Cytherea Part 13

Immediately after he cursed himself for a blunder, a stupid error in emphasis, from which she drew perceptibly away. She extinguished the cigarette, his cigarette, and that, as well, added to the distance between them.

"I should go back to Eastlake tomorrow afternoon," he observed, in a manner which he made entirely detached. To that she objected that he would not see Mina Raff, nothing would be accomplished. "She might have dinner with you tomorrow night," she thought; "Mina gets back to the Plaza a little before seven. But we can call the studio."

In view of what he had already done, Mrs. Grove's proposal seemed unavoidably reasonable. He would telephone f.a.n.n.y again in the morning and explain. f.a.n.n.y, his wife! Well, he continued, as though he were angrily retorting to a criticism from without, no man ever better realized the splendid qualities of his wife. That was beyond contradiction; and he sharply added that not f.a.n.n.y, but the role of a wife, a housewife, was under observation. Mrs. Grove was married, but that didn't keep her from the Malmaison, at what Eastlake disapprovingly called all hours of the night. She had no aspect of a servitude which, while it promised the most unlimited future rewards, took the present grace, the charm, from women. That--the consequent loss or gain--was open to question; but the fact remained: for the majority of women marriage was fatal to their persons. Only the rich, the fortunate and the unamenable escaped.

"In a very few minutes now," Mrs. Grove said, "you will be able to sleep."

"I've never been wider awake," he protested; "I was thinking of how marriage submerged most women while you escaped."

She laughed quietly, incomprehensibly.

"Well," he insisted, aggrieved, "haven't you?"

She leaned toward him; almost, he told himself, there was a flash of animation on her immobile face. "Escape, what do you mean by that?" she demanded. "Does anyone escape--will young Morris and Mina? And you?"

"Oh, not I," he replied, thrown off his mental balance by the rapid attack of her questioning; "I am tied in a thousand ways. But you surprise me."

"I could," she remarked, coldly, returning to her corner. "Your self-satisfaction makes me rage, How do you dare, knowing nothing, to decide what I am and what I can do? You're like William, everyone I meet--so sure for others."

"No, I'm not," he contradicted her with a rude energy; "and, after all, I didn't accuse you of much that was serious. I only said you were apparently above the circ.u.mstances that spoil so many women."

"It isn't necessary to repeat yourself," she reminded him disagreeably; "I have a trace of memory."

"And with it," he answered, "a very unpleasant temper."

"Quite so," she agreed, once more calm; "you seem fated to tell me about myself. I don't mind, and it gives you such a feeling of wisdom." The car stopped before the Grove house and, within, her good-night was indifferent even for her. What, he wondered, what the devil, had upset her? He had never encountered a more incomprehensible display of the arrogantly feminine.

In his room, however, re-establis.h.i.+ng his sense of comfort, he found, on a low table by the bed, a choice of whiskies, charged water, cigarettes, nectarines, orange-brown mangoes, and black Belgian grapes, Attached to an electric plug was a small coffee percolator; for the morning, Lee gathered. His pajamas, his dressing gown and slippers, were conveniently laid at his hand. He was, in fact, so comfortable that he had no desire to get into bed; and he sat smoking, over a tall drink, speculating about his hostess. Perhaps she had difficulties with the obdurate correctness of William; but Mrs. Grove would have been too well-steeled there to show any resentment to a virtual stranger; no, whatever it was lay within herself. He gave it up, since, he proclaimed aloud, it didn't touch him.

The opened windows admitted the vast unsubdued clamor of New York; the immeasurable force of the city seemed to press in upon the room, upon his thoughts. How different it was from the open countryside, the quiet scene, of his home in Eastlake. There the lowing of a chance cow robbed of her calf, her udder aching, the diminis.h.i.+ng barking of dogs and the birds--sparrows in winter and robins in the spring--were the only sounds that disturbed the dark. In the morning the farmer above Lee rolled the milk down the road, past his window, on a carrier, and the milk cans made a sudden rattle and ringing. Then Christopher washed the porches.

f.a.n.n.y, no matter how late she had been up the night before, was dressed by eight o'clock, and put fresh flowers in the vase. He hazarded the guess that Mrs. Grove was often in bed until past noon; here servants renewed the great hot-house roses with long stems, the elaborate flowers on the dining-table.

In the morning, as he had foreseen, the percolator was connected, cream and sugar placed beside it; and before his shaving was over, he had a cup of coffee with a cigarette casting up its fragrant smoke from the saucer. His shoes might have been lacquered from the heighth of the l.u.s.tre rubbed into them; a voice the perfection of trained sympathetic concern inquired for the exacted details of the suspended preparation of his eggs.

His dinner engagement with Mina Raff, arranged through her secretary, was for fifteen minutes past seven; and, meanwhile, as Mrs. Grove had offered, Adamson drove Lee down-town. The afternoon had nearly gone before he returned to East Sixty-sixth Street; but the maid at the door told him that there was tea up in the library. This he found to be a long gloomy room finished in a style which, he decided, might be ma.s.sively Babylonian. A ponderous table for the support of weightless trifles filled the middle of the rug; there were deep chairs of roan leather, with an immense sofa like the lounge of a club or steamer; low bookcases with leaded gla.s.s; and windows the upper panes of which were stained in peac.o.c.k colors and geometrical design.

The tea things were on a wagon beside the center table; there were a number of used cups and crumpled napkins, and whiskey gla.s.ses, in evidence, but Mrs. Grove was alone. She had been about to have them removed, she told him, when he rang. "No, I am not in a hurry; and it's such a disagreeable day you ought to have a highball."

She was in black, a dress that he found unbecoming, with a collar high about her throat and wide sleeves heavily embroidered in carmine. "You will hate that one," she said of the chair he selected; "I can't think why chairs have to be so very uncomfortable--these either swallow you whole or, like a toboggan slide, drop you on the floor." Lee drew up a tabourette for his gla.s.s and ash tray. The ba.n.a.l idea struck him that, although he had met Mrs. Grove only yesterday, he knew her well; rather he had a sense of ease, of the familiar, with her. The sole evidence she gave of an agreement in his feeling was that she almost totally neglected to talk. She smoked, absorbed in a frowning abstraction. A floor lamp behind them was lighted, and there was an illumination at the mantel, but the depths of the library were wrapped in obscurity: its sombreness had increased, the air was heavy with the dust of leather, a vague funereal oppressiveness.

Lee's sense of familiarity increased, but his ease left him, driven away by the strength of a feeling not exactly of being at home but of returning to an old powerful influence. Mrs. Grove's head was in shadow.

There was a stir at the door, and William Grove entered. He was, he told Lee civilly, glad that Adamson had been of use. "I walk whenever it's possible," he proceeded; "but that way you wouldn't have reached Beaver Street yet. Nothing to drink, thanks, Savina, but a cigarette--" Lee Randon reached forward with the silver box and, inadvertently, he pressed into Mrs. Grove's knee. He heard a thin clatter, there was a minute hot splash on his hand, and he realized that she had dropped her spoon. She sat rigidly, half turned toward the light, with a face that shocked him: it was not merely pale, but white, drawn and harsh, and her eyes, losing every vestige of ordinary expression, stared at him in a set black intensity.

"I'm sorry," Lee Randon said mechanically, and he offered the cigarette box to the other man; but, internally, he was consumed with anger.

The woman positively was a fool to mistake his awkwardness; he hadn't supposed that anyone could be so super-sensitive and suspicious; and it damaged his pride that, clearly, she should consider him capable of such a juvenile proceeding. Lee rose and excused himself stiffly, explaining that it was time for him to dress; and, in his room, telephoning f.a.n.n.y, he determined to leave New York, the Groves, as early as possible in the morning.

f.a.n.n.y responded from Eastlake in a tone of unending patience; nothing he could do, her voice intimated, would exhaust her first consideration of him; she wouldn't--how could she?--question the wisdom of his decisions, even when they seemed, but, of course, only to her faulty understanding, incomprehensible.

"You make it sound as though I were over here on an errand of my own,"

he protested cheerfully; "I'd rather be in Eastlake."

Helena, she told him, had been bad again; there was a recognized opinion between them that, while Gregory was like his mother, Helena surprisingly resembled Lee Randon. "Well, don't be too severe," he said. Someone had to be, the reply came, faint and indistinct. "Is there anything else?" he asked. Of course, how stupid, she was keeping him; the sound was now open and colored with self-reproach. She was so sorry.

"d.a.m.n!" Lee exclaimed, leaving the telephone with the feeling that f.a.n.n.y had repelled his affection. Women were beyond him.

In this mood he was unprepared for the appearance of Mina Raff, immediately after his name was sent up to her rooms, on the minute arranged. What, next, about her occurred to him was the evidence of her weariness. A short and extremely romantic veil hung from the close brim of her hat--with her head bent forward she gazed at him seriously through the ornamental filaments; her chin raised, the intent regard of her celebrated eyes was unhampered. She didn't care where they went, she replied to his question, except that she preferred a quiet place, where they could talk.

The St. Regis, he thought, would best answer this requirement; and he had started toward the taxi-cab stand when she informed him that she had kept her car. It was larger and more elaborately fitted than the Grove limousine; in its deep upholstery, its silk curtains and velvet carpet and gold mounted vanities, Mina Raff was remarkably child-like, small; her face, brightening at intervals in the rapidly pa.s.sing lights outside, was touched by pathos; she seemed crushed by the size, the swiftness and complexity, of her automobile, and by the gathering imperious weight of her fame. She was still, however, appealingly simple; no matter what she might do it would be invested with the aspect of innocence which, admirable for her art, never for an instant deserted her personality.

Lee Randon, who liked her better with each acc.u.mulating minute, wondered why he was completely outside the disturbance of her charm. As a young man, he concluded, he would have been lost in a pa.s.sionate devotion to her. Mina realized to the last possible indefinite grace the ideal, always a silver abstraction, of youth; the old worn simile of an April moon, distinguished in her case by the qualification, wistful, was the most complete description of her he possessed. Young men--Peyton Morris--were wors.h.i.+ppers of the moon, the unattainable; and when they happily attained a reality they hid it in iridescent fancy.

What now formed Lee's vision had, together with no less a mystery, a greater warmth and implied reality from him. Cytherea and Mina Raff shared nothing; somehow the latter lacked the magnetism essential to the stirring of his desire. This, perhaps, was inevitable to his age, to the swift pa.s.sage of that young idealism: after forty, the nebulous became a need for sensuous reality. Certain phases of Mina, as well, were utterly those of a child--she had the eluding sweetness, the flower-like indifference, of Helena, of a temperamental virginity so absolute that it was incapable of understanding or communicating an emotional fever. But, in the degree of her genius, she was above, superior to, experience; it was not, for her, necessary; she was not changed by it, but changed it into herself, into the validity of whatever she intrinsically was.

His thoughts returned to the unfortunate occurrence in the library at the Groves'; his indignation at Mrs. Grove was complicated, puzzled, by the whole loss of the detached self-possession which, he had thought, was her most persistent characteristic. Her expression, in memory, specially baffled him; under other, accountable, circ.u.mstances he should have said that it was a look of suffering, of drawn pain. He couldn't recall the appearance of a shade of anger; yet the spoon had fallen as if from a hand numb with--with resentment. No other deduction was possible. He wished it were permissible to speak to her again about what--but obviously--had been no more than an accident; he objected to leaving such a ridiculous misconception of himself lodged permanently in her mind. But he couldn't bring it up again; and, after all, it mattered very little. Mrs. Grove was welcome to whatever flattering of her seductiveness her pride demanded. When he had dispatched, with Mina Raff, his duty to Claire, succeeded or failed--the latter, he added, was of course inevitable--he'd return to Eastlake and the Groves would go out of his life.

The curtain of what he had thought of as a play, an interlude, would fall heavily, conclusively, and the music end.

At the St. Regis he chose the more informal dining-room with panellings and high columns of wood, and medallions in white marble. It was neither full nor empty, and they were conducted to a table set for two. Lee was conscious of heads turning, and of a faint running whisper--Mina Raff had been recognized. However, without any exhibited consciousness of this, she addressed herself to him with a pretty exclusion; and, pausing to explain her indifference to food, she left the selection of everything but the salad to Lee; she had, she admitted, a preference for alligator pears cut into small cubes with a French dressing. That disposed of, he turned to her:

"I noticed, at the Plaza, that you are hard at it."

"Indeed, yes," she replied; "but we are still only rehearsing; not a scene has been shot. You see, that makes it all so expensive; I want to do as well as possible for the men who have money and confidence in me."

This, from her manner, her deceptive look of fragility everywhere drooping with regret, was patent. What she said, thought, felt, was magnificently reflected, given visibility, by her fluid being. "But you haven't come over here to talk to me about that," she said directly; "you want me to give up Peyton."

He nodded, relieved that she had made the introduction of his purpose so easy.

"I ought to tell you, before we begin," she warned him, "that I can't.

Nothing can convince me that we are wrong. We didn't try to have this happen, we did all we could--but it was too late--to prevent it," Mina Raff repeated Peyton's own a.s.surance to him. "Things were taken out of our hands. Why I went to Eastlake I don't know, it was dreadfully inconvenient, and my director did what he could to keep me working.

But, as you know, I persisted. Why?" She stopped and regarded him imploringly, through the romantic veil. "I haven't the smallest idea,"

she continued. "Peyton had seen me again in New York; I knew then that I meant a lot to him; but it couldn't have happened if I hadn't stayed with Anette."

Her voice, her wonderment, he thought, were colored by superst.i.tion.

Evidently, up to a certain point, she had resisted, and then--how charming it must have been for Morris--she collapsed. She had convinced herself that they were intended for each other. Lee asked, "How well do you know Peyton?"

"Not at all in the way you do," she admitted candidly; "I understand him only with my heart. But isn't that everything? I know that he is very pure, and doesn't ordinarily care for women--usually I have no feeling about men--and that he played football at Princeton and is very strong.

You have no idea, Mr. Randon, how different he is from the men I am thrown with! There are some actors, of course, who are very fine, wonderful to work with; but the ones not quite so finished.... It's natural, for many reasons, in a woman to act; but there is something, well--something, about men acting, as a rule; don't you agree?"

Lee did, and told her so with a growing pleasure in the rightness of her perceptions. "Peyton is altogether different from the men of the stage,"

he developed her observation; "and it is a capital thing he did play football; for, in the next year or so, until he grows used to your life, he'll have a collection of men to knock down. I'd like to tell you whatever I have discovered about him, for your own consideration, and Peyton is a sn.o.b. That isn't necessarily a term of contempt; with him it simply means that he is impatient, doubtful, at what he doesn't know.

And first under that head come the arts; they have no existence for him or his friends. A play or a book pleases him or it doesn't, he approves of its limiting conventional morals, or violently condemns what he thinks is looseness, and that's the extent of his interest."

Mina Raff gazed at him blankly, this time from under the scallops of the veil. "That is hard to believe," she objected; "he talks to me beautifully about my pictures and a future on the stage. He says that I am going to revolutionize moving pictures--"

"I don't question that," he put in; "but did Peyton show you how it would be done?"