Cytherea Part 3

"I'm not sure," she replied, with an evident honesty; "I am trying to make up my mind now. But I hope not, it will bring so much trouble. I do all I can to avoid that; I really hate to hurt people. If it happens, though, what can you do? Which is worse--to damage others or yourself?

Of course, underneath I am entirely selfish; I have to be; I always was.

Art is the most exhausting thing that is. But I don't know a great deal about it; other people, who act rather badly, can explain so fully."

From where Lee sat he could see Cytherea; the unsteady light fell on the gilt headdress, the black hair and the pale disturbing smile. She seemed to have paused in a slow graceful walk, waiting, with that wisdom at once satirical and tender, for him. Together, slowly, deliberately, they would move away from the known, the commonplace, the bound, into the unknown--dark gardens and white marble and the murmur of an ultramarine sea. He was rudely disturbed by the entrance of Anette and Peyton Morris. "We're so sorry," Anette said in an exaggerated air of apology; "come on away, Peyton." But the latter told Lee that f.a.n.n.y was looking for him. "We are ready to go over to the Club; it's ten minutes past eight."

Mina Raff gazed up at the doll. "I have an idea the devil made you," she declared.

"You are to go with us, Mina," Peyton told her; "if you will get your cloak--" The two women left, and Morris demanded:

"What was that d.a.m.ned rot about the doll?"

"Miss Raff wanted it."

"Well, why not?"

Lee Randon turned away coldly. "Little girls can't have everything they put their eyes on." Morris muttered, and Lee asked, "What's that?" The other failed to reply, but his remark had sounded remarkably like, "She can." Going, Lee looked back involuntarily: he hadn't, after all, imagined Cytherea's quality, Mina Raff had recognized it, too; the dance had lost its attraction for him.

The automobiles started in a concentration of accelerated gasoline explosions, their headlights sweeping across the house and plunging into the farther night. f.a.n.n.y gathered her wrap closely about her throat.

"I'm cold," she a.s.serted; "it was so nice at home, with the children, and plans--I intend to take out that yellow rambler and try a climbing American beauty rose there. What a lovely dress of Anette's; it must be the one she's been talking about so much, that Miss Zillinger made; really good for Eastlake. What was that man's name who was in the navy, and did you notice his rank? The officers of the navy are a lot better looking than army men. And Mina Raff, after all did you find her interesting?"

"Quite. She struck me as very intelligent." He had no wish to repeat the conversation about Cytherea. It was queer, that; the more he considered it the more significant it appeared to be. "Did it seem to you," he asked, "that Peyton was very attentive?"

"I didn't have time to notice. Do you think it's true about her getting all that money? It looks almost wicked to me, with so many people needing just a little. But anybody could see that she thinks only of herself; I don't mean she isn't charitable, but in--in other ways."

They were late, and the main floor was being emptied of a small crowd moving into the dining-room. There the long table of the club dinner reached from end wall to wall; and, with the sc.r.a.ping of chairs, a confusion of voices, the places were filled. Lee found himself between Bemis Fox, a younger girl familiar enough at the dances but whose presence had only just been recognized, and Mrs. Craddock, in Eastlake for the winter. Anette was across the board, and her lips formed the query, "The first dance?"

Lee Randon nodded; he was measurably fond of her; he usually enjoyed a party at which he found Anette. That she liked him was very evident; not desperately, but enough to dispose of most restraint; she repeated to Lee what stories, formal and informal, men told her, and she asked his advice about situations always intimate and interesting.

The flood of voices, sustained on c.o.c.ktails, rose and fell, there were challenges down the length of the table and quickly exchanged confidences. Bemis, publicly ingenuous, laid a light eager hand on his arm, and Mrs. Craddock answered a question in a decided manner. The dinner, Lee saw, was wholly characteristic of the club and its members: they had all, practically, known each other for years, since childhood; meeting casually on the street, in the discharge of a common living, their greetings and conversation were based on mutual long familiarity and recognized facts; but here, at such dances, they put on, together with the appropriate dress, a totally other aspect.

An artificial and exotic air enveloped whatever they did and said--hardy perennials, Lee thought, in terms f.a.n.n.y's rather than his, they were determined to transform themselves into the delicate and rare flowers of a conservatory. Women to whom giggling was an anomaly giggled persistently; others, the perfect forms of housewife and virtue, seemed intent on creating the opposite engaging impression; they were all seriously, desperately, addressed to a necessity of being as different from their actual useful fates as possible.

The men, with the exception of the very young and the perpetually young, were, Lee Randon knew, more annoyed than anything else; there was hardly one of them who, with opportunity, would not have avoided the dinner as a d.a.m.ned nuisance; scarcely a man would have put his stamp of approval on that kind of entertainment. It was the women who engineered it, the entire society of America, who had invented all the popular forms of pleasure; it was their show, for the magnifying of their charms and the spectacle of their gay satins and scented lace; and the men came, paid, with a good humor, a patience, not without its resemblance to imbecility. Women, Lee continued, constantly complained about living in a world made by men for men; but the truth of that was very limited: in the details, the details which, enormously multiplied, filled life, women were omnipotent. No man could withstand the steady friction, the inexhaustible wearing, of feminine prejudice; forever rolled in the resistless stream of women's ambition, their men became round and smooth and admirable, like pebbles. This, he saw, in f.a.n.n.y's loving care, was happening to him: she had spun him into the center of a silken web--

"You are not very polite," Mrs. Craddock said.

"Are you a mind-reader," he replied, "or haven't I heard you?"

"It doesn't matter," she explained, "but you were so far away."

He told her something of what had been in his thoughts, and she rewarded him with a swift speculative interest. "I hadn't realized you were so critical about your guinea hen," she acknowledged. "Well, if what you say is true, what can you do about it?"

"Nothing," Lee returned non-committally; "I am comfortable." This, he instantly decided, sounded unfair to f.a.n.n.y, and he subst.i.tuted happy.

Mrs. Craddock obviously was not interested in the change. "I get as tired of this as you do," she a.s.serted abruptly; "it's like being on a merry-go-round someone else started and can't stop. You have no idea how we get to hate the tunes."

"But you mustn't forget the chance of catching a gold ring," he reminded her.

"It's bra.s.s," Mrs. Craddock a.s.serted.

The orchestra began in the other room and, though dinner was not over, there were breaks in the table, couples dancing beyond. Anette rose, and Lee Randon, taking her into his arms, swept out from the doorway.

"What was she talking about?" Anette demanded. "You," he replied experimentally. "I like her; experience has brought her some wisdom; and she knows men, too."

"G.o.d knows she ought to," Anette's face was close to his, and he caught the flash of malice in her eyes. Conscious of the flavor of an acceptable flattery he didn't let this disturb him. "What a marvelous dance," she proceeded; "there must be twenty men over. But I like it better when the porch isn't inclosed, and you can sit on the bunkers."

How was it that she contrived to make nearly everything she said stir his imagination? Anette had the art of investing the most trivial comments with a suggestion of license. It was a stimulating quality, but dangerous for her--she was past thirty with no sign of marriage on the horizon. He wondered if she really had thrown her slipper over the hedge? It wasn't important, Lee decided, if she had. How ludicrous it was to judge all women, weigh their character, by the single standard of chast.i.ty. But this much must be admitted, when that convention of morality was broken it had no more significance than the fragments of a coconut sh.e.l.l. The dance came to an end and they returned to their vanilla mousse, coffee and cigarettes.

Some of the men were leaning over the table, drunk and noisy; a woman's laugh was shrill, senseless. Senseless! That, for Lee Randon, described the whole proceeding. He had looked forward to the dance with a happy antic.i.p.ation, and, now that it was here, even before he had come, he was out of key with it. The efforts of the people about him to forget themselves were stiff and unconvincing; their att.i.tudes were no more than masks held before their faces; there wasn't a genuine daring emotion, the courage of an admitted thrill, to be found. And then, as if to mock his understanding, he saw Peyton Morris with such a desperately white face bent over Mina Raff that he had an impulse to reprove him for his shameless exposure.

Instead, he cut in on their dancing and carried her to the other end of the floor. "I don't know why you did that," she complained; "you don't like me. But you can dance, and with Peyton it's a little like rus.h.i.+ng down a football field. There! Shall we drop the encore and go outside?

My wrap is on a chair in the corner."

"I don't go to parties," she explained; "I am only here on Anette's account. That was Oscar Hammerstein's idea--he wouldn't let his actresses even ride in a public car; he said that mystery was a part of their value, and that people wouldn't pay to see them if they were always on the streets. Beside, I am tired all the time; you can't possibly know how hard I work; a hundred times harder than you, for instance."

"I've been told that about moving pictures."

"The glare of the silver-foil reflectors is unbearable," she looked up, with a pointed and famous effect. "But you don't like me?"

"I do; aside from that, though, I'm not sure; probably because you are so remote and cold."

"Thank G.o.d!" she replied. "You haven't stopped to think where I'd be if I weren't. And yet, no one, in their work, is supposed to be more emotional. It's funny, and I don't pretend to understand. The trouble with me is that I have no life of my own: ever since I was sixteen I've done what directors told me, for the public; it is time I had some private feelings."

"It must be a nuisance," he agreed.

Another dance began, but neither of them stirred; from where Lee sat the long doors were panels of s.h.i.+fting colors and movement. The music beat, fluctuated, in erratic bars. A deep unhappiness possessed him, an appalling loneliness that sometimes descended on him in crowds. Even f.a.n.n.y, the thought of his children, could not banish it. Above the drum he thought he could hear the sibilant dissatisfaction of the throng striving for an eternity of youth. The gla.s.s about the porch, blotted with night, was icy cold, but it was hot within; the steam pipes were heated to their full capacity, and the women's painted and powdered faces were streaked--their a.s.sumption of vitality and color was running from them.

"Hideous," Mina Raff said with a small grimace. She had the strange ability of catching his unexpressed thoughts and putting them into words. "Women," she went on, "spend all their money and half their lives trying to look well, and you'd suppose they would learn something, but they don't."

"What do women dress for?" he demanded; "is it to make themselves seductive to men or to have other women admire and envy them?"

"Both," she answered, "but mostly it's a sort of compet.i.tion with men for the prize. I'll tell you something about us if you like--we are not made of sugar and spice and other pleasant bits, but only of two: prost.i.tute and mother. Not, of course, separately, or in equal parts; some of us have more of one, others more of the other. That girl across the table from you is all prost.i.tute, the married woman you were talking to is both, quite evenly divided; your wife is a mother, even with her remarkable eyes." She stopped his obvious inquiry:

"I am an artist, and no one has yet discovered what that is. Do you remember the straw you used to get with a gla.s.s of soda water? You see, often I think I'm like that, a thing for bright colors to pour through.

It's very discouraging. There is Peyton, and he'll want to dance." She rose, slipping out of her cloak.

Lee Randon saw f.a.n.n.y not far away, and he dropped into a chair beside her. "Well," he asked, "how is it going?"

"It seems all right," she told him, with one of her engaging smiles. "I was surprised that you talked so long to Mina Raff; I had the idea you didn't like her." Women, he reflected, were uncanny. "Three women are just plastered up in the dressing-room," she continued; "Sophie Tane ruined her dress completely, and Crystal Willard has been sobbing for an hour. Lee, there are horrid bruises on her arm--do you think he is brutal?"

He told her not to bother about the Willards, and then rose to get a chair for Claire Morris. "Peyton is simply fascinated," Claire a.s.serted lightly. "This Mina ought to have something handsome for giving him such a splendid time. She is a lovely wench, Lee."

"You have it over her like a tent, Claire," he insisted; "you're lovely and human both."

"Thank you, darling; I'm human, fast enough, now that the drink is dying. I believe for the first time in my life I am ready to leave a dance before the last flourish of the music. f.a.n.n.y, we are getting older; it's hideous but so. We're getting on, but our young men are gayer every day."

f.a.n.n.y Randon's smile, her expression, were secure.