Chapter 27

Sometimes she tried to stand off as a spectator of her emotionalism, to examine these new feelings. Were they more egotistical than compassionate, more defiant than gentle? Among them, at any rate, there was gratitude. She had found an object in life, had splendidly emerged from her old sensations of incompleteness and inferiority. No longer that morbid humility struggling in vain to transform itself into a violent self-assertion. Not since she had become the virtual creatrix of beauty, even the giver of life!

And David, because she owed so much to him, became every day more precious. All this new dignity and worth that now enveloped her, these self-satisfactions of a Euterpe and a Beatrice, depended on his survival, would increase, even if he maintained just that strange equilibrium between life and death, but would die the instant he died. So for Lilla he took on such importance that everything else in life turned insignificant: old ardors were all consumed in this new ardor at once conquering and maternal, vainglorious and passionately grateful.

Even that wound in her heart from which a corporeal love had been torn out by the roots, was healed at last, as it seemed, by these new forms of pride and tenderness that could culminate in no material union.

She returned less and less often to the little house in Greenwich Village, where Parr, escaped from his crutches, sat in a chintz-covered chair, a cane between his knees, his white head lowered, still dreaming of "those good days."

"You're better, aren't you? What does the doctor say now? Is there anything you need here?"

Her eyes, avoiding his look of humble devotion, roamed over the walls, as if she were considering the advisability of more Delia Robbia plaques. The niece, with her sleek brown bandeaux and fifteenth century profile, passed noiselessly through the hall; and presently a smell of cooking entered the sitting room.

"As late as that?"

Lilla drove uptown, heaped her arms with flowers, entered the rooms to which Lawrence Teck had led her on the night of their marriage.

The characteristic odor of the place--the odor of skins and sandalwood, camphor and dried grasses--nearly stifled her. In the gloom she saw the savage weapons gleaming. Then the shadow of clustered tomtoms against the bedroom door made her heart stand still. As if to exorcise a ghost that she no longer dared to meet, still clutching the mass of tributary blossoms to her breast, she tore the window curtains apart. The sunset struck in like a sword blade relentlessly cleaving through the veils of time. Dust lay over everything. On the center table, in the polished gourd, a bouquet of winter roses stood rigid, brown, like the lips of mummies, dry enough to crumble at a touch.

Standing there in her modish suit so cunningly devised to emphasize her charms, with the flowers slipping from her arms to the dusty rug, she wept at the vagueness of her recollections, the fading away of grief, to which she had once dedicated herself "for life."

"Why do I keep this place up? It's dreadful that everything should be just the same here----"

She meant, "While I am so changed."

She went downstairs intending to tell the janitor to give the rooms a cleaning; but she found him--a fat, undersized old fellow in a skullcap--talking to a young man who had a leather portfolio stuck under his arm. As her eyes were red, and her voice no doubt still unsteady, she averted her head, and passed quickly out to her car.