Black Oxen Part 35

"I don't believe it."

"Well, don't, then. And don't wake up as blue as paint tomorrow morning. Reaction is the price we all have to pay for keeping the brain too long at a pitch so high above the normal. It's the downwash of blood from the organ it has kept at fever heat. And it's a long sight less commonplace than reaction from too much love-making.

Especially when love-making has begun to pall--which it does sooner in artists than in ordinary men... . Writers begin life all over again with each new release of the creative faculty; and each new work is as enthralling as the last. But love!" She sighed. "You don't look as if I had made the slightest impression on you."

"You haven't. A man can combine both if a woman cannot. You forget that we return here after two or three months in Austria, and here we remain for at least two years."

"Why are you so sure of that? Have you her actual promise?"

"It is understood. I told her we should return and she knew that I meant what I said."

"It is quite likely that she knew you meant it! But I'd like you to promise me that you will ask her to tell you exactly what she does intend to do--when the honeymoon is over."

"What do you mean?" Clavering asked sharply.

"I mean, that although she told me nothing of her plans, it was perfectly evident from her conversation that she intends to live her life in Europe and play a great role there. I infer that she is in constant correspondence with political friends in Austria. Do you mean that she has never told you this?"

Clavering sat forward, frowning. "No. We--have had little time together and have not wasted it on politics. Did she tell you this?"

"Not she. But I 'got' it. I can't tell you just how, but my intuitions are pretty good."

"Intuitions be hanged. Your creative tract is prepared for action and has been doing a little stunt all by itself. Better get to work on it and plough up a new book. I don't doubt Mary has political friends in Austria, and corresponds with them. Why shouldn't she? But she's not committed to any definite date or action. I'll swear to that. She'd have told me so honestly."

"Very well. I've said my say. But I wish----" She fell silent and sat very still for several moments regarding the point of her slipper.

Then she looked up and said brightly: "Don't you think it's time to let the rest of them know what's going to happen? It's hardly fair to your other friends--and they are your friends, Clavey. Of course they are practically certain of it."

"I don't think she'll mind, particularly as the first sensation has pretty well run its course--she thought she'd spare her own friends two shocks at once. But I fancy she intends to go out among them less and less. I'll ask her, and if she agrees, suppose you announce it?"

Miss Dwight bent down and removed a pinch of ashes from her slipper.

"Do--persuade her. It would be a tremendous feather in my cap. I'll give you both a dinner and announce it then."

"Settled. Well, I'm off. Got my column to write." He gathered up his ma.n.u.script, and she went to the door with him. As he held her hand, he felt one of those subtle whispers along his nerves that had warned him of danger before. He dropped her hand with a frown.

"Look here, Gora," he said. "You haven't any mistaken idea of appealing to _her_, have you?"

"What do you take me for?" demanded Miss Dwight angrily. "The father in _Camille_?"

"Well, keep off the gra.s.s, that's all. Ta, ta."

XL

When Mary Zattiany returned home at twelve o'clock after a tiresome morning in Judge Trent's office she told the butler to send her luncheon upstairs, and ascended to the seclusion of her room, delighted with the prospect of a few hours she could call her own. These hours had been increasing during the past fortnight but were no less welcome.

Not a word of that dinner was known to any but those who had attended it. People do not foul their own nest unless they are ready to desert it and sometimes not then. Moreover, the women were too ashamed or too humiliated with their failure to invite the criticism of their friends, and although they avoided the subject among themselves, their agreement to bury it was no less final for being tacit. The men, with something of the deliberation of male guests at a diplomatic dinner where there has been an unfortunate incident involving dangerous possibilities if known, called one another up on the telephone the next day and agreed to "forget it." Even Dinwiddie never heard of it. As for Madame Zattiany, she could be trusted to dismiss it from her contemptuous mind. Nevertheless, these young women, who had entertained her almost constantly, pointedly omitted her from their luncheons and dinners and parties--in her new lightheartedness she had been induced to attend several parties during the past six weeks. And they had little difficulty in persuading others to follow their example. The more amiable of the younger women might have looked upon their attack that night with horror if they had heard of it, as, indeed, several at the dinner had done, but they were no more enthusiastic over the "foreign invasion" than their militant sisters. The remonstrances of the men were unheeded, and when one or two tried to arrange theatre parties or dinners in Madame Zattiany's honor they received graceful regrets.

Even the att.i.tude of her older friends had changed, now that the dramatic novelty of her return to them, and their first determined enthusiasm, had worn off. They were betraying more and more their disapproval of what she had done, the more so perhaps, as the majority of them, being excessively thin, might have accomplished a like result had not their standards protected them. This naturally inspired them with a full realization of their superiority, which increased daily.

If she had made the attempt and failed it would have been bad enough, for such violations of the law of orthodoxy insulted the code in which she had been born and reared: but triumphantly to have succeeded in making herself young again while the rest of them were pursuing their unruffled way to the grave was a deliberate insult both to themselves and to G.o.d.

Moreover, they hardly knew what to talk to her about, and although this might still have been the case had she returned to them carrying aloft the crinkled and spotted flag of time, so far apart their lines had run, her scientific victory added an ever-increasing irritant. Also, she had never been a "woman's woman," and it was patent that, as ever, she was far more animated in the company of men. Inevitably, old scandals were raked up. They had been frowned upon in the days when she was protected by her husband and the great position he gave her, and the rumors had been dismissed for more interesting scandals, both public and private, at home. They no doubt would have remained in the limbo of history had she returned looking no better than themselves, but her ridiculous defiance of nature revived them, and these ladies discovered that their memories were more lively than might have been expected of their years.

It would be too much, as Mary told Clavering, to ask a violent contradiction of human nature from worn out glands, and she bore them no malice. She only wondered that Jane Oglethorpe, Elinor Goodrich, and Lily Tracy were still faithful in private--to the world all of them preserved a united front; they would not even discuss her with their children, much less their grandchildren; but they made up their minds that it would be for the good of her soul to let her see, with no flaw in their politeness, just what uncompromisingly sensible women of high moral and social responsibilities thought of her.

Mary, being human, felt the pin-p.r.i.c.ks, but was glad on the whole to be rid of them. Those first weeks of almost girlish pleasure in what was to her a novel society, had vanished for ever on the night of her dinner. Scornful and indifferent she might be, but although they could not kill her youth, they drove home to her what she had guessed in the beginning, that the society and the companions.h.i.+p of young people--fas.h.i.+onable young people, at least--were not for her. Their conversations, interests, shallow mental att.i.tude to life, bored her.

That curious brief period of mental rejuvenescence had been due to the novelty and excitement of being in love again, after long and arid years.

And now, Judge Trent had told her that she would be free to leave in a fortnight. She had walked the three miles from Broad Street with a buoyant step, and she had vowed that never, not for any consideration whatever, would she set foot in America again. Vienna was the city of her heart as well as of her future exploits. She would buy the old Zattiany palace from her widowed niece-in-law and make it the most famous rendezvous in Europe. But of all this nothing to Clavering until they were in the Dolomites.

She rang for her maid and exchanged her tweed walking suit for a tea gown of violet velvet and snow white chiffon, with stockings and slippers to match. She expected no one but it was always a delight to her to be exquisitely and becomingly dressed. Even in the seclusion of her Hungarian estate she had arrayed herself as appropriately for outdoors, and as fastidiously for the house, as if she had been under the critical eye of her world, for daintiness and luxury were as ingrained as ordinary cleanliness and refinement. During the war she had not rebelled at her hard and unremitting labors, but she had often indulged in a fleeting regret for the frequent luxury of the bath, the soft caress of delicate underwear, for charming toilettes; and she had sometimes scowled at her white cotton stockings with a feeling of positive hatred.

Judge Trent, while she was still in Austria, had sent her a cheque for forty thousand dollars. She had given half of it to relief organizations in Vienna, and then gone to Paris and indulged in an orgy of clothes. She looked back upon that wholly feminine reversion, when she had avoided every one she had ever known, as one of the completely satisfactory episodes of her life. Even with unrestored youth and beauty, and a soberer choice of costumes, she would still have experienced a certain degree of excited pleasure in adorning herself.

She had always liked the light freshness of chintz in her bedroom, leaving luxury to her boudoir; but here she had furnished no boudoir; her stay was to be short, and her bedroom was as large as two ordinary rooms. She spent many hours in it, when its violet and white simplicities appealed to her mood. Today it was redolent of the lilacs Clavering had sent her, and through the open windows came the singing of birds in the few trees still left in the old street.

She loved comfort as much as she loved exercise, and after her careful toilette was finished and her maid had gone, she settled herself luxuriously in a deep chair before her desk and opened one of the drawers. The European mail had arrived yesterday and she had only glanced through half of it. But she must read all of those letters today and answer some of them before the sailings on Sat.u.r.day.

The telephone on a little stand at her elbow rang, and she took the receiver from its spreading violet skirts and raised it to her ear. As she had expected, it was Clavering. He told her that he had promised Gora Dwight the evening before to ask her permission to announce their engagement.

For a moment she stared into the instrument. Then she said hurriedly, almost breathlessly: "No--I'd rather not. I hate the vulgarity of congratulations--publicity of my private affairs. I've always said that when one marries a second time the decent thing to do is to marry first and tell afterward."

"But they guess it, you know."

"That is quite different." It was Madame Zattiany who spoke now and her tones were deliberate and final. "Quite a different thing from being congratulated, and tormented by newspapers." She dismissed the subject. "I shall be free two weeks from today. What do you think of that?" Her voice was both gay and tender. "Judge Trent will see at once about engaging my stateroom. Don't tell me that that play of yours will prevent you from following shortly after."

"Not a bit of it. We shall only be gone two months, and even if Hogarth succeeds in placing it with his manager as he expects, it might be several months before rehearsals."

"Then it all fits in quite charmingly. You are coming to dinner tonight?"

"Well, rather."

"Mind you come early. I have many things to tell you."

"It'll not be for that I'll come early."

Mary smiled and hung up the receiver. She would have to let him return to New York for a time--possibly. But herself, she would go on to Vienna. No doubt about that.

She returned to her letters. Those that required answers she placed in a separate heap with a pencilled note on the back, for she was neat and methodical; she even slit the envelopes with a paper-knife that was always at hand for the purpose, and the envelopes were dropped at once into the waste basket.

The contents for the most part were expected, and related to her work in Vienna, the disposition of moneys she had sent over, and the usual clamoring for more. But when she had read halfway through a long letter from Baroness Tauersperg, in whose capable hands she had left the most important of her charities, she involuntarily stiffened and sat forward a little.

Several pages of her friend's letters were always devoted to business, the rest to gossip. In return Mary enlivened her own letters with many of her American adventures, although she had made no mention of Clavering.

"I need not ask if you remember Hohenhauer," continued Frau von Tauersperg, "although, I suppose, like the rest of us, you saw nothing of him after the war. He was, as you know, not in bad standing with the new Government, like the reactionary n.o.bles, as he had always been a liberal in politics, and had a good record as a generous and just landlord. But they did not have intelligence enough to ask him to be a member of the Cabinet, or to send him to the Peace Conference, where he alone, of all Austrians, perhaps, might have won some advantage for this wretched country.

"The present Government seems to have appreciated that initial mistake of ignoring him, for they have invited him to return from his estate in Switzerland, where he has been staying, and to act in some advisory capacity. That means, we think here, that he will soon have the whole thing in his hands. The first step he took was to pay a visit to Bavaria and have a conference with Count L., and no doubt you will surmise what that means. He went incognito, however, and few people even here in Vienna know of that visit, much less the rest of Europe.

Very shortly he goes to America, whether for reasons connected with his sudden interest in Bavaria, I have no means of knowing, but ostensibly because his New York lawyers demand his presence in regard to the large sum of money he invested in the United States. The Government makes no objection to this journey, as you may imagine, for they know they can depend on him to spend it in the cause of Austria--under his leaders.h.i.+p! Imagine what it will mean to have the income of several million American dollars rolling in to be exchanged for Austrian kronen! Or the capital, if he thinks the end justifies it.