Chapter 6

“That isn't just,” he replied; “unless you want to speak of pity at its very best. No, that won't do: my affection for you is made of all our experiences, our lives and emotions, together. We are tied by a thousand strings--common disappointments and joy and sickness and hope and pain and heaven knows what else. We're held by habit, too, and convenience and the opinion of society. Certainly it is no smaller than the first,” he argued, but more to himself than to Fanny; “that was nothing but a state of mind, of spirit; you can't live on music.”

“Don't you think you have said enough for one night?” she asked, in a calm voice belied by the angry sparkle of her eyes, the faint irrepressible trembling of her lips. “Do you think I want to hear that it is only convention and our neighbors that keep you with me? You have no right to insist that your horridness is true of me, either. I--I could hear music, if you would let me.” She sank on the little cushioned bench before her dressing table, where her youthfulness took on a piercing aspect of misery. Fanny's declaration, not far from tears, that she was just as she had always been was admirably upheld by her appealing presence.

The tenderness he had admitted, reduced by a perceptive impatience and the sense of having been wholly, wilfully, misunderstood, carried him over to her. He took Fanny, with her face strained away from him, into his arms. “Don't be an idiot,” he begged softly; “you ought to be used to my talking by now. Let me go on, it can't come to anything--” She stiffened in his embrace:

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, nothing,” he answered shortly, releasing her; “where is all that certainty you assured me of? If you go on like this I shall never be able to tell you my thoughts, discuss problems with you; and it seems to me that's very necessary.”

“It has been lately,” she spoke in a metallic voice; “nothing satisfies you any more; and I suppose I should have been prepared to have you say things to me, too. But I'm not; you might even find that I am not the idiot you suspect.”

“I was giving you a chance to prove that,” he pointed out.

“Now you have discovered the fatal truth you can save yourself more trouble in the future.” She emphatically switched off a light beside her, leaving him standing in a sole unsparing illumination. Yet in her extreme resentment she was, he recognized, rubbing Vaseline into her finger nails, her final nightly rite. Then there was silence where once he had kissed her with a reluctance to lose her in even the short oblivion of sleep.

* * * * *

Throughout Monday, at his office, Lee Randon thought at uncomfortable intervals of the late incipient scenes with Fanny. They had quarrels--who hadn't?--but they had usually ended in Fanny shedding some tears that warmly recemented their deep affections. This latter time, however, she had not wept--at the point of dissolving into the old surrender she had turned away from him, both in reality and metaphorically, and fallen asleep in an unexpected cold reserve. He was sorry, for it brought into their relationship a definite new quality of difference. He was aware of the thorough inconsistency of his attitude toward their marriage; again two opposed forces were present in him--one, Fanny, as, bound to her, he knew and cherished; and the other--the devil take the other!

He was organizing a new company, and, figuring impatiently, he pressed the button for Mrs. Wald, his secretary. She appeared at once and quietly, her notebook and pencil ready, took a place at his side. “Run this out, please, Mrs. Wald,” and an involved financial transaction followed. What he wanted to ascertain was, with a preferred stock bearing eight per cent at a stated capitalization, and the gift of a bonus of common, share for share, how much pie would remain to be cut up between a Mr. Hadly, Sanford, and himself? The woman worked rapidly, in long columns of minute neat figures. “About thirty-four thousand dollars, each, Mr. Randon,” she announced almost directly. “Is that close enough; or do you want it to the fraction?”

“Good enough; send Miss Mathews in.”

Almost anyone on his staff, Lee reflected, knew more about the processes of his business than he did; he supplied the energy, the responsibility of the decisions, more than the brains of his organization; and it perfected the details. The stenographer, Miss Mathews, was very elaborately blonde, very personable; and, dictating to her, Lee Randon remembered the advice given him by a large wielder of labor and finance. “Lee,” he had said, touching him with the emphasis of a finger, “never play around with an employee or a client.”

He, John Lenning Partins, had been a man of eccentric humors, and--like all individuals who supported heavy mental burdens, inordinately taxed their brains--he had his hours, unknown to the investing public, of erratic, but the word was erotic, conduct. On more than one occasion he had peremptorily telegraphed for Lee to join him at some unexpected place, for a party. Once, following a ball at the Grand Opera House, in Paris, they had motored in a taxi-cab, with charming company, to Calais. During that short stay in France John Partins had spent, flung variously away, four hundred thousand dollars.

The industrious, the clerks, efficient women like Mrs. Wald, the middle-aged lawyers in his office, were rewarded...by a pension. It was all very strange, upside down: what rot that was about the infinite capacity for taking pains! He supposed it wouldn't do to make this public, the tritest maxims were safer for the majority; but it was too bad; it spread the eternal hypocrisies of living. He asked Miss Mathews:

“You're not thinking of getting married, are you? Because if you do I'll have your young man deported; I simply won't let go of you.”

“I don't see any signs of it, Mr. Randon,” she replied, half serious and half smiling; “my mother thinks it's awful, but I'm not in any hurry. There are men I know, who might like me; they show me a very good time; but somehow I am not anxious. I guess in a way it's the other married girls I see: either they housework at home, and I couldn't be bothered with that; or they are in an office and, somehow, that seems wrong, too. I want so much,” she admitted; “and with what clothes cost now it's terrible.”

“Moralists and social investigators would call you a bad girl,” he told her; “but I agree with you; get your pretty hats and suits, and smart shoes, as long as you are able. You're not a bit better in a kitchen than you are here, taking dictation from me; and I am not sure you would be more valuable at home with a child or two. You are a very unusual stenographer, rapid and accurate, and you have a good mind in addition to your figure. Why should you lose all that at once, give it up, for the accidents of cholera infantum and a man, as likely as not, with a consumptive lung?”

“But what about love, Mr. Randon? That's what throws me off. Some say it's the only thing in life.”

“I'm damned if I know,” he admitted, leaning back from his wide flat-topped desk. “I hear the same thing, and I am rather inclined to believe it. But I have an idea that it is very different from what most people insist; I don't think it is very useful around the house; it has more to do with the pretty hat than with a dishpan. If you fall in love go after the thing itself, then; don't hesitate about tomorrow or yesterday; and, above all else, don't ask yourself if it will last; that's immaterial.”

“You make it sound wild enough,” she commented, rising.

“The wilder the better,” he insisted; “if it is not delirious it's nothing.”

The road and countryside over which he returned in the motor sedan, partly frozen, were streaked by rills of muddy surface water; the sky, which appeared definitely to rest on the surrounding hills, was grey with a faint suffusion of yellow at the western horizon. It was all as dreary, as sodden, as possible. Eastlake, appearing beyond a shoulder of bare woods, showed a monotonous scattering of wet black roofs, raw brick chimneys, at the end of a long paved highway glistening with steel tracks.

Lee Randon was weary, depressed: nothing in his life, in any existence, offered the least recompense for the misfortune of having been born. He left his car at the entrance of his dwelling; Christopher, the gardener, came sloshing over the sod to take it into the garage; and, within, he found the dinner-table set for three. “It's Claire,” his wife informed him; “she called up not half an hour ago to ask if she could come. Peyton was away over night, she said, and she wanted to see us.” He went on up to his room, inattentive even to Claire's possible troubles.

He dressed slowly, automatically, and descended to the fire-lit space that held Cytherea in her mocking, her becoming, aloofness. In the brightly illuminated room beyond the hall Helena and Gregory were playing parchesi--Gregory firmly grasped the cup from which he intently rolled the dice; Helena shook the fair hair from her eyes and, it immediately developed, moved a pink marker farther than proper.

“You only got seven!” Gregory exclaimed; “and you took it nine right on that safety.”

“What if I did?” she returned undisturbed. “I guess a girl can make a mistake without having somebody yell at her. Your manners aren't very good.”

“Yes, they are, too,” he asserted, aggrieved; “I have to tell you if you move to a safety where you don't belong.” He shook the dice from the cup. “Now, see there--that just brings me to your man, and I can send him home.”

“I don't care,” Helena informed him; “it's a young sort of game, anyhow. Now I'm wearing waists and buttoned skirts I'd just as leaves write a letter to Margaret West with no boys in it at all.”

She left the parchesi board, and crossed the room to the piano, where she stood turning over sheets of music with a successful appearance of critical interest. Gregory, silently struggling with the injustice of this, gazed up with a shadowed brow at Lee. “I was going to beat her,” he said, “I was almost home, and she went away. She just got up like nothing was happening.” Helena put in, “Neither there was.” Lee Randon took her place. “You can beat me instead,” he proposed. His interest in the game, he felt, was as false as Helena's pretended musical preoccupation; but he rolled the dice and shifted the counters, under Gregory's undeviating scrutiny, with the conviction that parchesi was not conspicuously different from the other more resounding movements of the world and its affairs. Gregory easily vanquished him, and Lee rose with a curt, unwarranted nod of dismissal.

* * * * *

Freezing cocktails in the pewter pitcher, in the repetition of minor duties which, Lee Randon thought, now constituted four-fifths of his life, he told himself that Claire Morris had never looked better: she was wearing a dress of a soft negative blue material, high about her throat, with glimpses of bright embroidery that brought out her darkly vivid personality. Claire had a slim low-breasted figure, gracefully broad shoulders; and her face, it might be because of its definite, almost sharp, outline, held the stamp of decided opinions. Claire's appearance, he recognized, her bearing, gave an impression of arrogance which, however, was only superficially true--she could be very disagreeable in situations, with people, that she found inferior, brutally casual and unsympathetic; but more privately, intimately, she was remarkably simple-hearted, free from reserve. She was related to Lee through her father, a good blood, he told himself; but her mother had brought her a concentration of what particular vigorous aristocracy--an unlimited habit of luxury without the responsibility of acknowledged place--the land afforded.

The drinks had been consumed, the soup disposed of, when Claire said abruptly, “Peyton is going to leave me.”

Although, in a way, Lee had been prepared for such an announcement, the actuality upset him extremely. Fanny gasped, and then nodded warningly toward the waitress, leaving the dining-room; at any conceivable disaster, he reflected, Fanny would consider the proprieties.

“When did he tell you?” Fanny demanded.

“He didn't,” Claire replied; “I told him. It was a great relief to both of us.”

“Say what you like outside,” Lee put in vigorously; “but at least with us be honest.”

“I am, quite,” she assured him; “naturally I don't want Peyton to go--I happen to love him. And there's Ira. But it was an impossible position; it couldn't go on, Peyton was absolutely wretched, we both were; and so I ended it. I laid out all his best silk pajamas so that he'd look smart--”

“How can you?” Fanny cried; “oh, how can you? It is too wicked, all too horrible, for words. I don't think you are advanced or superior, Claire, you failed him and yourself both. It's perfectly amazing to me, after the men you have met, that you don't know them. You must keep them going in the right direction; you can't let them stop, or look around, once; I only learned that lately, but it is so. They haven't an idea of what they want, and they try everything. Then if you let a man go he is the first to blame you; it's like winking at murder.”

“How could I keep him when he didn't want to stay?” Claire asked wearily; “I am not too moral, but I couldn't quite manage that. Then what you say might do for some men, but not Peyton. You see, he has always been very pure; all his friends at Princeton were like that; they were proud of it and very severe on the other. And afterwards, when he went into the city, it was the same; Peyton would get drunk any number of times with any number of men, but, as he said, he was off women. The stage door, it seems, is very old-fashioned now.

“When we were engaged, and he told me that he was really pure, I was simply mad with happiness. I thought it was such a marvelous thing for a girl to find. I still think that; and yet, I don't know. If he were different, had had more experience, perhaps this wouldn't have hit him so hard. He would have kissed his Mina on the porch, outside the dance, and come home.”

“As for that Raff woman--” Fanny stopped, at a loss for a term to express her disgust.

“Why not?” Claire asked. “She wanted Peyton and went after him: he isn't for her art, I believe, but for herself. I haven't talked to her; I can't make up my mind about that. Probably it would do no good. Peyton is splendidly healthy; it won't be necessary to tell her anything about draughts and stomach bands.”

“Claire, you're utterly, tragically wrong,” Fanny wailed. “I wish I could shake sense into you. Up to a point this is your fault; you are behaving in a criminally foolish way.”

“What do you think Claire should do?” Lee asked his wife.

She turned to him, a flood of speech on her lips; but, suddenly, she suppressed it; the expression, the lines, of concern were banished from her face. “There is so much,” she replied equably; “they haven't discussed it enough; why, it ought to take a year, two, before they reached such a decision. Peyton can't know his mind, nor Claire hers. And Ira, that darling innocent little child.”

“Damn Ira!” Claire Morris exclaimed.

“You mustn't,” Fanny asserted; “you're not yourself. Mina Raff should be burned alive, something terrible done to her.” Fanny'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, Fanny, 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 Fanny 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 God'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 sanctity of his home. I've never had a house of that kind; it was christened, like a ship, with champagne.

“I have never cared for domestic things. I'd rather wear a dinner-gown than an apron; I'd a damn 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.”

Fanny, 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 Embassy 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 snob, 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 Fanny 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 Fanny 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 Fanny 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 asserted. “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 damnable 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 class, I believe, and particularly fancied the duchess part.”

“It wouldn't be like that in the current novels, or even in the better: either your grandparent or the duchess 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 damned 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 damning your fate. It may be largely envy--personally I am convinced it is--but they have you ticketed straight for hell 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.