Cytherea Part 5

"That is not very kind, Peyton," she protested; "but I have some common sense."

"Haven't you any uncommon sense?" he begged. "That's what I want. A little just now might save everything."

"You must try to find out," she informed him; "I think I have been successful with Lee; anyhow he ought to say so."

"I do," Lee Randon a.s.serted quickly. "f.a.n.n.y is wonderful. If I'm of no use go to her."

"You don't know," Peyton muttered; "you can have no idea."

"What in the world was he talking about?" she asked Lee in the automobile.

"Peyton is in love with Mina Raff," he admitted shortly, in a pressure of conflicting emotions.

"Lee!" she exclaimed; "are you sure? Did he say so? That is simply frightful."

"I imagine it's worse than you realize."

"Do you mean--"

"Nothing actual yet," he interrupted her impatiently; "perhaps nothing you would bother about. But you'd be wrong. It's all in his thoughts--some d.a.m.ned spoiled ideal, and as dangerous as possible."

"Poor Claire," she said.

"Of course, that's the thing to say," he agreed. "The man is always a criminal in such situations."

"You are not trying to defend him?" she asked quietly.

"Maybe I am; I don't know. After all, we are jumping at conclusions; Peyton was drunk. But, for heaven's sake, if either of them comes to you don't just be moral. Try to understand what may have happened. If you lecture them they will leave you like a shot."

f.a.n.n.y was driving, and she moved one hand from the wheel to his cheek.

"It isn't us, anyhow, Lee; and that is really all I care for. We are closer than others, different. I don't know what I'd do if you should die first--I couldn't move, I couldn't go on."

"You would have the children," he reminded her.

"They are nothing compared with you." It was the only time she had made such an admission, and it moved him profoundly. It at once surcharged him with grat.i.tude and an obscure disturbance.

"You mustn't pin so much to me," he protested; "you ought to think of a hundred other things."

"I would if I could; I often try, but it is impossible. It is terrible to care for a man the way I do for you; and that's why I am so glad you are what you are: silly at times, ridiculously impressionable, but not at all like George Willard, or Peyton Morris."

He had an overwhelming impulse to explain himself in the most searching unsparing detail to f.a.n.n.y, the strange conviction that in doing it he would antic.i.p.ate, perhaps escape, grave trouble. Lee Randon realized, however, that he would have to begin with the doll, Cytherea; and the difficulty, the preposterousness, of trying to make that clear to his wife, discouraged and kept him silent. No woman, and least of any the one to whom he was married, could be trusted to understand his feeling, his dissatisfaction in satisfaction, the restlessness at the heart of his peace.

f.a.n.n.y went up at once, but he lingered, with a cigar, in the living room. A clock struck one. A photograph of Claire with her bridesmaids, Peyton and his ushers, on a lawn, in the wide flowered hats of summer and identical boutonnieres, stood on a table against the wall; and beyond was an early girlish picture of f.a.n.n.y, in clothes already absurdly out of mode. She had a pure hovering smile; the aspect of innocence time had been powerless to change was accentuated; and her hands managed to convey an impression of appeal. He had been, in the phrase now current, crazy about her; he was still, he told himself strictly. Well, he was ... yet he had kissed Anette; not for the first time, either; but, he recognized, for the last. He was free of that!

A s.p.a.ce, a phase, of his life was definitely behind him. A pervading regret mingled with the relief of his escape from what he had finally seen as a petty sensuality. The little might, in the sequence, be safer, better, than the great. But he vigorously cast off that ignominious idea. A sense of curious pause, stillness, enveloped Lee and surprised him, startled him really, into sitting forward and attentive. The wind had dropped, vanished into the night and sky: the silence without was as utter as though Lee Randon were at the center of a vacuum.

II

On Sat.u.r.day morning Lee telephoned to his office, found nothing that required his immediate attention there and, the brief-case again in evidence, stayed at Eastlake. f.a.n.n.y, too, with her hair severely plain and an air of practical accomplishment, was occupied with her day book.

She kept this faithfully; but Lee couldn't decide whether the obvious labor or her pleasure in the accomplishment were uppermost. She addressed the day book with a frowning concentration, supplementary additions and subtractions on stray fragments of paper, which at times brought him with an offer of a.s.sistance to her shoulder. But this she resolutely declined--she must, she insisted, maintain her obligation along with his. However, f.a.n.n.y, like all other women, he thought, was entirely ignorant of the principle of which money was no more than a symbol: she saw it not as an obligation, or implied power, but as an actuality, pouring from a central inexhaustible place of bright ringing gold and crisp currency.

However, f.a.n.n.y had always been accustomed to the ease of its possession, familiar with it; and that had stamped her with its superiority of finish. How necessary, he continued, money was to women; or, rather, to the women who engaged his imagination; and women were usually the first consideration, the jewelled rewards, of wealth. As he visualized, dwelt on, them, their magnetic grace of feeling and body was uppermost: st.u.r.dy utilitarian women in the kitchen, red-faced maids dusting his stairs, heavily breasted nurses, mothers, wives at their petty accounts--he ended abruptly a mental period escaping from the bounds of propriety.

What he meant, all that he meant, was that beauty should be the main consideration. Lee applied himself to far different values; and, before he had finished, lunch was ready.

"I have been thinking half the morning about Claire and Peyton," f.a.n.n.y told him; "I do feel that we exaggerated the situation last night; it all seemed more immediate, bigger, than it will turn out. Heavens, as you said, they can't do anything, nothing can happen."

He was still inclined to believe that. "There is a tremendous lot of talk and no result; yes--no one really does a thing. They want to, and that's all it comes to."

f.a.n.n.y cast a glance of repressed attention at him across a lower center-piece. "If you could be whatever you wanted, what and where, what would you choose?" she asked.

"Here, with you and the children," his voice replied without hesitation.

The youth of her expression was happily stained by a flush. He meant it, Lee told himself sharply. But about Peyton--

"Of course, he was drunk last night, and he said nothing conclusive; he was only wretchedly unhappy--wished he had been killed in the war and all the romantic rest."

"It is too much for me," f.a.n.n.y decided generally; "but I am glad that I was young when I was; being alive was quite simple then. I am comparatively young, Lee, 'way under forty--well, two years--but you can't realize how things have changed in such a short while. The women we knew didn't even smoke then. Wasn't it only five or six years ago they were first allowed to in nice cafes? And, not simply that, men didn't, either, when they were with us. We used to go to Cape May; they called the dances hops; and do you, oh, do you, remember the bathing suits?"

"I am not so certain about any great change," he objected. "I seem to recall--"

"Horrid people will always be horrid!" she exclaimed. "I knew one or two very fast girls; but they were different about it from now, it was only whispered around and condemned, and it's shouted out today. I wish I had known you sooner; I would have done a lot better than your mother. I'd like to have had you, Lee, as a little boy; but I suppose you're enough that yet."

His opposition to f.a.n.n.y's maternal manner, directed at him, was stronger than customary; she seemed to accept in herself every responsibility for him; as though, whenever his actions were unfortunate, it had been due to her imperfect control. With practically no experience of life, guarded from its threatening aspects, her att.i.tude was that, not without patience, she brought him with relative safety through a maze in which otherwise he'd be lost. This was evident now in what he felt to be the complacency of her voice and expression; and a perverse impulse grew in him to combat and shatter her blind satisfaction. Lee subdued this, in the merest decency; but the effort left him thoroughly irritated. He found, finally, an outlet for his annoyance in the restlessness of Helena; and he ordered her from the table.

This show of paternal discipline f.a.n.n.y met with lowered eyes and a silence that endured until Gregory had walked sedately from the room; then she reminded Lee that he must never, absolutely never, correct his children when he was in an ill temper.

"That's nonsense," he returned shortly; "you ought to see that because it's impossible. Even theoretically I don't agree with you--a child can understand a punishment in which there is some warmth. You are dealing with a little animal and not a reasonable being." To this f.a.n.n.y replied that her children were not animals.

"Really, f.a.n.n.y, you don't know what you are talking about," he a.s.serted; "we are all, men and women and children and giraffes, animals. You might look that up in the dictionary."

"I haven't any need to," she observed, with a calmness that further tried him. "If the dictionary says that it isn't a very good one. And if you are trying to tell me that Helena and Gregory are no better than giraffes you're sillier than usual."

"That isn't in the least what I said," Lee retorted, with widely separated words. "I wasn't speaking of the comparative but of the absolute. It is a fact that we are animals, more responsible and with greater powers than the others, but animals, animals."

"Then what is an animal?" f.a.n.n.y demanded.

"A mammal."

A marked expression of distaste invaded her. "It has a nasty sound," she admitted with her instinctive recoiling from life. "I don't see how we got on this subject anyhow, it's too much like s.e.x. It seems you are able to discuss nothing else."

"It is only nasty in your mind," he declared.

"That's exactly like you, you all over, to blame things on me. It's convenient, I must say, but not fair nor true: it was you who got in a wicked temper and sent Helena, who was feeling miserable, away."

"You always say the children are sick when they misbehave."

"I wish I could be as sure of you as I was of that," she answered quickly; "for instance, when you go out in automobiles at the dances with women."