Chapter 41

Now and then, craving a glimpse of the gay streets and the shops, Lilla went into town "to see that everything was all right" in the house on lower Fifth Avenue, or else, "to make sure that Parr was comfortable."

One afternoon, at a stoppage of the traffic her limousine came side by side with that of Fanny Brassfield, who persuaded her to look in at a horse show.

She found herself in a box on the edge of an arena, amid a concourse of people whose unrelated movements and chatter combined in a species of visible and audible mist, which encircled the spread of tan bark. In the midst of everything, in the dusty glitter that poured down from the high roof, horses and men were moving like automata. The thud of the hoofs was lost in a great buzzing of voices. The odor of stables was impregnated with the scent of winter flowers and sachets.

Round Lilla there was an accentuated stir. Even across the arena some women were staring through their glasses. The reporters came hurriedly to verify the rumor that it was she. Those who were promenading below the boxes walked more slowly, feasting their eyes on her.

She eat proudly erect, her fur-trimmed cloak drawn round her tightly; and none could have suspected the confusion of her brain after so much solitude.

Fanny Brassfield's piercing voice struck through the fanfare of a bugle:

"Look here, Lilla, I'm giving quite a dinner tonight. You stay in town for once, and have a little fun. We can stop and buy you a perfect gown that I saw yesterday----"

And when Lilla had shaken her head, the blonde, lean temptress exclaimed in exasperation:

"I declare, you're no good to anybody any more!"

A sleek-looking man in riding clothes stepped down into the box. Fanny Brassfield, who had been craning her neck indignantly, disregarded his outstretched hand to give his arm a push, while crying out:

"Go get her for me, Jimmy. Anna Zanidov. There, with those people in the aisle."

The Russian woman appeared before them in a black turban and a voluminous black cloak. Her flat, vermilion lips were parted in a social smile; but her Tartar eyes remained inscrutable. Her face, wedge-shaped, dead white, with its look of being made from some material more rigid than flesh, was as startling as the countenance of an Oriental image, in its frame of glossy black fur. Sitting down, she assumed that close-kneed hieratic attitude habitual to her, which made Lilla see her once more in the barbarically painted evening gown, amid superstitious women breathless from awe.

"Do you care for this idolatry?" Madame Zanidov asked Lilla, in her precise English. "But then after all so few are here to worship the animals. Perhaps rather to be worshipped," she suggested pleasantly, casting her glance over Lilla's face and costume.

All around her, indeed, Lilla could see the pretty women in their slate-gray and rust-colored cloaks, in their rakish little toques from under which their sophisticated eyes peeped out in search of homage. Some had the expression of those for whom love is an assured phenomenon solving all questions. Others seemed to be waiting impatiently for its advent or its departure. But all, Lilla thought, looked assured either of its persistence or its recurrence. Amid them she felt as isolate as a ghost.

The men approached them with confident smiles, long limbed, with leisurely and supple movements, smart in their heavy tweeds or riding breeches that suggested habits of strenuous exertion. When they removed their hats, one saw their close-clipped heads bending forward confidentially toward the fair faces: and their eyes slowly followed the eyes of the women who were contemplating absentmindedly the rippling muscles of the horses in the arena. A band in a balcony began to play Strauss's _Wiener Mad'l_, the strains of music muffled by the dust, the lights, the movement of the audience, the pain in Lilla's breast. And the vague savor of stables and flowers, the statuesque postures of beasts and the expectant attitudes of human beings, were suddenly fused together into one hallucination--a flood of sensory impressions at once unreal and too actual, in which Lilla found herself sinking and smothering.

Anna Zanidov was looking at her intently.

"You do not often come to town, they tell me," the Russian murmured.

"No, why should I?" Lilla returned, as if violently aroused from sleep. She saw beyond Anna Zanidov, on the steps of the box, a man whose visage was lined across the forehead and under the cheekbones, and who showed, under his heavy, mouse-colored mustache, a stony, courteous smile.

It was the new face of Cornelius Rysbroek.

"No, sit here," said the Russian, "I wish to talk with Fanny."

He seated himself beside Lilla, and, after watching a horse clear a jump, remarked:

"Do you know I'm living near you?"

He had taken a house in Westchester County, five miles away from hers. He had been looking for quiet, because he was writing a book about his journey in China--"just for the fun of the thing."

"Yesterday," he added indifferently, "I happened to pass your gates. At least I suppose they were. I had a mind to call."

His hands, clasped round his knee, attracted her unwilling notice. They had become sinewy. He appeared like a hard-muscled elder brother of the listless hypochondriac who in the old days had paid feeble court to her: and strangeness enveloped him, not only because of the changes in his body and character, but also because of the hardships and escapes that he had experienced in the Chinese mountains. Yet in this strangeness Lilla found a disturbingly familiar quality, like an echo of something lost, a vague and diminished reapparition of an old ideal.

"Yes," she said softly, "I wish we could be friends again. But the situation at home is so very delicate."

After a long silence, he uttered, so low that she could hardly hear him:

"Are there no other places?"

The band still played _Wiener Mad'l_.

"It's getting late," she faltered, wondering where she was going to find the strength to rise from her chair.

"Yes, go back to your tomb. Are there any mirrors in it? Do you ever look in them? Do you see in them what's happening to you? Your eyes are losing their luster; you're getting haggard, and in a little while one will see the bones under your skin. At this moment you look like the devil." Without raising his voice, without ceasing to stare as though bored at the old Russian silver box from which he was taking a cigarette with trembling fingers, he pronounced malignantly, "You are losing your beauty, Lilla--all that you ever had to plunge a man into hell. Presently, thank God, there will be nothing to love."

It seemed to her that he had shouted the words at the top of his voice, that the whole multitude must have heard him, and must have seen the look that he showed her for the briefest instant--the look of a damned soul peering through flames that only she could quench.

At the full impact of pity and remorse at last, she felt her spirit stumbling toward his through that inferno.

The promenaders perceived a woman and a man, expressionless though rather worn and pale, exchanging apparently commonplace words, while staring down at the horses.

"I'll phone you to-night----"

"Not the phone."

"With an indolent movement he thrust his shaking hands into his coat pockets, and tried again:

"I'll drive over in the morning. You might be taking a walk----"

Weak and sick, she glanced down at the buttons of her gloves, before rising to her feet. She heard Anna Zanidov saying to Fanny Brassfield, "Well, I've lost those friends of mine. No matter. I'll find a taxi." Pouncing upon this chance to escape, for the moment, from him and from herself, Lilla blurted out:

"Let me give you a lift. Come on."

Cornelius Rysbroek saw her lovely head turning away from him, the swirl of her cloak as she ascended the steps, the flash of her tapering boot heel. He then stood looking round him through his ironical, weary mask, one hand on the back of a chair, however, as if without that support his quaking legs might let him fall to the floor.