Chapter 13
“I don't care; I have--now, anyway--what I wish, what I've always wished for--you. I didn't know it was you right away, how could I? Not even when we had tea, and talked about Mina and your young Morris, that first afternoon. It was the next day before I understood. Why wasn't it long long ago, when I was a girl, twelve years old? Yes, quite that early. Isn't it queer, Lee, how I have been troubled by love? It bothers hardly anyone else, it scarcely touches the rest. There is a lot of talk about it, but, all the while, people detest it. They are always wearing dresses and pretentions they can't afford to have mussed. It--I am still talking of love, Lee darling--breaks up their silly society and morals ... like a strong light thrown on something shabby.”
Once more he had the feeling that, before the actuality of Savina's tragic necessity, his own speculations were merely visionary, immaterial; yet he tried to put them into words, to explain, so far as he was able, what it was in him that was hers. But he did this omitting, perhaps, the foundation of all that he was trying to say--he didn't speak of Cytherea. He avoided putting the doll into words because he could think of none that would make his meaning, his attachment, clear. Lee couldn't, very well, across the remnants of dinner, admit to Savina that a doll bought out of a confectioner's window on Fifth Avenue so deeply influenced him. He hadn't lost Cytherea in Savina so much as, vitalized, he had found her. And, while he had surrendered completely to the woman and emotion, at the same time the immaterial aspect of his search, if he could so concretely define it, persisted. The difference between Savina and himself was this: while she was immersed, obliterated, satisfied, in her passion, a part of him, however small, stayed aside. It didn't control him, but simply went along, like a diminutive and wondering child he had by the hand.
Cytherea, at this moment, would be softly illuminated by the shifting glow of the fire and, remote in her magical perspective, would seem at the point of moving, of beckoning for him with her lifted hand.
“What were you seeing in the smoke?” Savina asked; and he replied with an adequate truth, “You.”
“Why not just look at me, then, instead of staring?”
“I see you everywhere.”
“Adorable,” she whispered.
No such name, no terms of endearment, occurred to him for her; why, he didn't know; but they had no place in his present situation. He had to think of Savina as removed from whatever had described and touched other special women. The words which had always been the indispensable property of such affairs were now distasteful to him. They seemed to have a smoothly false, a brassy, ring; while he was fully, even gaily, committed, he had a necessity to make his relationship with Savina Grove wholly honest. As he paid the account she asked him if he were rich.
“Your husband wouldn't think so,” he replied; “yet I am doing well enough; I can afford dinner and the theatre.”
“I wish you had a very great deal of money.”
“Why?” He gazed at her curiously.
“It's so useful,” Savina told him generally; but that, he felt, was not completely what was in her mind. “What I have,” she went on, “is quite separate from William's. It is my mother's estate.”
“My brother, Daniel, has done very well in Cuba,” Lee commented. Savina was interested:
“I have never been there; cooler climates are supposed to suit my heart better; but I know I should love it--the close burning days and intense nights.”
“Daniel tells me there's usually the trade wind at night.” His voice reflected his lack of concern.
“I have a feeling,” she persisted, “that I am more of Havana than I am, for example, of Islesboro. Something in the tropics and the people, the Spanish! Those dancing girls in gorgeous shawls, they haven't any clothes underneath; and that nakedness, the violence of their passions, the danger and the knives and the windows with iron bars, stir me. It's all so different from New York. I want to burn up with a red flower in my hair and not cool into stagnation.”
They were in her closed automobile, where it was faintly scented by roses yellow and not crimson. She sat upright, withdrawn from him, with her hands clenched in her lap. How she opposed every quality of Mina Raff's; what a contradiction the two women, equally vital, presented. And Fanny, perhaps no less forceful, was still another individual. Lee Randon was appalled at the power lying in the fragile persons of women. It controlled the changeless and fateful elements of life; while the strength of men, it occurred to him further, was concerned with such secondary affairs as individual ambitions and a struggle eternally condemned to failure.
Savina relaxed, every instinct and nerve turned toward him, but they were at the theatre.
The performance had been on, an usher told them, for almost three quarters of an hour. Their seats were in the fifth row, the middle; and there was an obscured resentful stirring as they took their places. Plunged into darkness, their hands and shoulders and knees met. Savina, scarcely above her breath, said “Ah!” uncontrollably; she was so charged with emotion that her body seemed to vibrate, a bewildering warmness stole through him from her; and once more, finally, he sank into questionless depths. The brightness of the stage, at first, had no more form nor meaning than the whirling pattern of a kaleidoscope, against which the people around him were unsubstantial silhouettes, blind to the ardor that merged Savina and him into one sentient form alone in a world of shadows.
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The spectacle on the stage, Russian in motive, was set in harmonized barbaric color--violent movements under a diffused light: in the background immobile peasant-like figures held tall many-branched candlesticks; there were profane gold mitres, vivid stripes and morocco leather; cambric chemises slipping from breasts and the revelation of white thighs. It floated, like a vision of men's desire realized in beautiful and morbid symbols, above the darkened audience; it took what, in the throng, was imperfect, fragmentary, and spent, but still strong, brutal, formless, and converted it into a lovely and sterile pantomime. Yet there was no sterility in what had, primarily, animated it; the change, it seemed, had been from use to ornament, from purpose to a delight with no issue beyond that. Over it there hung, for Lee Randon, the pale radiance of Cytherea.
Other visions and spectacles followed, they melted one into the next, sensations roused by the flexible plaited thongs of desire. Lee, stupefied in the heavy air of his own sensuality, saw the pictorial life on the stage as an accompaniment, the visualization, of his obsession. It was over suddenly, with a massing of form and sound; Lee and Savina Grove were pitilessly drowned in light. Crushed together in the crowded, slowly emptying aisle, her pliable body, under its wrap, followed his every movement.
On the street, getting into the automobile, she directed Adamson to drive through the park. “I don't want to go to the Malmaison,” she told Lee. Her ungloved fingers worked a link from his cuff and her hand crept up his arm. The murmur of her voice was ceaseless, like a low running and running over melodious keys. Then, in a tone no louder, but changed, unexpected, she said:
“Lee, I love you.”
It startled him; its effect was profound--now that it had been said he was completely delivered to his gathering sense of the inevitable. It secured, like a noose, all his intentions; he was neither glad nor sorry; what was the use? His own feeling--if this were love and what love was--eluded him. Above every other recognition, though, was a consciousness of impending event. What happened now, in the car rapidly approaching Central Park, was unimportant, without power to contain him in its moment. They turned in at the Fifty-ninth Street entrance: through the glass there was a shifting panorama of black branches, deserted walks and benches and secretive water. He saw vaguely the Belvedere, the Esplanade fountain, and the formal length of the Mall, together with--flung against the sky--the multitudinous lighted windows of Central Park West, the high rippling shimmer of the monumental lifted electric signs on Broadway. Other cars passed, swift and soundless, he saw their occupants and then they were gone: an aged man whose grey countenance might have been moulded in sand with a frigid trained nurse; a couple desperately embracing in a taxi-cab; a knot of chattering women in dinner dresses and open furs; another alone, painted, at once hard and conciliatory, hurrying to an appointment.
The tension, his suspense, increased until he thought it must burst out the windows. Between the shudders and the kissing he kept wondering when.... It was Savina, at the speaking-tube, who commanded their return. They left the Park for Fifth Avenue, Sixty-sixth Street. Lee got out, but she didn't follow. He waited expectantly. The night had grown very much colder. Why, in the name of God, didn't she come?
“In a moment” he heard her say faintly. But when she moved it was with decision; there was no hesitation in her manner of mounting the stone steps. The maid came forward as they entered, first to help Savina, and then to take Lee's hat and coat and stick. Savina turned to him, holding out her hand, speaking in a high steady voice:
“Thank you very much--wasn't it nice?--and good-night.” Without another word, giving him no opportunity to speak, to reply, she turned neither hurried nor slow to the stairway.
He was dumfounded, and showed it, he was sure, in the stupidity of his fixed gesture of surprise. The emotion choked in his throat was bitter with a sense of ill-treatment. To cover his confusion, he searched obviously through his pockets for a cigarette case which he had left, he knew, in his overcoat. Then, when the servant had retired, he softly cursed. However, the bitterness, his anger, were soon lost in bewilderment; that, with the appearance of resolving itself into a further mystery, carried him up to his room. With a mixed drink on a dressing-case, he wandered aimlessly around, his brain occupied with one question, one possibility.
Piece by piece, at long intervals, he removed his clothes, found his pajamas and dressing-gown, and washed. The drink he discovered later untouched and he consumed it almost at a gulp. Lee poured out another, and a third; but they had no effect on him.
In spite of them he suffered a mild collapse of the nerves; his hands were without feeling, at once like marble and wet with sweat; his heart raced. A pervading weariness and discouragement followed this. He was in a hellish mess, he told himself fiercely. The bravado of the words temporarily gave him more spirit; yet there was nothing he could do but go to bed. Nothing else had been even hinted at; he turned off the lights and opened the windows. Flares of brightness continued to pass before his eyes, and, disinclined to the possibilities of sleep, he propped himself up with an extra pillow. Then, illogically, he wondered if he had locked the door; at the instant of rising to find out, he restrained himself--if, subconsciously, he had, chance and not he had worked; for or against him, what did it matter?
He looked at the illuminated dial of his watch; the hands, the numerals, greenly phosphorescent, were sharp; it was midnight. After apparently an interminable wait he looked again--six minutes past twelve. The rumble of an elevated train approached, hung about the room, and receded. Death could be no more dragging than this. Why, then, didn't he fall asleep? Lee went over and over every inflection of Savina's final words to him; in them he tried, but vainly, to find encouragement, promise, any decision or invitation. What, in the short passage from the automobile to the house, could have so wholly changed, frozen, her? Had she, at that late opportunity, remembering the struggle, the tragic unrelenting need, to keep herself aloof from passion, once more successfully fled? Was she--he was almost dozing--Cytherea, the unobtainable?
He woke, stirred, convulsively: it was after one o'clock now. The craving for a cigarette finally moved him; and, in the dark, he felt around for those, the Dimitrinos, on the tray. The cigarette at an end, he sank back on the pillows, deciding that he must take the earliest train possible toward Eastlake. He had missed a directors' meeting today, and there was another tomorrow that he must attend, at his office. Then he grew quieter; the rasping of his nerves ceased; it was as though, suddenly, they had all been loosened, the strung wires unturned. What a remarkable adventure he had been through; not a detail of it would ever fade from his memory--a secret alleviation for advancing old age, impotence. And this, the most romantic occurrence of his life, had happened when he was middle-aged, forty-seven and worse, to be exact. He looked again at his watch, but now only from a lingering uncertain curiosity. It was five minutes of two.
The present peace that settled over him seemed the most valuable thing life had to offer; it was not like the end of effort, but resembled a welcome truce, a rest with his force unimpaired, from which he would wake to the tonic winter realities of tomorrow. An early train--
In the act of dropping, half asleep, into the position of slumber, he halted sharply, propped up on an elbow. A sense invaded him of something unusual, portentous, close by. There wasn't a sound, a flicker of audible movement, a break in the curtain of dark; yet he was breathless in a strained oppressive attention. It was impossible to say whether his disturbance came from within or without, whether it was in his pounding blood or in the room around him. Then he heard a soft thick settling rustle, the sound a fur coat might make falling to the floor; and, simultaneously, a vague slender whiteness appeared on the night. A swift conviction fastened on him that here he had been overtaken by fate; by what, for so long, he had invited. Out of the insubstantiality a whispering voice spoke to him:
“Lee, where are you? It's so cold.”
IV
Twice, the following day, Lee telephoned to Fanny, but neither time was she in the house; and, kept at his office, he was obliged to take an inconvenient train that made a connection for Eastlake. When Lee reached the countryside opening in the familiar hilly vistas he had, in place of the usual calm recognitions through a run of hardly more than an hour, a sense of having come a long way to a scene from which he had been absent for years. It appeared to him remarkably tranquil and self-contained--safe was the word which came to him. He was glad to be there, but at indeterminate stations rather than in Eastlake. He dreaded, for no plainly comprehended reason, his return home. The feelings that, historically, he should have owned were all absent. Had it been possible he would have cancelled the past forty-eight hours; but Lee was forced to admit to himself that he was not invaded by a very lively sense of guilt. He made a conventional effort to see his act in the light of a grave fault--whatever was attached to the charge of adultery--but it failed before the conviction that the whole thing was sad.
His sorrow was for Savina, for the suffering of her past, the ordeal of the present, and the future dreariness. There had been no suggestion of wrong in her surrender, no perceptible consciousness of shame: it was exactly as though, struggling to the limit of endurance against a powerful adverse current, she had turned and swept with it. The fact was that the entire situation was utterly different from the general social and moral conception of it; and Lee began to wonder which were stronger--the individual truth or the imposed dogmatic weight of the world. But the latter, he added, would know nothing of this. Concisely, there was to be no repetition of last night; there would be no affair.
Lee Randon had completely and sharply focussed the most adverse possible attitude toward that: he saw it without a redeeming feature and bare of any chance of pleasure. His need for honesty, however special, was outraged on every facet by the thought of an intrigue. Lee reconstructed it in every detail--he saw the moments, doubtful and hurried and surreptitious, snatched in William Grove's house; the servants, with their penetration of the tone of an establishment, knowing and insufferable; he lived over the increasing dissatisfaction with quick embraces in the automobile, and the final indignities of lying names and rooms of pandering and filthy debasement. The almost inevitable exposure followed, the furies and hysterical reproaches. That, indeed, would have involved them fatally: in such circumstances the world would be invincible, crushing; holding solidly its front against such dangerous assault, it would have poured over Savina and him a conviction of sin in which they would unavoidably have perished.
As it was, he had told her--with, in himself, the feeling of a considerable discovery--that they were to a marked degree superior: he could find no more remorse at his heart than Savina showed. This, exactly, was his inner conviction--that, since he had given something not in Fanny's possession, he had robbed her of nothing. It was a new idea to him and it required careful thought, a slow justification. It answered, perhaps, once and for all, his question about the essential oneness of marriage. Yes, that was a misconception; marriage in an ideal state he wasn't considering, but only his own individual position. To love but one woman through this life and into a next would be blissful ... if it were possible; there might be a great deal saved--but by someone else--in heroically supporting such an Elysian tenet; Lee Randon definitely hadn't the necessary utopianism.
Love wasn't a sacred fluid held in a single vessel of alabaster; marriage didn't conveniently create shortsightedness. Lee couldn't pretend to answer all this for women, or even in part for Savina. Her attitude, he knew, in that it never touched the abstract, was far simpler than his; she didn't regard herself as scarlet, but thought of the rest of the world as unendurably drab. The last thing she had said to him was that she was glad, glad, that it had happened. This, too, in Savina, had preserved them from the slightest suggestion of inferiority: the night assumed no resemblance to a disgraceful footnote on the page of righteousness. It was complete--and, by God, admirable!--within itself. No one, practically, would agree with him, and here, in the fact that no one ever could know, his better wisdom was shown.
About love, the thing itself, his perceptions remained dim: he had loved Fanny enormously at the time of their wedding and he loved her now, so many years after; but his feeling--as he had tried so unfortunately to tell her--wasn't the same, it had grown calm; it had become peaceful, but an old tempestuous need had returned. Yet, until he had gone to the Groves', his restlessness had been trivial, hardly more than academic, a half-smiling interest in a doll; but now, after he had left the realm of fancy for an overt act, a full realization of his implication was imperative. Without it he would be unable to preserve any satisfactory life with Fanny at all; his uneasiness must merely increase, become intolerable. Certainly there was a great, it should be an inexhaustible, amount of happiness for him in his wife, his children and his home; he would grow old and negative with them, and there die.
But a lot of mental re-adjustment, understanding, was necessary first. Suddenly the minor adventures and sensations of the past had become, even before the completeness of the affair with Savina, insuperably distasteful to him; he simply couldn't look forward to a procession of them reaching to impotence. No, no, no! That was never Cytherea's import. He didn't want to impoverish himself by the cheap flinging away of small coin from his ultimate store. He didn't, equally, wish to keep on exasperating Fanny in small ways. That pettiness was wholly to blame for what discomfort he had had. His wife's claim was still greater on him than any other's; and what, now, he couldn't give her must be made up in different ways. This conviction invested him with a fresh sense of dignity and an increasing regard for Fanny.
What a shame it was that he could not go quietly to her with all this, tell her everything. A lie was rooted, concealed, beyond removal at the base of the honesty he planned. There was, of course, this additional phase of the difficulty--what had happened concerned Savina even more than it did his wife and him. He had Savina Grove, so entirely in his hands, to guard. And the innate animosity of women toward women was incalculable. That wasn't a new thought, but it recurred to him with special force. As much as he desired it, utter frankness, absolute safety, was impossible. Fanny's standard of duty, or responsibility, was worlds apart from his.
Bitterly and without premeditation he cursed the tyranny of sex; in countless forms it dominated, dictated, every aspect of life. Men's conception of women was quite exclusively founded on it in its aspects of chastity or license. In the latter they deprecated the former, and in the first they condemned all trace of the latter. The result of this was that women, the prostitutes and the mothers alike, as well, had no other validity of judgment. The present marriage was hardly more than an exchange of the violation of innocence, or of acted innocence, for an adequate material consideration. If this were not true, why was innocence--a silly fact in itself--so insisted upon? Lee was forced to conclude however, that it was the fault of men: they turned, at an advancing age when it was possible to gather a comfortable competence, to the young. By that time their emotions were apt to be almost desperately variable.
In his case it had been different--but life was different, easier, when he had married--and his wedding most appropriate to felicity. Yet that, against every apparent reason to the contrary, had vanished, and left him this calm determining of his fate. Through his thoughts a quirk of memory ran like a tongue of flame. He felt Savina's hand under his cuff; he felt her sliding, with her arms locked about his neck, out of her furs in the automobile; a white glimmer, a whisper, she materialized in the coldness of the night. There was a long-drawn wailing blast from the locomotive--they were almost entering the train-shed at Eastlake. When Fanny expected him, and it was possible, she met him at the station; but tonight he would have to depend on one of the rattling local motor hacks. Still, he looked for her and was faintly and unreasonably disappointed at her absence. An uncontrollable nervousness, as he approached his house, invaded the preparation of a warm greeting.
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