick forth to buy some charcuterie for luncheon, and telephoneto Fontainebleau.
Once he was gone--and after watching him safely round thecorner--she too got into her wraps, and transferring a smallpacket from her dressing-case to her pocket, hastened out in adifferent direction.
IT took two brimming taxi-cabs to carry the Nicholas Lansings tothe station on their second honey-moon. In the first were Nick,Susy and the luggage of the whole party (little Nat's motor hornincluded, as a last concession, and because he had hithertoforborne to play on it); and in the second, the five Fulmers,the bonne, who at the eleventh hour had refused to be left, acage-full of canaries, and a foundling kitten who had murderousdesigns on them; all of which had to be taken because, if thebonne came, there would be nobody left to look after them.
At the corner Susy tore herself from Nick's arms and held up theprocession while she ran back to the second taxi to make surethat the bonne had brought the house-key. It was found ofcourse that she hadn't but that Junie had; whereupon the caravangot under way again, and reached the station just as the trainwas starting; and there, by some miracle of good nature on thepart of the guard, they were all packed together into an emptycompartment--no doubt, as Susy remarked, because train officialsnever failed to spot a newly-married couple, and treat themkindly.
The children, sentinelled by Junie, at first gave promise ofsuperhuman goodness; but presently their feelings overflowed,and they were not to be quieted till it had been agreed that Natshould blow his motor-horn at each halt, while the twins calledout the names of the stations, and Geordie, with the canariesand kitten, affected to change trains.
Luckily the halts were few; but the excitement of travel,combined with over-indulgence in the chocolates imprudentlyprovided by Nick, overwhelmed Geordie with a sudden melancholythat could be appeased only by Susy's telling him stories tillthey arrived at Fontainebleau.
The day was soft, with mild gleams of sunlight on decayingfoliage; and after luggage and livestock had been dropped at thepension Susy confessed that she had promised the children ascamper in the forest, and buns in a tea-shop afterward. Nickplacidly agreed, and darkness had long fallen, and a great manybuns been consumed, when at length the procession turned downthe street toward the pension, headed by Nick with the sleepingGeordie on his shoulder, while the others, speechless withfatigue and food, hung heavily on Susy.
It had been decided that, as the bonne was of the party, thechildren might be entrusted to her for the night, and Nick andSusy establish themselves in an adjacent hotel. Nick hadflattered himself that they might remove their possessions therewhen they returned from the tea-room; but Susy, manifestlysurprised at the idea, reminded him that her charges must firstbe given their supper and put to bed. She suggested that heshould meanwhile take the bags to the hotel, and promised tojoin him as soon as Geordie was asleep.
She was a long time coming, but waiting for her was sweet, evenin a deserted hotel reading-room insufficiently heated by asulky stove; and after he had glanced through his morning'smail, hurriedly thrust into his pocket as he left Paris, he sankinto a state of drowsy beatitude. It was all the maddestbusiness in the world, yet it did not give him the sense ofunreality that had made their first adventure a mere goldendream; and he sat and waited with the security of one in whomdear habits have struck deep roots. In this mood ofacquiescence even the presence of the five Fulmers seemed anatural and necessary consequence of all the rest; and when Susyat length appeared, a little pale and tired, with the broodinginward look that busy mothers bring from the nursery, that tooseemed natural and necessary, and part of the new order ofthings.
They had wandered out to a cheap restaurant for dinner; now, inthe damp December night, they were walking back to the hotelunder a sky full of rain-clouds. They seemed to have saideverything to each other, and yet barely to have begun what theyhad to tell; and at each step they took, their heavy feetdragged a great load of bliss.
In the hotel almost all the lights were already out; and theygroped their way to the third floor room which was the only onethat Susy had found cheap enough. A ray from a street-lampstruck up through the unshuttered windows; and after Nick hadrevived the fire they drew their chairs close to it, and satquietly for a while in the dark.
Their silence was so sweet that Nick could not make up his mindto break it; not to do so gave his tossing spirit such a senseof permanence, of having at last unlimited time before him inwhich to taste his joy and let its sweetness stream through him.
But at length he roused himself to say: "It's queer how thingscoincide. I've had a little bit of good news in one of theletters I got this morning."Susy took the announcement serenely. "Well, you would, youknow," she commented, as if the day had been too obviouslydesigned for bliss to escape the notice of its dispensers.
"Yes," he continued with a thrill of pardonable pride. "Duringthe cruise I did a couple of articles on Crete--oh, just travel-impressions, of course; they couldn't be more. But the editorof the New Review has accepted them, and asks for others. Andhere's his cheque, if you please! So you see you might have letme take the jolly room downstairs with the pink curtains. Andit makes me awfully hopeful about my book."He had expected a rapturous outburst, and perhaps somereassertion of wifely faith in the glorious future that awaitedThe Pageant of Alexander; and deep down under the lover's well-being the author felt a faint twinge of mortified vanity whenSusy, leaping to her feet, cried out, ravenously and withoutpreamble: "Oh, Nick, Nick--let me see how much they've givenyou!"He flourished the cheque before her in the firelight. "A coupleof hundred, you mercenary wretch!""Oh, oh--" she gasped, as if the good news had been almost toomuch for her tense nerves; and then surprised him by dropping tothe ground, and burying her face against his knees.
"Susy, my Susy," he whispered, his hand on her shaking shoulder.
"Why, dear, what is it? You're not crying?""Oh, Nick, Nick--two hundred? Two hundred dollars? Then I'vegot to tell you--oh now, at once!"A faint chill ran over him, and involuntarily his hand drew backfrom her bowed figure.
"Now? Oh, why now?" he protested. "What on earth does itmatter now--whatever it is?""But it does matter--it matters more than you can think!"She straightened herself, still kneeling before him, and liftedher head so that the firelight behind her turned her hair into aruddy halo. "Oh, Nick, the bracelet--Ellie's bracelet ....
I've never returned it to her," she faltered out.
He felt himself recoiling under the hands with which sheclutched his knees. For an instant he did not remember what shealluded to; it was the mere mention of Ellie Vanderlyn's namethat had fallen between them like an icy shadow. What anincorrigible fool he had been to think they could ever shake offsuch memories, or cease to be the slaves of such a past!
"The bracelet?--Oh, yes," he said, suddenly understanding, andfeeling the chill mount slowly to his lips.
"Yes, the bracelet ... Oh, Nick, I meant to give it back atonce; I did--I did; but the day you went away I forgoteverything else. And when I found the thing, in the bottom ofmy bag, weeks afterward, I thought everything was over betweenyou and me, and I had begun to see Ellie again, and she was kindto me and how could I?" To save his life he could have found noanswer, and she pressed on: "And so this morning, when I sawyou were frightened by the expense of bringing all the childrenwith us, and when I felt I couldn't leave them, and couldn'tleave you either, I remembered the bracelet; and I sent you offto telephone while I rushed round the corner to a littlejeweller's where I'd been before, and pawned it so that youshouldn't have to pay for the children .... But now, darling,you see, if you've got all that money, I can get it out of pawnat once, can't I, and send it back to her?"She flung her arms about him, and he held her fast, wondering ifthe tears he felt were hers or his. Still he did not speak; butas he clasped her close she added, with an irrepressible flashof her old irony: "Not that Ellie will understand why I've doneit. She's never yet been able to make out why you returned herscarf-pin."For a long time she continued to lean against him, her head onhis knees, as she had done on the terrace of Como on the lastnight of their honeymoon. She had ceased to talk, and he satsilent also, passing his hand quietly to and fro over her hair.
The first rapture had been succeeded by soberer feelings. Herconfession had broken up the frozen pride about his heart, andhumbled him to the earth; but it had also roused forgottenthings, memories and scruples swept aside in the first rush oftheir reunion. He and she belonged to each other for always:
he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn themtogether again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselvesalmost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of theother, would never again wholly let them go. Yet as he satthere he thought of Strefford, he thought of Coral Hicks. Hehad been a coward in regard to Coral, and Susy had been sincereand courageous in regard to Strefford. Yet his mind dwelt onCoral with tenderness, with compunction, with remorse; and hewas almost sure that Susy had already put Strefford utterly outof her mind.
It was the old contrast between the two ways of loving, theman's way and the woman's; and after a moment it seemed to Nicknatural enough that Susy, from the very moment of finding himagain, should feel neither pity nor regret, and that Streffordshould already be to her as if he had never been. After all,there was something Providential in such arrangements.
He stooped closer, pressed her dreaming head between his hands,and whispered: "Wake up; it's bedtime."She rose; but as she moved away to turn on the light he caughther hand and drew her to the window. They leaned on the sill inthe darkness, and through the clouds, from which a few dropswere already falling, the moon, labouring upward, swam into aspace of sky, cast her troubled glory on them, and was againhidden.