Cytherea Part 12

It seems to me most peculiar."

He couldn't help it, he replied, with a slight responsive sharpening of his own speech; he had driven to the hotel, where he had secured their room, and Mrs. Grove had made it impossible for him to stay there.

When he left--it would be late tomorrow or early the next day, Lee thought--she could meet him and do as they planned. But f.a.n.n.y refused to agree: it would, now, be a needless expense. No, the other was what she had eagerly looked forward to. Lee, drawing her attention once more to the fact that it wasn't possible, was answered by so long a silence that he concluded she had hung up the receiver.

"Have a good time," f.a.n.n.y said at last; "you will, anyhow, with the Raff woman. I suppose Mrs. Grove, who seems to get everything she wants, is fascinating as well."

"Indeed, I don't know, f.a.n.n.y!" he exclaimed, his patience almost exhausted. "It hasn't occurred to me to think about her. I'm sorry you won't do what I suggest; it's not different from what we first thought of."

"Good-bye," she answered reluctantly; "the children are here and send their love. They'd like to speak to you, but probably you're in a hurry."

"I may be late for dinner now," he admitted.

The receiver in his house was abruptly, unmistakably, replaced. No one else, and for so little perceptible cause, could make him as mad as f.a.n.n.y frequently did. He put on his waistcoat, changed his money from the trousers on the bed to those he was wearing, in a formless indignation. This wasn't his fault, he repeated; positively, judged by her manner, he might be doing something wrong. f.a.n.n.y even managed to convey a doubt of Mrs. Grove, Mrs. William Loyd Grove. But she couldn't see how ridiculous that was.

William Grove Lee liked negatively; there was, patently, nothing in him to create an active response. His short heavy body was faultlessly clothed; his heavy face, with its moustache twisted into points, the clouded purple of his cheeks contradicted by the penetration of a steadily focussed gaze, expressed nothing more than a niceness of balance between self-indulgence, tempered by exercise, games in open air, and a far from negligible administration of the resources he had inherited.

"You are a relative of the Morrises?" he asked Lee, turning from the menu set before him in a miniature silver frame. This Lee Randon admitted, and Grove's eyebrows mounted. "Can't anything be done with the young man?"

"How are you succeeding with the young woman?" Lee returned.

"Oh, women--" William Grove waved his hand; "you can't argue with women.

Mina wants her Peyton--if that's his name; G.o.d knows I've heard it enough--and there's no more to that."

"It begins to look as though she'd get him," Lee observed; "I must say we haven't got far with Morris."

"Extraordinary."

It was Mrs. Grove who spoke. She was dressed in grey, a gown cut away from sheer points on her shoulders, with a girdle of small gilt roses, her hair in a binding of grey brocade and amber ornaments; and above her elbows were bands of dull intricately pierced gold.

"I wonder what it's all about?"

Lee gazed at her with a new interest. "So do I," he acknowledged; "I was thinking of that, really, before this happened: what is it all about?"

"I can answer that readily enough," Grove a.s.sured them; "anyone could with a little consideration. They saw too much of each other; they ran their heads into the noose. Trouble always follows. I don't care who they are, but if you throw two fairly young people of opposite s.e.x together in circ.u.mstances any way out of the ordinary, you have a situation to meet. Mina has been spoiled by so much publicity; her emotions are constantly over-strung; and she thinks, if she wants it, that she can have the moon."

"You believe that, I know, William," his wife commented; "I have often heard you say so. But what is your opinion, Mr. Randon--have you reached one and is a conclusion possible?"

"I can't answer any of your questions," he admitted; "perhaps this is one of the things that must be experienced to be understood; certainly it hasn't a great deal to do with the mind." He turned to William Grove, "Your view has a lot to recommend it, even if it solves nothing. Suppose you are right--what then?"

"I don't pretend to go that far," Grove protested; "I am not answering the questions of the universe. Savina has an idea there's a mystery in it, a quality hidden from reason; and I want to knock that on the head. It's a law of nature, that's all; keep away from it if you want security. I can't imagine people of breeding--you will have to overlook this, Mr. Randon, on the account of Morris--getting so far down the slide. It belongs to another cla.s.s entirely, one without traditions or practical wisdom. Yet, I suppose it is the general tone of the day: they think they can handle fire with impunity, like children with parlor matches."

"It can't, altogether, be accounted for so easily," Lee decided. "The whole affair has been so lied about, and juggled to suit different climates and people, that hardly any of the original impulse is left on view. What do you think would happen if for a while we'd lose our ideas of what was right and wrong in love?"

"Pandemonium," Grove replied promptly.

"Not if people were more responsible, William," Savina Grove added; "not for the superior. But then, all laws and order were made for the good of the mob. I don't need the policeman I see in the streets; and, really, I haven't a sc.r.a.p more use for policeman-like regulations; I could regulate myself--"

"And there," he interrupted, "is where Mina fails; she can't run herself for a d.a.m.n; she ought to have a nurse. Your theories contradict each other, as well--you say one thing and do quite differently."

She was silent at this, gazing at her hands, the beautifully made pointed fingers bare of rings. On their backs the veins, blue-violet, were visible; and there was a delicate tracery inside the bend of her arms. But her face, Lee reflected, was too pa.s.sive, too inanimate; her lack of color was unvaried by any visible trace of emotion, life. She was, in fact, plain if not actually ugly; her mouth was too large; on the street, without the saving distinction of her dress, he wouldn't have noticed her.

But what, above the rest, engaged him was her resemblance to someone he knew but couldn't recall. What woman, seen lately, had Mrs. Grove's still, intent face, her pointed chin and long throat? She lifted her hand, and the gesture, the suspended grace of the wrist, was familiar to him. Finally Lee Randon, unable to satisfy his curiosity, exasperated at the usual vain stupidity of such comparisons, gave up the effort.

William Grove informed Lee that he might accompany him to his club, stay, or go as he willed. Mrs. Grove, it developed, would be at home, where, if he chose, they might pursue the cause of Lee Randon's presence there.

There was, Lee soon grasped, very little that was useful to be said.

They repeated what had been gone over before. Mrs. Grove explained again Mina Raff's unpredictable qualities, and he spoke of Peyton and Claire Morris. Beyond the admission of their surrender, Peyton's and hers, to each other, Mina had told the Groves nothing; Savina Grove was ignorant of what they intended. That it would begin at once was evident. "William is always a little annoyed by my contradictory character," she observed, gazing down at her slippers. They were grey, slight like a glove, on slight arched feet that held his attention. The conversation about the situation before them, expanded to its farthest limits, inevitably dragged; they said the same things, in hardly varied words, a third and even a fourth time; and then Lee's interest in it wholly deserted him--he could excite himself about Mina no longer.

This left him confronted with himself and Mrs. Grove. A clock on the stairway struck ten. Her face hadn't a vestige of cordiality, and he wondered if she were fatigued, merely polite in remaining in the room with him? She needn't inconvenience herself on his account! It was pleasant enough at the Groves'; without doubt--in her own world--she was a woman of consequence, but he wasn't carried away by the privilege of studying her indifferent silences. Then she completely surprised him:

"I suppose you have been to all the cafes and revues you ever want to see; but I almost never get to them; and it occurred to me that, if you didn't too much mind, we might go. What do you think--is it utterly foolish?"

On the contrary, he a.s.sured her, it would amuse him immensely. Lee Randon said this so convincingly that she rose at once. To be with Mrs. William Loyd Grove at Malmaison--that, of all the places possible, presented itself at once--would furnish him with an uncommon evening.

Consequently, driving smoothly over Fifth Avenue, a strange black river of solidified asphalt strung with fixed moons, in answer to her query, he proposed Malmaison, and the directions were transmitted into the ivory mouth-piece beside her. At the moment when the day was most threatened it had shown a new and most promising development. Over the grey dress Mrs. Grove wore a cloak with a subdued gold s.h.i.+mmer, her hat was hardly more than the spread wing of a bird across the pallor of her face, and the deep folds of the gloves on her wrists emphasized the slender charm of her arms. No young--younger woman, he decided, could compete with her in the worldly, the sophisticated, attractiveness she commanded: on the plane of absolute civilization she was supreme. In the semi-gloom of the closed car, sunken in her voluminous wrap of dull gold, with a high-bridged nose visible, a hand in its dead-white covering pressed into the cus.h.i.+on, she satisfied his every aesthetic requirement. Women, he reflected, should be primarily a show on a stage carefully set for the purpose of their loveliness. Not many men, and scarcely more women--so few were lovely--would agree with him there.

Argument would confront him with the moral and natural beauty of maternity; very well, in such instincts, he thought with a resignation quite cheerful, he was lacking. Birth, self-oblivion, was no longer the end of his dream-like existence. Lee Randon wanted to find the justification, preserve the integrity, of his personality, and not lose it. Yes, if nature, as it seemed fully reasonable, had intended the other, something incalculable had upset its plans; for what now stirred Lee had nothing to do with breeding. Long-continued thought, instead of making his questioning clearer, endlessly complicated it. There was always a possibility, which he was willing to consider, that he was lacking in sheer normality; and that, therefore, his doubts, no more than neurasthenic, were without any value.

He was ready to face this, but unable, finally, to accept it, to dismiss himself so cheaply. Whatever it was, troubling his imagination, was too perceptible at the hearts of other men. It wasn't new, singular, in him; nor had he borrowed it from any book or philosophy: it had so happened that he had never read a paragraph, satisfactory to him in the slightest, about the emotional sum of a man and a woman. What he read he couldn't believe; it was a paste of moralistic lies; either that or the writer had no greater power of explication than he. But, while he might deny a fundamental irregularity, the majority of men, secretly delivered to one thing, would preach virtuously at him the other. He recalled how universal were the traces of dissatisfaction he had noticed; an uneasiness of the masculine world that resembled a harborful of s.h.i.+ps which, lying long and placidly at anchor, began in a rising wind to stir and pull at their hawser chains.

Lee didn't mean that this restlessness was confined to men; simply he was intent on his own problem. The automobile turned into a cross-town street; they met, entered, a ma.s.s of cars held at Broadway, advanced a few feet, stopped, went on, and, twisting through the traffic, reached Malmaison. He left his outer things at the door, but Mrs. Grove kept her cloak, and they mounted in an elevator to the cafe floor. The place was crowded with brightly filled tables surrounding the rectangular open dancing s.p.a.ce, and Lee signalled for a captain. That experienced individual, with a covert glance at Lee Randon's companion, a hand folded about a sum of money that would have paid the butcher for a week at Eastlake, found, however, exactly what they wanted; and Mrs. Grove's dominating slimness emerged by degrees, like a rare flower from leaves of quiet gold.

They sat facing each other. At a table on Lee's left, on a floor a foot higher, sat a woman, Spanish in color, with a face like a crumpled petunia. The girls of a larger party, beyond Savina Grove, were young, with the vigorous nakedness of their shoulders and backs traced by black cobwebs of lace. The music began, and they left to dance; the deserted tables bore their drinks undisturbed while the floor was choked by slowly revolving figures distilling from the rhythm frank gratification.

There was an honesty of intention, the admission that life and nights were short, lacking in the fever at the Eastlake dancing; here, rather than unsettled restraint, was the determination to spend every excited nerve on sensation, to obtain the last drop from gla.s.ses the contents and odors of which uniquely resembled the drinks of pre-prohibition.

These girls, consciously animating their shapely bodies with the allurement if not the ends of creation, prost.i.tutes of both temperament and fact, were, Lee Randon decided, calmer--yes, safer--in mind and purpose than were his most admirable friends.

Certainly they were better defined, more logically placed than, for example, Mrs. William Loyd Grove--her dress, her powdering and perfume, the warm metal clasped about the softness of her arms, and the indicated purpose about them, were not worlds apart. But the latter met its announced intention; it was dissipated--normally--in satiety. But, where Mrs. Grove was concerned ... Lee speculated. She was evidently highly engaged, not a shade repelled, by what she saw; in a cool manner she drew his gaze to a specially scarlet and effective dress:

"With her figure it's very successful," she commented.

What struck him immediately was that the proportions she had pointed out and her own were identical; and Lee had a vision of Mrs. Grove in the dress they were studying. The same thing, it appeared, was in her mind. "Well," she challenged him, "I could, you know." This he admitted discreetly, and asked her if she cared to dance.

"Why not?"

In his arms she was at once light and perceivable; everything a part of her was exquisitely finished; he discovered more and more surely that she was flesh and blood, and not, as he had regarded her, an insulated social mechanism. Leaving the dancing floor, she was careless, in the manner everywhere evident, in the disposition of her skirt. Lee had come prepared for the pleasure to be had from on-looking; but he had become the most oblivious of all the active partic.i.p.ants. After a second brief understanding with the captain, another quickly-disposed currency note, there was the familiar smothered uncorking of champagne by his ear. To Lee Randon's lavishness Mrs. Grove gave no attention, and he was obliged to banish a petty chagrin by the knowledge that he had fully met the obligations of her presence. The propping of her elbows on the table, her casual gazing over the lifted rim of her gla.s.s, her silences, all admitted him to her own unremarked, her exclusive and inalienable, privilege.

She still, however, retained her personal remoteness from him; what she gave belonged to him, in their situation, conventionally; it had no greater significance; and, forming nearly all of the duty of life, her life, she discharged her responsibility beautifully. She wasn't, certainly, gay in the sense most familiar to him--Anette, in the same circ.u.mstances, would have radiated a bubbling sensual pleasure, indulged in a surface impropriety; any girl around them would have given more than Mrs. Grove; everything, probably. But he preferred the penetrating judgments, the superior mental freedom, of his companion. If she were interested in a prost.i.tute, she didn't, with a laborious self-consciousness, avoid that term; she was neither obviously aware of those fragile vessels of pleasure nor ignorant of them; indeed, Lee told himself, she was more a part of their world, however continent she might remain, than she was of f.a.n.n.y's.

f.a.n.n.y, here, would have been equally fascinated and shocked; but, essentially, she'd be hurt; and, at the same time, rebellious with the innate resentment of the pure, the contained, for the free. She would never have agreed to the champagne, either; they would have ordered lemonades or claret cup; and, by midnight, gone back to the hotel. It was now past two o'clock. There was no lessening in the vigor of the dancing, the laughter, or in the stream of laden trays; no trace of fatigue in Mrs. Grove. She had the determined resilience of a woman approaching, perhaps, the decline, but not yet in it; of one who had danced into innumerable sun-rises from the night before, destroying many dozens of pairs of satin slippers.

When it occurred to her to gather up the petal-like folds of her cloak, get her hands into the gloves rolled back on her wrists, it was nearer three than two. A hollow voice on the street called the number of the Grove automobile, the door closed smoothly on them, and again she was absorbed into the cus.h.i.+ons and her wrap. But there was a change in his feeling for her, an indefinable but potent boundary had been crossed: they had looked together, informally, at life, at pa.s.sion, and the resulting sympathy had, finally, put aside the merely casual. Lee lighted a cigarette, and, without speech, she took it from him, transferred it to her own lips.

Eastlake and f.a.n.n.y, Helena and Gregory, seemed very remote; a quality of his being suppressed at home here possessed him completely: in a black silk evening waistcoat, with no responsibilities, no thought of time or work, he was, lightly and wholly, an idler in a polite sphere. The orchids in their gla.s.s holder, dimly visible before him, were a symbol of his purely decorative engagement with life. Now Lee couldn't reconcile himself to the knowledge that this was no more than an interlude--with music--in his other, married existence. It was as unsubstantial as an evening's performance, in temporary finery, of a high comedy of manners.

Savina Grove said, "It has been surprisingly nice."

"Hasn't it," he agreed; "and, when you spoke, I was trying to realize that it will be so soon over."