Part 11

What he thought was: “If she cares for me, I can hurt her--that’s my weapon, and she knows it.” He got up and went to the window, stood there, smoking, his back turned. He waited with admirable restraint for Lilah to speak again. Behind him, she was absolutely silent. The sun had gone. The room was fading into the gray shadows of late afternoon, retreating, dimming, like a blurred photograph. Flagg kept his eyes on the street; his senses were aware of her; he had no comfort in her presence, but he wanted her there. Suddenly, she was close to him, soft, propitiating. She put her arms around him, pressed her face against his back and they stood, in silence, for a long time. Flagg no longer saw the city; that slate-gray twilight seemed to envelope them both, to isolate them. And he had a deep pity for himself and for her. What should be so simple, so natural, so uncomplicated, would be raveled and frayed and tarnished.... Between this moment and anything like the realization of happiness, there would be a struggle of egos--rebellion, shocked pride, jealousy, in conflict. Before he could show himself to her and lose himself in her loveliness, both of them would suffer. And for what? Because life was so confounded complicated--no passion could be single, perfect, but must be linked up to other passions, an endless tangle of little, petty feelings--like lichens on a tree. The growth was hindered, the sap cut off so that the blossoms withered and the whole plant, tree and parasite, came down into the dust, choked to death....

“Are you sure we’re right?” Lilah asked. “I’ve got to be sure! Isn’t it selfish to be happy?”

Flagg answered that to be unhappy was the worst sort of selfishness. For centuries the world had been in the grip of a superstitious fear of acknowledged happiness, as if being contented with one’s lot were an indication of alliance with the devil. If you sang, in old Salem, you were hanged for a witch. “But to-day, if you sing, you are selfish! And it amounts to the same thing--the world has its fingers crossed....”

Flagg asked, without turning: “Have you ever loved your husband, Lilah?”

Lilah pressed against him. “Don’t ask me, now, to say.... A moment.... Perhaps, yes. But not like this! I am perfectly willing to divorce him.”

Flagg wanted to know what reasons she would give. She said impatiently: “Why--I _want_ a divorce! Isn’t that enough? Such things are arranged. Nowadays, you don’t have to give reasons, do you?”

Flagg answered that he would prefer that she allow Robert to bring suit; the defection, such as it was, was hers; she had tired of her bargain; she had broken her word; she had found compensation. If any one was to blame, she was.... Lilah interrupted: “You’re mad! It would ruin me! It is accepted, usual, for men to take the public blame for these things--every one understands. It isn’t serious. Don’t you know--you silly--idealist--that in New York a man can arrange an adulterous affair by simply hiring a woman, a room and a witness? I know decent men, respectable men, who have done it, not once, but several times. Like vaccination, it doesn’t always take. My darling, you don’t want me talked about.... And it would be so funny.... Robert, in silk pajamas, entertaining a chorus girl.”

“You and I, in love--and your husband, caught with a hired adulteress in a rotten hotel, for your sake! What cheap irony! Such things are damned ugly. You and I will take our medicine, Lilah. Or we’ll renounce, now, what might be so fine. If you’re afraid, say so.”

After a moment, Lilah said, “I’m not afraid.”

She drew away. A knock at the door was followed, discreetly, by a professional inquiry: “You are feeling better, Major Flagg?” And that starched, rustling presence entered, carrying a glass. With a gesture of rebellion, funny because it was unconscious, Flagg took the mixture and drank it.

“You’re talking too much,” the nurse said. With another crackle of starched skirts, she moved from lamp to lamp and the room came into sharp outline. The slovenly carpet and worn chairs, a frayed scarf on the table....

“I’ll go,” Lilah said quickly.

“Hang the doctor!” Flagg exploded. “I beg your pardon, Miss Peterson--but doctors don’t always understand.”

She took the empty glass from him, shrugging her shoulders. And the door closed upon her with a disapproving bang.

“I must go,” Lilah said again. “I must. If anything should happen to you--”

Flagg made her sit down. He made her remove the concealing veil and the little black hat. He began to take the pins out of her hair, but, laughing, she stopped him. She could not, now, imagine that he had ever been ill; a mood of playfulness had followed his rebellion; he was curiously like a young animal again, lost in his delight in her. He was lovable, willful; she stayed because he wanted it. It was hard to refuse him anything. And she couldn’t see that her being there hurt him--he had forgotten his enemy in his discovery of Lilah. Sitting on the floor with his arm thrown across her knees, he talked about himself. Himself, as a little boy. As an almost grown boy. As a young man. It was as if he wanted her to share everything, all in a moment; as if he could make her see the whole pattern of his life, so that he would never be alone again. Lilah could feel herself change, relent, bend down to him with a lovely tenderness. It was what she had always wanted to be, the way she had wanted to feel, only that no one had let her be herself. People had allowed her to be hard and bright and dominating! Now she was the woman she might have been. The simplest things he said touched her. She had no desire to ridicule, to hurt him. She wanted him to want her, to need her, to get closer and closer to her heart.

“I wish I had seen you when you were a little boy,” she said.

“I was a sort of flat face and terribly earnest. From the beginning, before I could reason, I wanted to know about God. I couldn’t believe. And the harder they tried to make me believe, the more stubborn I was. God was unimaginable. They sent me to Sunday school, where I sat with my underlip sticking out, denying God with my muscular system--braced against acceptance. I remember that this refusal made me, in my own eyes, an outcast. I thought of myself as the loneliest and wickedest child on the crust of the globe. But I believed only what I could see, touch or smell.” He shook his head. “And I never got a whiff of God! I remember that one day a sort of evangelist came to the Sunday school. He asked all the little boys and girls who believed in God to stand up. I sat where I was, burning with shame. He leveled at me a shouting and frothing, invective, hate and threats of damnation--eternal. And how I loathed God! When he got through he asked all the little boys and girls who didn’t believe in God to stand up, and I stood up, alone....

“Aren’t kids everlastingly funny? I hadn’t an ounce of prevarication in me; I told the truth, always, until I was a grown man, when I learned that there are times when the truth hurts. Then I drew in my claws. I make velvet paws nowadays. But that doesn’t affect my honesty--I am deadly honest with myself.”

Lilah wondered whether he could feel her shivering with delight in being near him, whether he saw how her eyes looked at him. She could never go back to Robert. She could never again pretend. It was going to be hard. It was going to hurt her to strip herself naked of pretense and fight for this new, this strange and wonderful raiment.

“Did you ever change,” she asked unsteadily, “about God?”

He was launched again. He told her about his student days in Germany--how he had gone back, patiently, to the sources. His days of pessimism. His romantic year. A period of mysticism. A frightened, at first tentative groping through the mazes of science. Then, something like a personal conviction, emerging.... He began to shake off support and to stand alone, almost against his will, for to stand alone was a responsibility. It forever removed him from the sensuous, happy, careless self he had wanted to be and demanded that he face facts, cold, brutal, unadorned and make of them what he could. God came to him out of these facts--not the God he had refused to believe in--a vastly different--

He made her see, somehow, why he was not afraid of pain or death, and why he was reconciled. He hadn’t much longer--but why should he have longer? Only to love her. To make her happy, if that was what she wanted.

“I didn’t know you could care like this. But since you do--”

She still trembled; he could not help but see what she was feeling. The thing that hurt her now was that he would have to know how little and selfish she had been. The self she had to offer him was inadequate. Her magic was tawdry, like cheap spangles on a dancer’s skirt. Her beauty was painted on. The reality, the real Lilah had nothing to give him. And some day, when he had stopped loving her technique, he would look for her art, and find nothing, only fear and an ugly desire to keep him, at all costs. She saw herself, in a sort of contorted and nightmarish vision, pleading with him; she saw his indifference--no, his recognition--crushing her down. It wasn’t Robert and Junius, scandal, that she was afraid of; it was not having Flagg. That was the most terrible thing--to be alone again, inventing enthusiasms, because the reason for being was not there.

This was what Robert had meant.

“You’re not listening,” Flagg said.

“I am. I am.”

“I changed,” he went on, from what beginning Lilah could not guess, “as every one changed. And like every one else, I saw freedom as the most desirable end, gaining it all important. Only that I differed from most in that I didn’t want freedom for personal reasons. I’ve always been singularly free of the crooked, inherited notions that hold men back. But a freedom that releases the mental power of humanity--I can’t make you understand; I’ve only the vaguest notion myself! But I see that if we don’t adapt ourselves, we’ll disappear from the earth. We don’t need web feet or fluffy little wings or snouts, yet we do need an entirely new sort of mind. And the old way of thinking has got to be pitched out, forgotten.”

He clasped her hands, tight, between both of his. “But we can’t pitch it out all at once! The social wheel is still revolving, although the engine has been smashed--it is carried forward by its own momentum, down-hill--a few hundred years of coasting! The survivors will look back at us as we look back at the Neanderthal ape--that’s how fast we’re going.... In the meantime, here we are, you and I, trying to conform to the decencies.”

“Are we?” Lilah asked. In spite of herself, she laughed. “I don’t think it’s decent, exactly, to cheat Robert. If we’re being honest....”

He interrupted: “Lilah, have you stopped to think about me?”

“Why, yes.”

“Aren’t you thinking about yourself?”

She shook her head.

He insisted: “Do you know what I want? What I dream of? Hours of sunshine. Hours of perfectly imbecile happiness, lying on a green hill with my head in your lap, watching the clouds go over. Must we wait? It isn’t so far to Spring. Can’t we go somewhere--I know a town in Connecticut, off the tourist track, where we’d be let alone. In April, the frogs sing at dusk, and the air is moist, cool, full of little gnats that dance as the sun goes down. I used to go there, years ago, to watch things grow. A marvelous season, Lilah. There’s a stir, actual, in the soil, and those prying, green fingers come through.... Suppose you and I were there to watch it together? I stayed at a farmhouse. We could go there. The apple orchard--if it hasn’t changed, and God forbid!--is deep with grass. And our room would be under the eaves....”

“You mustn’t talk like this!”

“Why not?”

“You mustn’t.”

“Does it hurt you? Tell me!”

“Yes.”

“Then I know I’m right. You’ve got to come to me as soon as you’ve told your husband. It isn’t fair to take from him what you don’t deserve--that house, and these clothes and all your ease and luxury! It doesn’t belong to you! After to-day, I’ll hate every hour you spend there. I want you to give back everything he’s given you. I’m not jealous, only I believe in value received.”

Lilah felt like a runner. Breathlessly, she dodged this obstacle. “You wouldn’t expect Robert to bargain?”

“I’m not thinking of Robert. I’m thinking of you. What I want you to be. If you love me, you’ll come to me, free, not all tangled up in another man’s possessions.”

She pushed him away.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Not yet. It’s only six o’clock.”

“But it’s dark. What will that nurse think?”

“I’m all right. I only want you.”

“I know. But some day you may have too much of me.”

“Stay.”

She got up and he stood close, pleading. Lilah was afraid, with that same delicious fear. Now, she wanted to hide her trembling from him, to ward off what must happen if he guessed the extent, the danger, of her surrender. She began to fasten her veil, her arms, in tight, black sleeves, upraised; Putnam Flagg watched her, and, characteristically, avoided, at that moment, any caress. When she glanced up, he said: “Very charming. What a minx you are! An artist. I admire you inordinately, if for nothing more than your gift of putting me off!”

Suddenly she clung to him. “Tell me the truth. Are you going to get well?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it terrible--the pain?”

“Bad enough. As if a hand squeezed, here, harder and harder. I could die, if I’d let myself. Only I won’t.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“Nothing. He’s used to bad hearts.”

“I hate doctors. They’re beasts! I hate suffering. I hate bodies.” She beat with her palms against his breast. “It’s terrible. Terrible! That you should suffer so! And we stand here, talking about houses and clothes and my owing something to Robert. When I only owe myself to you, now and forever.”

They kissed. They trembled against each other. And Lilah had never known such giving. He said: “The world’s full of ugliness. It needn’t be, perhaps. But it is. We’ll have to face this pain of mine along with the rest.... Now I’ll let you go.”

She went out into the street again. No one she knew was, at the moment, passing. She turned East, facing a cold wind. Her figure passed in and out of the squares and rounds of light cast by shop windows and street lamps, hurrying, bent a little forward. Her thoughts were hurrying, hurrying, ahead of her, toward the Spring, a dusk when frogs would sing and gnats dance, and she would lie against Flagg, holding the pain away with her two arms, her lips, her love....

VIII

Lilah woke again to that certainty....

She opened her eyes. Familiar things came into focus, were, inexplicably, unreal. She had the impression of waking in a strange room. Circumstance had changed the very outlines of accepted facts. At once her mind began the chase interrupted by sleep; unleashed, her thoughts darted down confused paths, circled, doubled, stopped aghast.

She leaned on her elbow and examined her arms, her hands. She could not associate her hands with herself. They might have belonged to another body. This certainty had in some mysterious way deprived her of herself. Her consciousness was separate; it was pain and fear.

She fell back on the pillows and pressed her fingers against her eyes. She must get hold of herself. Do something. Other women had had children. She wouldn’t die. In a year it would be over and she could go back.... The acceptance of that thought was like a trickle of ice through her veins.

If she had loved Robert....

* * * * *

Back again! Her thoughts were mad, erratic, feverish. She could not control them, or bring order out of chaos.

Sitting up with a violent gesture, she saw that it was past nine o’clock. She had, then, slept. Extraordinary! That she could sleep, that the tired body was stronger than the will! She had not wanted to sleep or to lose for an instant her watchfulness. Now, she felt, she had surrendered to this fact. In sleep, she had been stamped by nature with acquiescence.

She had been running away from herself. For a week, in crowded theaters, restaurants and drawing-rooms dedicated to forgetfulness, she had let herself be swept forward on the current. For hours at a time, she had forgotten, had postponed remembering. As if there were no reef ahead, no shattering of the frail craft that had carried her so far toward disaster. In moments of waiting, it had returned, always like a thin, icy trickle, down through her brain to her heart.

She must do something.

She half rose, but before she could disguise her dishevelment, the scars left by tears, the door opened and the mulatto came in, moving furtively as if to cover her curiosity. Lilah, for the first time, had the feeling that she was trapped, humiliated, her pride leveled by a tragedy shared by all women--this yellow girl, herself! She felt contempt. Some women sacrificed themselves with a smile to the inevitable, or concealed their wretchedness beneath an air of superiority, as if a thing so usual, so inexorable, so outside themselves, were a matter for congratulation. Other women seemed to be ordained--an order of motherhood; but they were never lovers, wives; they tended the flame of race, kept it burning. God knew why any one should willingly add a soul to a world where there were already too many souls, too much suffering. Better to let humanity dwindle, thousand by thousand, until the last man staggered to his knees and died and the earth was left once more to the forests, to animals, to storm and sunlight, unrecorded, eternal.

The maid, lifting the blinds, remarked that Miss Fuller had been waiting for half an hour.

“Ask her to come up. And I shall want breakfast here.”

“Yes, m’am.”

Grace Fuller came, bringing, as always, the morning’s mail. Her fringe was curled, not a hair out of place. And across the pallor of her cheeks, rouge showed like veining on a leaf.

From the bed, Lilah asked: “Anything amusing? I overslept.”

Grace Fuller put the letters within reach of Lilah’s hand, on the coverlet. Without preface, she said: “I’m sorry, Lilah. I can’t stay, go on--I thought I ought to tell you. I’ve registered and to-morrow I take a case.” A faint smile twisted her lips as she added: “A hopeless case.”

Lilah glanced at the letters. Suddenly she tossed them aside. “You needn’t leave, unless you want to. I’m going to have a baby.”

She sat up, pushing the hair back from her forehead, straining it back violently. Her eyes were heavy. There was no trace of beauty in her face; she was, for the moment, old. “I’m going to have a baby,” she repeated in a dull voice.

Her head went down between her knees. She heard Grace Fuller saying: “Lilah. Lilah! I’m glad for you! This will change everything. Wait until your heart accepts--I know what it does to women. I’ve watched. You’ll forget the other, come back to Robert, in gratitude.”

Lilah held her breath. Her revolt and her hate were ponderable; she felt the weight of them across her back; her body huddled; she tried to flatten herself out, to escape. Her hair fell forward and she caught at the thick strands with her teeth. Now, she knew, it was inevitable. She jerked away from Grace’s hands, flung herself aside.

“I’ll never change,” she cried. “Never. This won’t make me different. I’m myself. I will be. It’s something I’ve got to stand. But I’ll keep myself away from it. I’ve always resented being a woman. Gross. Ugly. Unfair....”

She sat up again. “Tell that girl to see that the cook doesn’t ruin the eggs. I want a decent breakfast.”

* * * * *

At eleven o’clock Lilah was seated in the outer office of a physician who was secure in the possession of a fashionable patronage.

The room was quiet, almost bare, and in chairs ranged against the wall, ten or twelve women were waiting. Now and then a door opened and a woman in white, with eyeglasses and a cap elaborately starched and folded, beckoned to one or the other. These patients, Lilah noticed, never reëntered the anteroom, but were ushered out another way, perhaps to keep the tide of despair from meeting the tide of hope. Other women, arriving, took the vacated chairs. A table covered with neat stacks of magazines offered an escape from curious eyes; there was a discreet, a constant turning of pages. Behind them, expressions were guarded, indefinable. Lilah sought duplication of her own sensations. Her face, she decided, must be as expressionless as the others. It was as if, at a prearranged signal, these women had become anonymous, featureless. Only when the door opened and the capped woman beckoned, there was a flash of excitement, of dread, of something forced and desperately unwilling.... Time and again the door opened and closed.

When Lilah heard her name, repeated three times because she had withdrawn so far into herself, she followed the nurse with a sort of arrogance, an indifference to the outcome. Inwardly, she felt again that sense of acquiescence, of surrender to a ruthless inquisitor.

The inner office was large, paneled. At a desk between two tall windows draped with brown velvet, the doctor allowed himself the advantage of turning his back to the light. Lilah saw him in silhouette--not the traditional physician, bearded and purposefully benign; a business man clipped, concise, scientific. To him she was no more than a name, a number. His manner had in it a trace of the impatience of the normal man who has had to deal with the delicate and unstable emotional balance of sick women. He was not jovial; he was not even polite. His dry questions, spoken with an accent of amusement, irritated Lilah. She snapped back at him. She had always been healthy; she had had a healthy contempt for illness; people were sick because they were stupid, or victims, like Flagg, of accident. She had thought of herself as immune, outside suffering and the ugly, wearisome details of suffering.... She had time, while he questioned her, to notice the elaborate simplicity of his settings; he received his patients in a room reminiscent of little drawing-rooms at Fontainebleau. A pretty, red-haired girl took Lilah’s answers in short-hand. Lilah resented this girl’s presence. The whole proceeding was degrading, like a public scandal.

Lilah fixed the physician with an unwavering gaze. She had expected him, for a large fee, to rid her of this tormenting suspicion. But she had not expected him to uncover her fear, subject it to Hogarthian records in short-hand.... Marriage à la Mode filed away in a card-index cabinet....

She wished, now, that she had stayed away.

* * * * *

In her motor, still quivering under that professional irony, a confirmation which had stripped her of arrogance, she looked out at the city with, again, that tormenting sense of the unreality of familiar things. People hurrying, laughing, meeting, waiting on the curbs for the tide of traffic to pass--Lilah was hurt by their indifference to her tragedy. There was no such thing as a common, a shared, suffering. No one, not even Flagg, could comprehend. She saw a group of people familiar to her, Chivers Chew with three women, standing before a florist’s window in animated conversation. Their security, their pleasure, seemed as remote as dumb-show within a lighted proscenium. And Lilah’s melancholy was shot across by a pang of jealousy.

The mulatto met her with the announcement that Major Flagg had telephoned repeatedly.

Lilah said in an indifferent voice: “Pack my things. I’m going to Maine to-night. Ask Elliott to wire Mr. Peabody. And tell him to get a stateroom. If Major Flagg calls again, you may say that I have left town.”

* * * * *