Chapter 4

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 anticipation, 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 attitudes 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 rushing 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 God!” 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 shifting 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 Fanny, 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 glass 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 assumption 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 competition 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: prostitute 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 prostitute, 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 glass 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 Fanny 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 asserted 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. Fanny, we are getting older; it's hideous but so. We're getting on, but our young men are gayer every day.”

Fanny Randon's smile, her expression, were secure.

This made Lee restive, and, patting her hand, he left to dance with Alice Lucian. “When this is over,” she informed him, “we'll get Anette and George, and go out to my car. There is a Thermos bottle of cocktails hidden under the seat.” The girl who had sat at Lee's right was dancing with a tall fair-haired boy in a corner. Entirely oblivious of the rest of the room, they were advancing two matched steps and then retreating, their eyes tightly shut and cheeks together. A man fell in the middle of the floor, catching his partner's skirt and tearing it from the waistband. Everywhere the mad effort at escape!

Lee Randon lost his impression of the triviality of the occasion: they all seemed desperately searching for that something he had lost and which was overwhelmingly important to him; and all the while the music stuttered and mocked and confused a tragic need. Or it was like a momentary release from deadly confinement, a respite that, by its rare intoxication, drove the participants into forms of incredulous cramped abandon. Positively, he thought, they were grasping at light, at color, at the commonplace sounds of a few instruments, as though they were incalculable treasures. Alice, when she danced, held her head back with eyes half closed; and suddenly, with her mouth a little parted, she, too, had a look of Cytherea, a flash of the withheld beauty which filled him with restlessness.

It startled him, and, sub-consciously, his arm tightened about her. She responded immediately, with an accelerated breath, and the resemblance was gone. Greatly to his relief, a man cut in on them, and once more he found himself dancing with Anette. She asked him, in a murmurous warmth, if he liked her, at all. And, with a new and surprising, a distasteful, sense of lying, he replied that he did, tremendously. No, a feeling in him, automatic and strange, responded--not Anette! He wanted to leave her, to leave everyone here, and go. For what? At the same time he realized that he would stay, and go out, drink, in the Lucians' car. He had a haunting impression, familiar to him in the past weeks, that he was betraying an essential quality of his being.

Yet along with this his other consciousness, his interest in Anette, lingered; it existed in him tangibly, a thing of the flesh, not to be denied. She was all prostitute, Mina Raff had said, using the word in a general sense rather than particularly, without an obvious condemning morality. Indeed, it might easily be converted into a term of praise, for what, necessarily, it described was the incentive that forever drove men out to difficult accomplishment, to anything rather than ease. Good or bad, bad or good--which, such magic or maternity, was which?

“What are you thinking about?”

“It would take years to tell you.”

“I wish ... you might; but I didn't mean to say that, to let you know--”

“You didn't let me know anything,” he broke into her period impatiently. “If we get on together isn't that enough? It's really not necessary to hide ourselves behind a lot of pretentious words. And what we feel tonight hasn't a thing to do with tomorrow; probably then we'll be entirely different; how can it matter?”

“It does, though, because you might hate me tomorrow for being myself tonight. What you think of me has to be big enough to guard against that. You hurt me, Lee, very much, talking in that way.”

* * * * *

Alice Lucian, with George Willard, passed them and nodded significantly toward the entrance. “You will need a cloak,” Lee told Anette; “it's blowing colder and colder.” She vanished up the stairs, to the dressing-rooms, while Lee stood waiting with Willard. He didn't especially like the latter, a man with an exuberant loud friendliness, a good nature, that served as a cover for a facilely predatory sensuality.

He was continually taking hold of feminine arms, bending close over dinner dresses; and he used--with a show of humorous frankness--his long knowledge of the girls of Eastlake as a reason for kissing them on every possible occasion.

Anette and Alice appeared, with their wraps turned to exhibit the silk linings, bright like their dresses; and, at a favorable moment, they slipped out into the malice of the wind beating on them from the darkness. Anette was pressed tightly against Lee, Alice and George Willard were vaguely ahead; and, after a short breathless distance, they were in the protection of the shed. The Lucians' automobile had an elaborate enclosed body: shutting the doors they were completely comfortable, unobserved and warm. “No,” Alice directed, “don't put on the light; I can find it. There! We'll have to use the cap for a glass.” The aluminum top of the bottle was filled and refilled; the frigid gin and orange juice brought Lee Randon a glow of careless well-being, irresponsibility.

The others had gone to the front seat, where they were squeezed into a remarkably small space. Anette sat leaning forward, her chin propped in her left hand and the right lightly resting on Lee's knee. A loose board in the shed kept up an exasperating clatter. A match flared and Willard lighted a cigarette. It was curious about Alice--only in the last year, and for no reason Lee could discover, had she done things such as this. Perhaps, with no children, and the money Warner had accumulated comparatively lately, she hadn't enough to do. Of course, Warner, a splendid individual, could not be called entertaining; he was totally absorbed in his business, often away at the wood-pulp mill, in the Laurentian Mountains, in which he had a large interest.

Warner Lucian had nearly all the principal virtues--integrity, generosity, courage, and he was as single in mind as Willard was dubious; but, in spite of so much, it was clear that he had begun to weary Alice. She was publicly indifferent to him, careless of his wishes; she had even complained to Lee about her husband's good conduct, explaining that if he would only have what she termed an affair he would be more human.

“I am still very cross at you.” Anette spoke out of a gloom in which her face was barely distinguishable. “You took all the niceness out of our friendship and made it seem horrid; just as though you had pulled off my clothes; I--I haven't the same feeling about you.”

His effort at honesty, at discovering the mystery of profound disturbing needs, had been vain. Gathering Anette in his arms Lee kissed her. She rested there for a moment; then, with her hands against his chest, pushed him away. “I can't, now,” she told him; “somehow it's all spoiled. It seemed as though you were studying me disapprovingly. I'm not just bad, you know.”

“I don't think you are bad at all,” he replied irritably; “you brought that into it. Why, in the name of heaven, should I?”

“Fanny doesn't like me,” she said at a tangent.

“Who put that in your head?”

“Fanny. She's hardly civil.”

“If you mean she's jealous, she isn't.”

“You hardly need to add that. Of course, I realize Fanny Randon couldn't be jealous of me. Good Lord, no! Why should she be? No one would give me a thought.”

Anette, wholly irrational, was furious. Damn women, anyway! It was impossible to get along with them, since they hadn't a grain of reason. He was superior to her temper, indifferent to it, because he was indifferent to her. Suddenly the charm she had had for him was gone, the seductiveness dissolved, leaving only Anette, a fairly good-looking girl he had known for a great while. His warm response to her was dead; whatever she had aroused and satisfied, or left in suspense, no longer contented him. The memory of his interest in her, the thought he had expended, was now a cause of surprise, incomprehensible. Lee wanted to return to the club house and Fanny.

There was an obscure indication of Alice's hands raised in the rearrangement of her hair. George Willard half turned, facing the rear of the car. “I can't see much,” he said, “but it is evident that you two have been fighting. Why don't you live in peace and happiness? The trouble's all with Lee, too, you don't have to tell me that, Anette; he is too cursed cantankerous; and it would serve him right if you'd come up here with us.”

Anette opened the door and an icy draft swept about their knees. “Not yet,” Willard begged; “we won't be missed.”

“You may stay as long as you want,” Anette replied, “but I am going back.” Positively her voice bore a trace of tears. What, what was it all about? It was Alice who decided that they should return together: “The bottle's empty, my hair net is fixed for the third time, and we had better. You get out, George, please. No, I told you.”

Lee Randon welcomed the solid rushing of the wind; it swept in full blast across the open of the golf course and made walking precarious. Anette was lost, forgotten. If the chill air could only take the fever, the desire, out of his mind and blood! He wished that he might be absorbed into the night, the storm, become one with its anonymous force, one with the trees he heard laboring on their trunks. Instead of the safety of being a part of nature he felt that, without directions, he had been arbitrarily set down on earth, left to wander blindly with no knowledge of his destination or its means of accomplishment.

Fragments of a dance measure were audible, and he returned to the pounding music, the heat, the perceptibly chlorinated perfumes and determined activity. He went at once in search of his wife; she had apparently not moved from the chair in which he had left her. Meeting her slightly frowning, questioning expression he told her simply, without premeditation or reserve, that he had been out in an automobile. Fanny was obviously not prepared for his candor, and she studied him with the question held on her lifted face. Then banishing that she proceeded to scold him:

“You know how I hate you to do such things, and it seems precisely as though my wish were nothing. It isn't because I am afraid of how you'll act, Lee; but I will not let you make a fool of yourself. And that, exactly, is what happens. I don't want women like Anette to have anything on you, or to think you'll come whenever they call you. I can't make out what it is in your character that's so--so weak. There simply isn't any other name for it. I don't doubt you, Lee,” she repeated, in a different, fuller voice, “I know you love me; and I am just as certain you have never lied to me. I'm sure you haven't, in spite of what the girls say about men.”

He was cut by an unbearably sharp, a knife-like, regret that he had ever, with Fanny, departed from the utmost truth. Lee Randon had a sudden vision, born of that feeling returning from the shed, of the illimitable tranquility, the release from all triviality, of an honesty beyond equivocation or assault. Fanny, in her way, possessed it; but that, he saw, was made vulnerable, open to disaster, through her love for him. It was necessary, for complete safety, to be entirely insulated from the humanity of emotions. That condition he instinctively put from his thoughts as being as undesirable as it was beyond realization. Lee, with all his vitality, drew away from a conception, a figure, with the cold immobility of death. After all, he reassured himself, he had never essentially lied to Fanny; he had merely suppressed some unnecessary details in order to make their existence smoother. The welcome collapse of his small affair with Anette proved the wisdom of avoiding the exaggeration and difficulty of explanations.

“Lee,” Fanny said, changing the direction of their thoughts, “I don't want to bother you, but I am uneasy about Claire and Peyton. He hasn't left Mina Raff a minute this evening. And he has such an unhappy expression, not at all as though he were enjoying himself.”

“I noticed that,” Lee agreed; “but it will do him no good with Mina--she's a cold potato, career's the only thing in her head.” Then he remembered what Mina Raff had told him about her individuality, her personal desire; and he repeated it to his wife.

“I don't think Claire is entirely wise,” she went on; “but you can't tell her a thing. She listens as sweetly as possible and then says that she won't interfere with Peyton. Well, someone else will. Claire has too much reserve, she is too well-bred and quietly superior. You wait and see if I am not right; life is very vulgar, and it will take advantage of her.”

“I wonder if you are? Well, as you say, we shall see. If Mina Raff fixes her mind on him there will be a lot to watch.”

“You must speak to him.”

“Now there,” Lee expostulated, “you make me sick. How--will you tell me--can I speak to Peyton until he first says something? And when that happens, as easily as not it may be a cable from Peru. You want to interfere too much, Fanny, and insist that everybody follow your idea of right.”

She retired into a silence of wisdom that merely looked down on him. Her face was troubled, her lips tightly compressed. “What time is it?” she asked sharply; “the ribbon of my watch is worn out. Oh, we can go home with decency. It makes me rather sick here.”

He went below, for his hat and coat, and found the room beyond the lockers, built as an informal café before the era of prohibition, occupied by a number of men transferring the balance of fulness from a row of bottles to themselves.

He accepted a drink, more for the purpose of considering Peyton Morris, moodily abstracted by the table, than for itself. It seemed to Lee that the young man had actually aged since the cocktail party at his house, earlier in the evening. Peyton's mouth was hard and sullen; his brow was corrugated. “We're going home,” Lee told him; “and it seemed to me that an hour ago Claire was tired.”

“She didn't tell me,” Peyton responded punctiliously; “and certainly if she's low we'll go too.” He rose promptly, and, with his outer garb, accompanied Lee Randon. His step was uncertain, and Lee put a hand under his elbow. “Liquored?” he asked casually.

“Not in my brain,” Peyton Morris returned: “it seems like I could never get drunk again; but my dam' feet are all over the place. Thanks for hanging on to me: I have an idea you are going to drop me pretty quickly.”

“I don't want to question you,” Randon said, “or in any way force a confidence, but, Peyton, in addition to the relationship, I am exceptionally fond of Claire; and, since helping you is practically the same thing as helping her--”

“I wish to Christ I had been sunk in the North Sea,” Morris broke in bitterly.

They were up the stairs and standing on the emptied floor of an intermission. Fanny, prepared to leave, was gazing about for him. “You've been an age,” she cried to Lee; “and, Peyton, Claire is at last looking for you; although she'd kill me for saying it. You had better go outside a minute, first, and clear your head.”

He came very near to her, slightly swaying. “Fanny, you are a darling, but you are hard; you are hard as the Commandments.”

“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 asserted quickly. “Fanny 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 damned 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.”

Fanny 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 gratitude 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 Fanny, the strange conviction that in doing it he would anticipate, 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.