Part 10

Grace Fuller came at once. Between them, they made Flagg comfortable; he lay with his arm under his head, apparently asleep. With deft, impersonal touches, Grace Fuller ascertained his pulse, wiped off his forehead, which was drenched with sweat, gave him water. She said nothing. Lilah did not meet her eyes. Her own feelings were confused; now that Flagg was safe, she could sense to the full her triumph; but how fragile a thing happiness had become--it depended on this man’s living! And it was doubtful whether he could resist the fatal pressure of the inevitable emotion. He lay exhausted, pallid, one hand hanging limply with fingers that brushed the floor.

Lilah turned her face away, afraid that Grace Fuller might see her expression, the mingling of pity and glory, of fear and expectancy.

“Is he all right? Will he die?”

“No,” Grace Fuller said.

At that, Flagg opened his eyes. “Die? Of course not! This happens very often. I shall be all right in half a second. I’m sorry and ashamed. Your kindness....”

He sat up.

Lilah’s gesture toward him was immediate; before she tempered its meaning, Grace Fuller had seen. But the nurse remained with her cool fingers on Flagg’s wrist. Only her lips twisted as if, before that revelation, she wanted to laugh. She helped Flagg to his feet.

“Good of you,” he said.

He bowed, apologized again and with a glance at Lilah, unreadable, went out and quickly downstairs.

“That’s war,” Grace Fuller remarked dryly. “Thousands like him, trying to....”

Lilah brushed her aside. “I’m going with him! He’s ill.... Let me go, I tell you....”

Grace Fuller caught Lilah’s arm, held her. “Lilah, don’t be a fool.”

Lilah cried wildly: “Let me go! I must.... He’s ill.... Oh, damn you!”

In a white fury she struck, clawed, but Grace Fuller pinioned her arms, shook her, twisted her back, away from the door.

“I love him! I love him! I’m not ashamed. Tell Robert! Tell every one! I want it over.”

“You’re hysterical,” Grace Fuller said.

Lilah ceased struggling. For an appalling moment she thought her own heart had stopped. She sagged against Grace Fuller’s shoulder; while a dark tide of feeling rose, submerged her, receded again.

“I love him,” she repeated in a dull voice. “That’s all. What can I say, or do?”

She straightened and pushed Grace Fuller away. “Now, you two can dance on my grave.”

VII

In her own room again, Lilah went to the telephone and called Flagg at his apartment. A man’s voice answered that Major Flagg was not well.

“I know,” Lilah said impatiently. “I am Mrs. Peabody. I must speak to him.”

“I am Major Flagg’s physician,” was the reply, in a tone Lilah thought a shade too dry. “He cannot speak to any one.” He went on to explain that Major Flagg was not seriously ill, but that he must, for a fortnight, be absolutely quiet.

“I saw him less than an hour ago,” Lilah insisted. “He seemed quite all right.”

The physician, with some acerbity, added that Major Flagg had had another attack on his way home. He was in bed and must stay there, undisturbed....

“Thank you,” Lilah said.

She turned away from the instrument with a frightened gesture. She couldn’t see him! That meant she must meet disaster alone; she had, irrevocably, committed herself to Grace Fuller. No matter what happened to Flagg, whether he lived or died, she had lost Robert....

She began, unsteadily, to dress for dinner. The Sinclairs, the lissome May and her husband, were coming, and, as a balance to their unimportant millions, Lilah had invited the American violinist and his curtly intelligent bride, a woman who might amuse the Sinclairs because she belonged to one of the richest families in the country. In the Sinclairs, two fortunes had come together, and the only enthusiasm they had in common was money. Their interest was not vulgar, it was, rather, fraternal. They enjoyed communion with the rare, kindred blessed.

Lilah thought: “I’ve got to pretend. But none of this is mine--”

In her chemise, with her hair tumbled on her shoulders, she realized that she had not called her maid. When she did, it was with a certain humility that she said: “I am very late.”

The maid said: “Yes, m’am,” and went into the bathroom to start the tub. She was a pretty mulatto, a soft, slight creature with the gait of an enchantress. Lilah had never liked her because she had the air of knowing everything, and the suave, the velvet quality of her St. Kitt’s English gave her a certain distinction.

Lilah wondered: “Could she have heard that row with Grace?”

She studied the girl’s back, her unhurried, expert gestures, and when she straightened suddenly, and turned, Lilah was embarrassed.

“The bath’s ready, m’am.”

A shower of violet crystals sparkled in the tub, and as Lilah stirred them, testing the scented water with the tips of her fingers, she had a sharp memory of tin tubs and basins in Swiss _pensions_.... And, willfully, she recalled the lovers of Lorelay.... She glanced down at herself, silver-white, with little bubbles, like quicksilver, climbing over her skin, bursting on the surface of the water. How lovely her thighs were, indented, slim, young.... And her knees, her feet.... She could go to Lorelay with Flagg and send for that famous, that notorious, tin tub without shame. She was like Manet’s Olympe, not classical but adorable. Flagg would understand if she mentioned Lorelay and Olympe. Robert would not; or, if he did, he would be shocked....

“Seven o’clock, m’am.”

“Coming!”

In a robe of dark blue silk, thrown over a shift of cream chiffon, she faced her mirror, while the mulatto girl dressed her hair. Her panic had been replaced by exuberance. She felt certain that she could handle Grace. Flagg would say, do, nothing. She was safe for a fortnight, with both love and beauty....

“Draw it back, away from my ears. Not fluffy! Here, give me the comb! I’ve told you so many times.”

“Sorry, m’am.”

That pretty, petulant face, honey-colored, was reflected in the triple mirror in an unguarded moment and Lilah caught a flash of dislike and contempt from eyes that were usually turned aside.

“Have you a sweetheart?” Lilah asked, twisting her hair into the Second Empire contour she affected.

“Yes, m’am.”

“Does he love you?”

The mulatto shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Men are funny. He’s a pretty man, but he gambles. He spends all my money. He’s a sailor.”

“Get me the black dress. I’ll want the white cameo ear-rings. No! Not there! In the leather box. Stupid! Stupid! I’m late.”

On her way downstairs, where the financial rating of the violinist’s wife was just dawning on the Sinclairs, Lilah stopped to speak to Grace Fuller.

“Grace?”

“Yes.” Grace Fuller was having her own dinner, in the fashion of nursery governesses, on a card-table before the fire.

“You’ve had dinner?”

“I’m having it--just.”

Lilah came into the room. She was very lovely. She wore no jewelry, save the heavy white cameos, set in gold, that dangled from her ears. She gave no hint of her actual years; Grace Fuller thought, in a moment of judgment, that she was like the city, a creation of that energy which is all nerves. There was something ageless in the slim, provocative, sexless body, thrust a little forward, the carriage of her head, with its dense weight of hair coiled under, her lips, painted like an Oriental’s, not scarlet, but magenta. She said lightly: “Am I all right? Will I do?”

“Beautifully,” Grace said, flushing.

Lilah bent down, and Grace became conscious of the odor of sandalwood. “Dear old Grace; I’m absolutely in your hands.”

“If you mean that I am not to say anything to Robert,” Grace replied, “I won’t. Things like this are too personal, too terrible, for an outsider--”

“I will know what to say when I see Robert,” Lilah interrupted. Her manner became, abruptly, sharp and decisive. “Or whether to say anything at all.” She added, almost carelessly: “My feeling may have been pity.”

Grace said nothing. The flush had mounted until her face burned, as if the shame of Lilah’s confession were hers. For the first time she had had a glimpse of Lilah’s weakness--she saw her exposed to defeat; the revelation was, somehow, humiliating. Grace Fuller turned her eyes away.

“I think you can trust me,” she said. And, instantly, she hated herself for not having struck. Now it was too late.

Lilah went downstairs.

Her guests were already launched. Fred Sinclair was staring at the violinist’s wife with the satisfaction of an entomologist who has happened upon a singularly rare insect. Mrs. Sinclair was testing her charm upon an unyielding surface; the violinist was more a priest than an artist. Lilah found him parrying Mrs. Sinclair’s sentimental thrusts with his own peculiar irony. He despised any one who wasted his time. Lilah trembled for the success of her dinner. She said deftly that in Robert’s absence she depended perhaps too much on her friends; she suggested loneliness and a peculiar sensitiveness to “atmospheres.” The violinist promptly pocketed his ill-temper and his bride surrendered to Mr. Sinclair’s butterfly-on-a-pin manner. On the way in to dinner, she graciously stated the size of her fortune, Mr. Sinclair’s collection thereby gaining a precious specimen.

Lilah had counted on Flagg as a sixth at the table. In her failure to warn the servants, a place had been set and she had to explain. Immediately, the silver and glass were removed, the chair taken away, but Flagg’s name had interested the violinist.

“I’m sorry. I’ve always wanted to know him. What a thundering crime--a man like that, gassed! There could be no survival of the fittest in such warfare.”

He spoke with bitterness of the destruction of the world’s best brains and of the inevitable hiatus--there would be a wide break in both science and art. As it was, the few who were left carried a double burden; their responsibility to the past and to the generation that had had no expression save in death. Flagg was one of the men the world could not spare. The indignity of his suffering now--

The violinist broke off: “I know it isn’t considered polite to talk about the war. In Europe, people aren’t so squeamish. It happened. It may happen again.”

Mrs. Sinclair thought not.

Lilah smiled at the violence of his retort; he had served on the Russian front, had seen the Kolchak debacle, and, before that, had flown over Triest and Pola, Villach and Wien, with d’Annunzio. Mrs. Sinclair listened to his tirade with a pained expression, as if he were being intentionally disagreeable. Why on earth talk about war when you could talk about the theaters, reducing and prohibition--there were enough interesting things....

Lilah pictured Mrs. Sinclair in her Long Island house, a Tudor mansion set down in a vast wilderness of new rose-gardens upon a featureless plain, not unadorned but unhallowed. Her security, established when she was a child, had been deepened by the possession of this enormous stone house, a fortress against chance or change; in rooms as cold, as cheerless, as echoing as a series of railway terminals, she seemed removed from those things which happen to all of us; the walls were too thick and too new to admit defeat. Lilah wondered what Mrs. Sinclair would do if the armies the violinist invoked should trample the Sinclair flower-beds and pepper the Tudor walls with machine-gun bullets.... Send for the Swiss butler, probably, and die, game and unconvinced, sipping a dry Martini.... Lilah could not decide which counted for more--the indifference of the Sinclairs or the awareness of the violinist; they believed that the future was negligible, the present amusing, which sufficed; he believed that the world could be saved only by incredible effort, a supreme, unending, unified intention....

He complained that there was no flame in humanity--too much water had been thrown on it, perhaps. Life was drab unless kept at an artificial, stimulated pitch; pleasure, purchased, had taken the place of faith....

Mrs. Sinclair, bending her willowy body from the waist, whispered to Lilah: “My dear--what’s this I hear about you and Putnam Flagg? It wouldn’t do for you--it wouldn’t do at all! He’s penniless. Now, don’t look innocent. A dozen people have seen you together, lunching at _tea rooms_ and meeting in _art galleries_ ... it’s awfully touching, but no one believes these naïve--”

“May,” her husband said.

“Oh, yes.” She turned again to the violinist. “Faith. You were saying--?”

* * * * *

In the morning Flagg telephoned. “Did you think that I would pay any attention to a doctor’s orders? I want to see you.”

His voice unnerved Lilah. Every time it was like the first time--a breathless recognition, a summons, alarming and unavoidable, to a self beyond self. “He was very severe--” Suddenly her voice broke. Through a flood of frightened tears, she stammered: “Oh, my darling! My darling!”

Flagg said gravely: “Lilah--if I could comfort you.... Will you get your hat and come over here? It’s quite respectable. There’s a nurse, who will, if I ask her, leave us alone. Or, if you prefer, she will stay in the room.”

“I can’t. It isn’t possible! I might be seen.”

“And what if you are? Before long every one who knows you will know that you love me. Things like this can’t be gone at politely. When you break up a marriage, it’s war. It’s got to be war. And neither of us can afford to be afraid, now, or later. You understand, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then come!”

“But--”

He was silent, and Lilah knew that the issue was important. If she refused, she would in all probability never see Flagg again.

“You’re better?”

“Yes.... Take a taxi. You know the number. These are bachelor quarters, but I’ve prepared the elevator man--he’ll bring you up.... I’ll be a lot better when I see you.”

Lilah thought: “Don’t be squeamish. All the women you know do this sort of thing.”

Aloud, she said: “I’ll come at once.”

She dressed with a romantic attention to detail. She chose a small black hat with an air of intrigue and sophistication; a veil that seemed to shut her beauty away so that her eyes were remote, enticing beneath the rakish brim of the tricorn.

A streak of conventionality, a dislike of criticism, warred with her eagerness to see Flagg. She sent her motor away and walked westward to the Avenue, then uptown. Lilah wanted to have her own way but to be considered above reproach. The possibility of scandal frightened her; she thought: “I’m not a coward! Only, to be torn to bits and thrown to the yellow journals to make a middle-class holiday! A Sunday supplement martyr! It’s so stupid.... So ugly.... Robert and Junius, all of us--” With a shock of relief, she thought: “I’m glad I haven’t a child.”

Still, she might have. Even now, she might have! Robert’s child. Even now, as she went to Flagg. But that would be a loathsome trick of destiny; it couldn’t be! Couldn’t.... She didn’t deserve punishment; not such a punishment! God thought of people--there must be some sort of divine justice. Now that she had love--But suppose, as Flagg had said, that there were a God beyond God, and no one watching, no one caring....

She found herself standing before a shop window, and was conscious of the blurred reflection of herself, the fashionable outline of a woman of the world. There was security, insurance against a detestable, a repugnant reality, in the fact of her worldliness. Like Mrs. Sinclair, she was a product of civilization, a vital, representative image of society, removed, by her unquestioned right to her position, from the blind attacks of destiny. She was powerful because she was instructed. She was indomitable because she was intelligent. If there was a God beyond a God she could reach Him. She would not take punishment--need not--

She shook herself, tried to stare at the things in the window--a Florentine chair, more graceful than most of them; a Persian bowl; a Flemish chest; a Luini; a strip of ecclesiastical velvet; a pair of Waterford glass chandeliers....

Her thoughts flew back to the house she had just left. She had wanted glass chandeliers for her bedroom--one on either side of the narrow mantel, to balance the _trumeau_. These were delightful--a shower of crystals, delicate as cobwebs after a rain. They were, probably, expensive....

Lilah hesitated. Her room was lifeless, almost gloomy; it needed such a sparkle as these little chandeliers would give.... She saw herself, moving about in a bland, crystal light....

She went into the shop, conscious, as always, nowadays, of her ability to reach out and take what she wanted. The chandeliers were displayed by a collector who flattered her by making no comments. That they were genuine, and rare, was beyond question.

“I’ll take them.”

“Very well.”

“Mrs. Robert Peabody.”

“I know. We had the pleasure of importing some Venetian glass--”

Lilah interrupted: “Be sure to send a man to hang the chandeliers.”

“Certainly. To-morrow.”

She went out again, somehow relieved, as if she had come unscathed through a hurricane. Buying things always gave her a sense of security. Silly of her, to have been afraid of something that could never happen to her ... never....

* * * * *

Flagg lived in the West Fifties, not far from the noisy “L” track where trains passed like steel comets, clattering, insistent.... An old man in an alpaca jacket admitted her to a narrow hallway and to a slow, dingy elevator operated by a cable. His face was scarlet; there seemed to have been an explosion of veins beneath the surface of the skin.... Without glancing at Lilah, he let the cable slip through his hands, as if, in his dejection and ennui, there could be no end to this ascent. Lilah thought: “How easy, after all.” He let her out and indicated a door “to the left. Push the button.”

Lilah saw the name “Flagg.” There was a rustle behind the door and it opened sharply. A woman in starched linen said: “Mrs. Peabody? Major Flagg is waiting. This way, please.”

Lilah had expected him to be in bed. But he rose from an arm-chair and smiled down at her.

“You’re better?”

“Yes.... Now! You were a long time getting here.”

“I walked.”

“Miss Peterson--Mrs. Peabody.”

The starched woman, who was, to Lilah, as featureless as an egg, bowed, murmured something and went out, closing the door.

“Don’t be afraid,” Flagg said. “I won’t keel over again. I’ll give you tea presently. But now I want to talk to you. You lovely thing! She can’t hear--there’s a corridor, and then my bedroom, where she’s sitting. Shall I send her away?”

“No. No.” Lilah shook her head. “It’s bad enough--my being here.”

He leaned forward and caught her hands, smiling. He drew off her gloves, turned her palms over and kissed them. His gestures were slow but there was nothing of Robert’s hesitancy about him; his eyes flew over her. She felt again that penetrating delight in him, and because he did not expect pity, her pity made her tremble; there was a maternal, a brooding pain in her heart. Without speaking, she went back to her eager search for the things she loved, enumerated them--the line of his cheek, the peculiar, sharp modelling of his lips, his lids, a way his hair had of growing, like a sort of fur, short, thick, lusterless--she wanted to stroke it, but she didn’t. Somehow, he was still a stranger whose presence excited and embarrassed her. She wondered if any one had ever known him; whether she would ever know him. Robert was like a plant that recoils at the touch of a prying finger. But Flagg was like an animal; he had the grace, the aloofness of an animal, the eyes of an animal. She was almost afraid to touch him. His absorption flattered her, as if a creature of the woods had strayed close to rub against her and purr--a big cat. Without stirring, she let him kiss her fingers, one after the other. And she felt again that sense of a moment prolonged, suspended, until she lost reality.

Her glance went beyond him to the room. She had never thought of him as living anywhere.... A shabby, slovenly room. Rows of white shelves were weighted with books. There were no photographs. Only a small bronze of a woman and a jar filled with pipes....

“This isn’t my place,” he said, glancing up quickly. “It belongs to a man I knew in France, who’s broke. He loves books, and I’ve had a feast....”

His eyes deepened and there came into them that look of a satyr, mischievous and sensual. She wanted to kiss him, but she held herself away. Something told her that there would be no going back after to-day; he would not grant her a reprieve.

“I’m sorry,” he began, “for what I said yesterday. In time, you’ll love love--not the idea, but the thing itself. That’s what I’m waiting for. When it comes to you, so that you understand it--its beauty and its penalty--you will lose yourself. And then you will be exquisite.”

“I love you,” she insisted, “now.”

He shook his head.

He relinquished her hands and, crossing the room, filled and lighted a pipe. Then he asked abruptly: “What are you going to tell your husband?”

“I don’t know.” Catching her breath, she evaded him: “Must I tell him anything?”

He did not answer. His expression was mocking. And angrily Lilah cried: “It isn’t easy! For you, yes! But for me--to break with a man who loves me and who doesn’t suspect--”

“Oh. He loves you. I didn’t know that. I had hoped that he didn’t. Are you sure he does?”

“Of course! It will kill him. He trusts me.”

“You haven’t betrayed him!” Flagg said sharply.

“What do you mean?”

“Love is never a betrayal. It’s the truth! I am convinced that it is a sin to deny love, under any circumstances, for any reason--to live with one man and love another is unmoral, ugly, inexcusable. To live with one woman and love another is to betray them both. I am not arguing on the side of promiscuousness. I despise filth. But there is, after all, a definite standard. A responsibility--to the emotion itself. There’s your obligation! Only, the world won’t recognize it.... You’ve got to be sure--dead certain--that what you feel justifies what you do.”

“You’re putting it up to me, then?”

He came over and kneeled beside her. He was asking something. His body pressed against her knees. His hands were supplicating. For the first time he was humble, but more than ever insistent; life itself, demanding that she say yes or no, that she take or leave, give or refuse. In spite of herself, she touched his hair, and with a terrifying sense of being lost, slipped forward into his arms.

“I’ll tell him, simply, that I love you.”

“When?”

She struggled back, away from him again. But Flagg remained on his knees, no longer a suppliant; stubbornly, he repeated: “When?”

“When he comes back--next week.”

She added, with a flash of disdain: “You might at least be sorry for him!” She put out her hand quickly and caught his. “I didn’t mean that! I hurt everybody. Don’t let me hurt you!”

Flagg laughed. “I don’t let myself be hurt.”