Cytherea Part 8

"You mustn't," f.a.n.n.y a.s.serted; "you're not yourself. Mina Raff should be burned alive, something terrible done to her." f.a.n.n.y's voice had the hard cold edge of fanatical conviction. "If she had come into my house making trouble.... But that couldn't have happened; I'd have known at once."

"You are more feminine than I am," Claire told her. "I see this in a very detached manner, as if it didn't concern me. I suppose I can't realize that it has happened to us. It has! But if you are right, f.a.n.n.y, and it's necessary to treat a man like a green hunter, then this was bound to occur. I couldn't do anything so--so humiliating; he could bolt sooner or later. I did the best I knew how: I was amusing as possible and always looked well enough. I never bothered Peyton about himself and encouraged him to keep as much of his freedom as possible.

"I don't believe in the other," she said to f.a.n.n.y Randon in a sharp accession of rebellion; "it is degrading, and I won't live that way, I won't put up with it. If he wants to go, to be with Mina Raff, how in G.o.d's name can I stop it? I won't have him in my bed with another woman in his heart; I made that clear to you. And I can't have him hot and cold--now all Mina and then the sanct.i.ty of his home. I've never had a house of that kind; it was christened, like a s.h.i.+p, with champagne.

"I have never cared for domestic things. I'd rather wear a dinner-gown than an ap.r.o.n; I'd a d.a.m.n sight rather spin a roulette wheel than rock a cradle. And, perhaps, Peyton wanted a housewife; though heaven knows he hasn't turned to one. It's her blonde, no bland, charm and destructive air of innocence. I've admitted and understood too much; but I couldn't help it--my mother and grandmother, all that lot, were the same way, and went after things themselves. The men hated sham and sentimentality; they asked, and gave, nothing."

f.a.n.n.y, it was evident, was growing impatient at what was not without its challenge of her character and expressed convictions. "I do agree with you, Claire, that we are not alike," she admitted. Her voice bore a perceptible note of complacency, of superior strength and position.

"Just last week I was telling Lee that I belonged before the war--things were so different then, and, apparently, it's only in my house they haven't changed. We are frightfully behind the times, and you'd be surprised at how glad we are. It was your mother's father, wasn't it, who fell in love with the Spanish woman while he was in the Emba.s.sy at Seville? My family weren't people of public connections, although a great-aunt married Senator Carlinton; but they had the highest principles."

"They were lucky," Claire Morris replied indifferently; "I am beginning to think it isn't what you have so much as what happens to it. Anyhow, Peyton is going away with Mina Raff, and I am sorry for him; he's so young and so certain; but this has shaken him. Peyton's a sn.o.b, really, like the rest of his friends, and Mina's crowd won't have that for a moment: he can't go through her world judging men by their slang and by whom they knew at college. I envy him, it will be a tremendously interesting experience." If her eyes were particularly brilliant it was because they were surrounded by an extreme darkness. Her voice, commonly no more than a little rough in its deliberate forthrightness, was high and metallic. She gave Lee the heroic impression that no most mighty tempest would ever see her robbed of her erect defiance. It was at once her weakness and strength that she could be broken but not bent.

After dinner Claire, who was staying with the Randons until tomorrow, played picquet with Lee; and his wife, her shapely feet elevated above the possible airs of the floor, continued to draw threads from the handkerchiefs she was making for Christmas. Claire played very well and, at five cents a point, he had to watch the game. On a specially big hand she piqued and repiqued. "That," she declared, "will pay you for caputting me." The jargon of their preoccupation, "A point of six; yes, to the ace; paid; and a quatorze, kings," was the only sound until f.a.n.n.y rose, decidedly. "I am going to bed." She hesitated at the door. "I hope you'll be comfortable, Claire: I had some club soda and rye put in your room, since you like it so well. Don't be too late, please, Lee; it makes you tired starting so early in the morning."

"You'll have to forgive me," Claire said, when f.a.n.n.y had gone; "but I don't--I never did--like women."

"Do you think any more of men, now?"

"Heavens, yes. I wish I could find someone to blame for what has happened, Peyton specially, but I can't, not to save my life. It seems so hopelessly inevitable. I don't want you to suppose I'm not unhappy, Lee; or that I care only a little for Peyton. I love him very much; I needed him, and my love, more than I can explain. As f.a.n.n.y as good as told me, I am a wild bird; anything, almost, with what is behind me, may happen. It was just the irony of chance that this affair caught Peyton, the immaculate, instead of me. I was awfully glad that I had an anchor that seemed so strong; in my own faulty way I adored everything I had; I wanted to be tranquil, and it had a look of security."

"It isn't over, Claire," Lee a.s.serted. "I haven't seen that young fool yet."

"Please don't bother him; and it's too much to drag out the moralities on my account."

"Moralities!" he echoed indignantly, "who said a word about them? I'm not interested in morals. Lord, Claire, how little you know me. And as for bothering him, he'll have to put up with that. He has invited a certain amount of it."

They forgot the game and faced each other across the disordered cards.

"If I won't argue with him," she insisted, "you can't. But we needn't discuss it--he won't listen to you, Peyton's all gone. I never saw such a complete wreck."

"He can't avoid it," Lee went on; "I'll have to do it if it is only for myself; I am most infernally curious about the whole works. I want to find out what it's about."

"If you mean love, he can't tell you; he hasn't had enough experience to express it. You might do better with me."

"No, I want it from the man; a woman's feeling, even yours, would do me no good. You see, this has always been explored, accounted for, condemned, written about, from the feminine side. Where the man is considered it is always in the most d.a.m.nable light. If, in the novels, a man leaves his home he is a rascal of the darkest sort, and his end is a remorse no one would care to invite. That may be, but I am not prepared to say. No, dear Claire, I am not considering it in preparation for anything; I want to know; that's all."

"The books are stuff, of course," she agreed. "The grandfather of mine who was killed in Madrid--it wasn't Seville--must have had a gorgeous time: a love affair with one of the most beautiful women alive. It lasted five months before it was found out and ended; and his wife and he had been sick of living together. After it was over she was pleased at being connected with such a celebrated scandal; it made her better looking by reflected loveliness. She was rather second cla.s.s, I believe, and particularly fancied the d.u.c.h.ess part."

"It wouldn't be like that in the current novels, or even in the better: either your grandparent or the d.u.c.h.ess would be a villainous person, and the other a victim. I'm inclined to think that most of the ideas about life and conduct are lifted from cheap fiction. They have the look of it. But that realization wouldn't help us, with the world entirely on the other side."

"No, it isn't," Claire objected; "and it's getting less so all around us. Perhaps men haven't changed much, yet; but you don't hear the women talk as I do. I don't like them, as I said; they are too d.a.m.ned skulking for me; but they are gathering a lot more sense in a short while."

"I don't agree with you there," he replied; "you are getting your own infinitesimal world confused with the real overwhelming majority; you haven't an idea how it feels and, in particular, of what it thinks of you, smoking and gambling and d.a.m.ning your fate. It may be largely envy--personally I am convinced it is--but they have you ticketed straight for h.e.l.l just the same."

"It doesn't interest me." Claire increasingly showed the strain, the unhappiness, through which she was parsing. Nor did it him, he ended lamely, except in the abstract. This at once had the elements of a lie and the unelaborate truth; he couldn't see how his curiosity applied to him, and yet he was intent on its solving. The fixed mobile smile of Cytherea flashed into his thoughts. His perpetual restlessness struck through him.

His att.i.tude toward the Morrises was largely dictated by his fondness for Claire. He had determined what, exactly, he would say to Peyton.

Yet, as a fact, he returned to his former a.s.sertion to f.a.n.n.y; the boy would make it difficult, if not impossible, to discuss such intimate relations.h.i.+ps. And as Claire had pointed out, the very openness of Peyton's life would make him exceptionally far to reach; he was particularly youthful in his hardness, his confidence in his acts and friends and beliefs; yet all that couldn't help but be upset now.

"f.a.n.n.y will think I have designs on you," Claire remarked; "go up when you like. I am not a bit sleepy."

Lee had no intention of going to bed then, and told her so. It seemed to him that, perhaps, with Claire, he might discover something that would set his questioning at rest. Vain delusion. He asked what her plans were:

"I'll stay in Eastlake for the winter, and, in March, go to Italy, to give Peyton his divorce--Florence; I lived a while at Arcetri; it's very lovely."

He had a momentary experimental vision of a small yellow villa among the olives of the Florentine hills, of crumbling pink walls with emerald green lizards along the stones, of myrtles and remarkable lilies-of-the-valley. Twenty years ago it would have drawn him irresistibly; but not now; he wanted--where his wants were articulate--a far different thing. It had nothing to do with Italy, or any other country; his intentness had been withdrawn from the surfaces of life, however charming; they had plunged into the profounder mysteries of being. Lee had gained nothing if not a certain freedom from exterior circ.u.mstance; his implied revolt against trivialities, if it did no other good, had at least liberated him from the furniture of existence.

However, it had begun to appear that this was not an unmixed blessing; he had the uncomfortable sensation of having put out, on a limitless sea, in a very little boat too late to arrive at any far hidden desirable coast.

Claire s.h.i.+vered, and, discovering that she was cold, he insisted on her going upstairs. "To my pure sheets," she said, with a touch of her familiar daring. Left alone, Lee was depressed by the hour; the room, his house, seemed strange, meaningless, to him. There was a menace in the unnatural stillness; f.a.n.n.y's unfinished handkerchief, her stool, were without the warmth of familiar a.s.sociation. It might have been a place into which he had wandered by accident, where he didn't belong, wouldn't stay. It was inconceivable that, above him, his wife and children were sleeping; the ceiling, the supine heavy bodies, seemed to sag until they rested on his shoulders; he was, like Atlas, holding the whole house up. It was with acute difficulty that he shook off the illusion, the weight. From outside came the thin howling of a dog, and it, too, seemed to hold a remote and desperate interrogation.

He slept badly, in short broken stretches, with the Morrises constantly in his mind; and what, in the slightest dislocation of reality, was dream and what waking he couldn't determine; at times his vision seemed to hold both--a door, the irrevocable door, swung open, the end impended, but he was unable to see the faces of the man and woman; when he looked anxiously a blind spot intervened. The morning found him unrefreshed, impatient; and he was glad that his early breakfast was solitary; Lee didn't want then to see either Claire or f.a.n.n.y, he was in no mood to discuss Peyton's seizure. That, it seemed to Lee Randon, was exactly what had happened to the younger man--Peyton had gone within the region of a contagious fever that had run through all his blood.

Yet, at dinner, to his surprise, f.a.n.n.y said very little about what had entirely occupied their thoughts; she was quiet, reserved; her att.i.tude was marked by a careful dignity. Her gaze, even more than commonly, rested on her husband. "I had a wretched night, too," she told him; "my head is like a kite. I've thought and thought until my brain aches, it is so full. But there are some things I decided; and if you don't agree with them I'm sorry; because, Lee, I am right, I am indeed."

"Of course you are," he replied; "but, possibly, only for yourself. I mean, for instance, that you can't be sure you're right for Claire."

"No, no, that's just the same as saying there isn't any right or wrong at all, and you know better. Yes, what I am certain about is duty; you must do that before everything else. Peyton's duty is to Claire and their child. It is as clear as this soup. Nothing else matters so much, or at all. Why, Lee, the world is made up of people doing their duty; what, I'd like to know, would become of it if they didn't? You don't seem to realize it, but there are loads of obligations I get dreadfully tired of, like the Social Service when it is my month to follow the accounts, and visits to Annie Hazard who has a cancer of the stomach and is dying, and thinking every day what to get you and the children and the servants to eat. Suppose, some morning, I didn't stir, but just rested in bed--what would happen? What did happen last winter when I had pleurisy? Why, the whole house went to pieces, and, when you weren't worrying about me, while I was getting well, you were the most uncomfortable man imaginable. I don't want you to think I am complaining, or that I don't love every minute and stick and stone of my home and life; I do. But you seem to forget about me ... that's because the house goes along so smoothly. It would be a good lesson if you had to live with some other woman for a while."

"I'm sure every word is so," he returned; "no one could have a better wife; you've spoiled me outrageously; I feel like that pig Christopher has in a pen out by the stable."

"You might think of something nicer to say," she protested. "You're not easy to live with, either," f.a.n.n.y continued; "you hardly ever agree with what other people think; and you curse fearfully. I wish you wouldn't swear like that, Lee. I object to it very much in Claire; I can't help believing that she thinks it is smart or funny. And you encourage her.

If Claire had been different--no, don't interrupt me--this would never have happened. You may say what you like about her good breeding: she's been too flippant. I felt that last night. Claire doesn't accept her obligations seriously enough. She's kept herself lovely looking, but that isn't the whole thing."

"What is the whole thing?" he demanded.

"I've told you, but you won't listen--duty."

"You put that above all the rest?"

f.a.n.n.y hesitated. "I said my head hurt because I've thought so much. Love and duty, yes; I see them as the same. Duty without love would be hard, and there isn't any love without duty." f.a.n.n.y evidently grew aware of her threatening incoherence. "It isn't necessary to tell you in so many words," she said defensively; "you are only being contrary."

"You have explained yourself beautifully," he hastened to a.s.sure her; "I am the person who is at sea."

"Why, Lee!" she exclaimed, surprised; "I don't know anyone who is so decided. That's what makes me raging, you're so dogmatic. There, that is a splendid word. Don't eat that apple, it isn't baked; I can see from here." She rang. "Varney," f.a.n.n.y addressed the maid, "take Mr. Randon's apple out and see if there isn't another better done, please. I warned you about that; he can't eat them uncooked."

"Let me keep it," he protested; "it might have an excellent effect on my disposition."

"Don't interfere, Lee," she responded coldly: "yes, Varney. It's really idiotic of you," she turned to him; "you are not a boy any more, you're not even a young man, and you can't take liberties with your digestion.

You are quite like Helena with her prayers--if she feels very well she's apt to forget them, but if she's sick she says them as hard as possible.

I wish she were like Gregory."

"Gregory and you are cut out of the same gold cloth," Lee Randon p.r.o.nounced.

"That was lovely of you, Lee." f.a.n.n.y radiated happiness. "No one could say anything prettier to his old wife." Dinner was over, and, rising, she walked around the table and laid a confident arm on his shoulders.

The knife-like tenderness which, princ.i.p.ally, he had for her overwhelmed him; and he held f.a.n.n.y against him in a silent and straining embrace.

For that reason he was annoyed at himself when, sitting through an uneventful evening, his simile of the pig, enormously fat, sleepily contented, in its pen, returned to him. It wasn't that he found an actual a.n.a.logy between the pig and life, individuals, on a higher plane, so much as that he was vaguely disturbed by the impression that there was an ultimate similitude between him, Lee Randon, and a fattened somnolence of existence.