Part 14

McNair, putting his tea-cup aside with a clatter, as if he had only just become aware of her, said: “You’re going back in October, Flagg?”

Flagg answered: “No! I’m through. For a while.... I have what every man secretly desires at one time or another, leisure for contemplation. I’ve never had time to think. Since the war smashed man’s favorite image of himself, wearing the laurels of progress, I want to sit alone with the fragments and make of them what I can, for my own satisfaction.”

“For your own satisfaction?” McNair repeated. “You used to believe, or claimed you did, that man owes his wisdom to man. You once said that you despised ascetics and hermits.” He glanced around. “Delightful! Your arbor! But you won’t stay here!”

Lilah interrupted: “Why?”

“Ask Flagg!”

Flagg said: “I claim the right to the one certain beauty--life itself! I’ve been through the five cycles of psychic hell. I’ve questioned until I’m sick and tired of questioning. I’ve come to a sort of acceptance that isn’t surrender--it’s seeing! And if I should tell you, any one, what I see, know--I’d be damned as a dreamer or an idiot. I see that science and religion, both, have failed. We still suffer plague. We still arm ourselves. We still distrust our brother.... But we go forward. Imperceptibly, forward.... Here, at peace, I want first to think, later, if possible, to write. It depends on whether or not I have anything to say.”

“You won’t stay,” McNair repeated. His face was flushed, and he said good-by abruptly, almost angrily.

When he had gone, Lilah said: “Did you really mean what you said?”

“Yes.”

“What did McNair think--about--us?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I dare say.”

Lilah insisted: “But he must have wondered--”

Flagg lifted her face and said gravely: “For God’s sake, let’s be decent sinners! I thought we had decided to pay our debt in the coin of the realm.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean that it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn what McNair or any one else thinks of us! The only thing that matters is what we think of ourselves. If you’re ashamed, you ought not to be here. If you’re sorry, you’re only hurting me.”

She answered: “We’re happy when we’re alone. But when people come, we begin to blame each other.” She kissed him, quick, light kisses. Then her head sank again on his shoulder, and they sat there, clasped together, staring through the arch of the arbor at Florence, the towers, the brazen Arno climbing across the plain toward Pisa. It was very still. A cart went down the road beyond the wall with a tinkle of bells. The little black cat sat on the table, licking, her tail in a plate of cakes.

X

The lazy enchantment of their exile lasted through the summer. In September, Lilah complained to Flagg that all of New York seemed to have moved to Florence. Whenever she went to town she met some one she had known during her brief appearance as Mrs. Robert Peabody. She encountered curiosity but, from the younger generation, at least, no hostility; she was not certain whether this was an indication of social emancipation or due, rather, to her own remoteness from the lives, the activities of these people--she was, perhaps, not worth snubbing! The older generation was unaware of her; their standards resisted, obdurately, the pressure of modern opinion. Lilah could dismiss them because they were “old-fashioned.” But she resented the casual indifference of her contemporaries; it was selfish, even vulgar; she had, it seemed, nothing material to offer them! She was bitterly aware that most of them could have been hooked had she baited her line with millions. Money, enough of it, meant pleasure, diversion, a sop for the martyrdom of satiety. She could have lured the fashionable world to one of the veritable _ville_ in the hills near Florence--jazz on a Medicean terrace, swimming parties in a marble basin by Mino da Fiesole, a liberal supply of sporting Italians of the upper class.... Her scandal would be an asset under such glamorous circumstances. The “Villino Sans-Souci” was another story.

McNair came again, bringing a young Englishman, a pianist, a pupil of Busoni, who played on the poet’s upright. He soothed Lilah because, without hesitation, he fell in love with her; she called him “silly boy,” but he was, if anything, older than Lilah; he “adored” women, professed to have been badly treated by them, to have thrown himself away, whereas he was quite unscrupulous, lazy and irresponsible. He played with facility and refused to practice because he seemed to have been born with a technique. Tall, heavy, he had the typical thespian’s skull, the profile of a Shakesperian actor.

He made love to Lilah whenever Flagg’s back was turned. He played “for” her, he said. Lilah began to believe that she was responsible for the seductive music he somehow got from that long-toothed piano; she saw herself in the waltzes of Kreisler, the moon-smitten nuances of Ravel, the songs of Rachmaninoff. And she was filled with a vague melancholy, almost a pity for herself, inexplicable, delicious, like the forebodings of adolescence. She would sit on the terrace with Flagg, her hand in his, and seeing the “silly boy’s” ardent profile swaying against the glow of the piano-lamp, she would think tenderly of Robert, of Junius, and of herself.... She could only relent, apparently, when she had had her own way.... She squeezed Flagg’s hand.

Lilah began to know the sort of people she would, in New York, have ignored. A thin, hawk-nosed, Pittsburgh-born American _contessa_ who lived nearby called repeatedly, bringing with her a shifting retinue of cavalry officers; the _contessa_ conducted a sort of matrimonial agency; she had, she boasted, introduced many “dear, sweet, rich American girls” to young Italians of title. Lilah suspected that she lived upon the precarious fruits of gratitude.

Flagg’s reputation attracted scientists from France, from Germany, from Rome--he was at the mercy of men who coveted his knowledge. He was always generous, but Lilah saw him in moods of savage contempt and rebellion. “You waste yourself on these people,” she said.

“I know! I wish they’d leave me alone!” But he never seemed to be able to resist them; she would rescue him from arguments carried on in half a dozen languages, lead him indoors and make him lie down. He would look up at her, his face pinched, his lips pale, and with a gesture of hopelessness, say: “I’ll have to go back, some day, and work! I don’t know a damn thing!” And once he added, with a querulous bitterness: “There’s so little time.”

“But you’re going to get well.”

“Yes,” he said. “Perhaps. It’s a new idea.... If I do, it will be because of you.” He smiled. “I’m not used to you, Lilah! I find myself looking at you, wondering who you are and how you came to be here.... You’re not sorry, are you?”

“Not if you aren’t.”

So they reassured each other.

* * * * *

Flagg was not a man who enjoyed idleness. McNair left for Edinburgh. Save only Don Orlando, a priest who came down from Siena occasionally to spend an hour in the arbor, and an eccentric Florentine, a sort of inventor-alchemist, there was no one he enjoyed. He took to wandering away into the country, on foot. Lilah was left to her own devices. She tried to convince herself that she was happy. This was what she had made for herself; she could not question his love; her own was deeper than she had thought possible--her feeling consumed her. But her character was unchanged. She resisted, despised discipline; denial made her intractable. She wanted pleasure, excitement, admiration. There was danger in the heartless and unstable passion of such men as the English pianist. She hated herself because this was so. But she told herself that had Flagg been different, she would have been contented to sit in the arbor at the Ponte a Mensola, secure in the possession of love.

Something instinctive in Flagg, out of reach, resisted accepted social standards. He stood aloof from close personal bonds, even, fundamentally, from Lilah. He was solitary, but not morose. She never really knew his failings or his ambitions; his confidences were always touched with self-scorn, yet he refused sympathy--it was as if he preferred to find his own way. His feeling for her was identical; he realized, perhaps, that sex would entangle him, hold him back from that mysterious pursuit of his. He was not easily stirred by her mere physical presence; she never felt that he had gone into the adventure through a desire for gratification. And she was flattered by his most casual caress because she realized that he was not demonstrative; his emotions were deep, strong and, when aroused, ruthless.

But there were moments when Lilah was baffled by his reserve; she felt inadequate. Her own human, reprehensible sufferings, longings and jealousies fell back before his impartiality. He had believed in their right to live together. The fact that she did not love her husband, Flagg insisted, absolved her. But he had not stopped to consider what the affair might mean to Lilah; it was demoralizing, she decided, to ignore the world’s opinion. If Flagg should die, she would have no resistance.

Thoughts like these threaded her consciousness; for the most part, she was lulled by the fact of his presence. Whenever he touched her, she sensed the immortality of happiness.

* * * * *

Coming out of Doney’s confectionery shop one afternoon, with a box of French pastry, she met Mrs. Sinclair, a willowy figure in gray crêpe, with enveloping veils, descending from an open touring-car painted royal blue.

“My precious darling.”

She enfolded Lilah briefly.

“I heard that you’d run off with Putnam Flagg. The Wagners crossed with you. That witty Wagner girl was too absurd--she said you’d been flagged. Was that vulgar? How are you?”

“Awfully well,” Lilah answered. She was sorry that she had worn her most unbecoming hat and a dress that was much too short for the mode.

“Of course you came to Florence. Extraordinary, how they all do--people who break away--irresponsible, brave people! Sinclair and I are so desperately conventional. We’ve been married fifteen years and neither of us has ever cast the eye--well, not seriously! Sinclair’s in the car. Don’t speak to him, Lilah darling--he’d be shocked. Flagg hasn’t a cent, has he? I don’t see, frankly, why you did it, or what you gained. You had everything on earth you could ask for, and New York at your feet. Sympathy is with Robert, of course. He’s enormously popular, and any number of women are applying.... You aren’t divorced?”

“No.”

Mrs. Sinclair turned with a swirl, positively oriental, of draperies.

“Are the chocolates good here? We’re on our way to Bologna--then on up, to Paris. They say Doucet’s clothes are inimitable, and I’m in rags.”

She went into the shop and Lilah, lifting her head, crossed the sidewalk to the royal blue car. Behind a pair of smoked goggles she found Sinclair’s eyes staring at her with a sort of panic. “How do you do?” He gasped, leaned forward, offered a limp hand. “How do you do? Beastly weather, isn’t it? Where are you stopping?”

“At the Ponte a Mensola,” Lilah said sweetly.

“Well, I must say, you’re looking fit.”

“I am.”

“What’s May doing? Tell her to hurry!”

Lilah turned away. The encounter had left her trembling. She crossed the Tornabuoni, signaled a cab and drove all the way back to the Ponte a Mensola. Somehow this extravagance comforted her.

The ride was long and dusty. A stream of cars and trucks, carts and trolleys, blocked the narrow road between endless villa walls. The cabman, a disreputable Tuscan in a frock coat and a patent-leather hat, gurgled and hiccoughed at the horse. She could imagine the progress of the Sinclair’s motor, climbing the tortuous streets of sun-smitten hilltowns, rushing across the Lombardian plain, climbing Alpine passes, on again through France to Paris--in its wake a servile host with well-silvered palms bent in an attitude of obeisance to American millions. Lilah knew how Mrs. Sinclair would spend her time in Paris--a round of the _couturières_, perhaps in the company of a Frenchman, a rarefied sycophant, dancer, flatterer and debased wit who would criticize _mannequins_ and gowns, choose May Sinclair’s wardrobe and profit by her vanity to the extent of a cruise in the Sinclair yacht or a trip to the South of France in the Sinclair’s private car.

Lilah’s imagination, like a shutter, opened and closed upon visions of fashionable America, the people she had known and might eventually have dominated, moving from Paris to London, from Biarritz to San Moritz, from New York to Palm Beach. Their houses, jewels, clothes, pleasures, were rare and exclusive enough to permit them any latitude of behavior; now that she was not a part of their life, Lilah could be contemptuous. Except for chance, she would in all probability have been in Paris, buying the best of Doucet’s collection ... or ... no; at the Point, waiting for her child to be born....

She put her hands up to her face.

Women like May Sinclair had escaped. Lilah suffered because she had not been content to use the material at hand--the fabric for the fashioning of her dreams had always been just beyond reach.

She decided to say nothing to Flagg of her encounter. She went up the steep path from the gate to the house. Flagg was leaning on the terrace wall. The late sun gilded him, so that he was like a figure in bronze. Lilah called: “You old pagan! I want ten _lire_. I’ve been extravagant.”

“Ten _lire_?”

“To pay the cabman.”

“Lilah,” Flagg said seriously, “you haven’t changed.”

“But I have!”

She paid the cabman and ran back to Flagg. “But I _have_ changed! I needed gloves and bought pastry instead for your tea--black, sticky cakes with cherries on top. Look!”

Flagg looked. “Lilah, do you know, I think that cat’s going to have kittens!”

They went to the arbor. Lilah admitted that Flagg’s suspicions were justified; the little black cat _was_ going to have kittens. And Flagg said: “Damn! I hate having dumb things suffer. We’ll have to make a bed for her.”

He went into the house and came back with a clothesbasket and a blanket. “But she’s not going to have them to-day!” Lilah cried. Flagg answered seriously that it was just as well to be prepared. These things upset him; birth was terrifying. “I hope you’ll never have a child. I’d probably die. Go mad. Knock my brains out.”

Lilah stroked the cat. Her heart tightened. After a moment she said: “I won’t have a child.”

“What do you mean?”

“That time when I was thrown--”

Their eyes met. Something flashed across Flagg’s eyes, a fugitive anger. “Oh. That was it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t.”

“You can tell me anything.”

After a pause, he added: “You weren’t quite honest, Lilah. I wouldn’t have gone to Maine if I had known what you’ve just told me. Your husband has every reason to believe that I’m a cad.”

“Must we talk about these things? Can’t we forget them?”

He stooped again over the basket. His expression was not guarded and Lilah cried: “If you think I wanted to be hurt--if you think I tried deliberately--”

Flagg turned away. “We can’t forget these things. But you’re right; we needn’t talk about them.”

When he had gone, Lilah wept a little. The warm, sinewy body of the stray cat comforted her; she held it close, as she would never have held one of Robert’s spaniels, letting her tears fall on the glossy fur like drops of quicksilver. If she sat there long enough, she knew, Flagg would come back, repentant. And presently he came, drawn by her silence. “I’m sorry, Lilah.”

She burst out: “You’re thinking of yourself when you ask me not to divorce Robert! I could, easily, in Paris.” The accusation was turned adroitly against Flagg. “Am I selfish? Isn’t it, rather, a question of honesty? Must we go over that again?” Lilah turned her head away. “I’m unhappy.” Flagg gazed at her with a curious detachment, as if he were seeing her for the first time. Presently he said deliberately: “If divorce will make you happy, by all means go to Paris. I don’t know what the process is, how long you’d have to live there or whether, in the end, we could afford the necessary expense. But you must, at all costs, be happy.”

Later in the day, still smarting under the memory of Sinclair’s dismissal, she wrote to Junius: “I am going to divorce Robert. Will you find out from him, for my sake, whether he would be willing to come to Paris and make the necessary arrangements?” She added, with a flourish of defiance: “I am gloriously happy.”

With the letter safely in the post, Lilah felt a return of security. It was only a matter of time before she could demand recognition. She dreamed of subjugating Florence; there was opportunity for a clever, pretty and accomplished woman to have a distinguished “drawing-room.” She hadn’t money, but she had everything else.

With this possibility in mind she looked with new eyes at the “Villino Sans-Souci.” The poet had furnished it with lavish bad taste. He had had a morbid turn of mind, and perhaps to stimulate his imagination or in the interests of publicity had slept in a bed built like a gondola, black, funereal, uncomfortable, and had placed a wooden statue of Aphrodite in a niche, a sort of shrine before which he had burned tapers “to love and sorrow.” His drawing-room was a museum of amorous mementoes, signed photographs of pretty actresses--_Á mon cher! Tua, Maria. Sempre, Nina_--abominable porcelains, first editions, cushions and ecclesiastical velvets. His desk, where he had probably written “_Belle Mani_,” was the largest piece of furniture Lilah had ever seen, an affair of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, “a battleground for literature,” Flagg said. “The whole place is like an embalmed scandal.”

The house itself was old; it had been a _podesta’s_ and bore the patina of several centuries. “I believe we could buy it for a song,” Lilah said. She kissed the tips of her fingers. “And I could make it into one of the loveliest houses in Florence.”

Her desire for beauty had never got her anywhere. Now she was restless and dissatisfied because there were too many footstools and majolica vases in the “Villino Sans-Souci.” A few thousand dollars--only a few--would transform this wilderness into a setting worthy of her ambition. She began to haunt the shops along the Borgognissanti, where, for ridiculous prices, she was offered the treasures of palaces; Sixteenth Century tables, dim Venetian mirrors, flamboyant chairs, chests, silver, brocades stiff with tarnished gold threads, faded, “like sunlight through claret.” Her desire for possession--she was a victim of her love of these things--was a sort of drunkenness; she made promises, broke them, had furniture sent to the “Villino Sans-Souci” on approval and sent back again; she was at once the despair and the victim of the antiquaries.

Flagg had no idea that she had in her possession the pearls Robert had given her. They were hidden away in a hat-box together with the emerald crown and bracelet.

One day she took them to a dealer whose shop was on the Ponte Vecchio, an unpretentious, shadowy room ten feet square. Across a modern counter upholstered in black velvet, Lilah faced a man who was positively medieval, lean, dark and clever; he had the delicate hands of an expert, flexible wrists and pointed, sensitive, critical fingers. The pearls, a long string, lay coiled on a small cushion, an opalescent serpent. Lilah had no idea how much they were worth. “I want to sell them,” she explained. The dealer considered, his hands clasped under his chin. His offer, in lire, astonished her, but she covered her surprise with an emphatic shake of her head.

“Too little?” The dealer’s face became enigmatic. “I recognize these pearls, Madame. They belong to the Peabody collection. I sold them--this clasp--to Mr. Junius Peabody, thirty years ago. I never forget a really important purchase; sooner or later, the most valuable pearls in the world pass through my hands. I have, besides, a record.”

Suppressing a feeling of guilt, Lilah said: “The pearls are mine. I am Mrs. Robert Peabody.”

“I see. Exactly.... I can sell the string, immediately, to an American lady who is now in Rome. My offer stands.”

Realizing that this man was superior to the sort of bargaining usual on the Rialto, Lilah accepted the offer. The pearls were whisked away by a clerk. The dealer remarked upon the weather. And the clerk, returning, paid into Lilah’s hands the sum of seventy-five thousand lire. She signed her name--once, twice--the dealer bowed without a trace of animation, and she went out again into the street, a street, a world transformed, no longer inimical, but hers. A duck of a world!

* * * * *

A duck of a world!

With seventy-five thousand lire hidden away beneath the tissue paper in an “Annette” hat-box, happiness flowed back over Lilah’s spirit. Her worldly surface, that inimitable appearance of security, reappeared. Her manner became decisive, her bearing assured. She found it possible to smoke a cigarette with her old manner of casual indifference. She could be Russian without an inward shiver of self-ridicule and distrust.

She postponed buying what she coveted because, in possession of seventy-five thousand lire, she could afford to be particular. The “Villino Sans-Souci” was inadequate. She must have one of the smaller Medicean houses--she could imagine Mrs. Sinclair saying: “Lilah, darling! What a delicious garden!”

With the _contessa_, in a hired carriage driven by a respectable coachman in livery, Lilah inspected the available houses. Flagg knew nothing of these excursions. The gates of imposing, crumbling _ville_ were thrown open and Lilah glimpsed some of the most coveted interiors in Italy. The demoralizing simplicity and perfection of these rooms--spacious, exquisite in proportion, frescoed--went to her head. She found herself living in imagination in a setting contrived by the most cunning artists of Lorenzo’s day for a corrupt and fastidious court. Terraces of stone worn smooth, grass-grown, crumbling; basins reflecting the complicated foliage of live oaks; cypress alleys and balustrades, the warm, ochre walls of Tuscan palaces, unbroken, without ornamentation, sharp against the dazzling purple of the sky....

The _contessa_ was garrulous; her enthusiasm, her bad and fluent Italian embarrassed Lilah. She was greedy, over-inquisitive. And with a sort of officious generosity she wanted to establish Lilah at once in a _villa_ at Montughi. “But, _cara mia_, it’s perfect! I don’t see what you expect. You’d better snap it up at once or some American vulgarian will lease it.”

It was easy to imagine herself established, with Flagg, in that ingenuous, expensive little palace. The seventy-five thousand _lire_, her treasure horde, were an open sesame to the most extravagant dreams.

But she did not dare to confide in Flagg; something warned her that he would not approve, understand, forgive.

The December rains drenched Florence. Valambrosa was powdered with snow. The Arno, amber, swollen, poured through the city, covered the mud flats, became all at once a veritable river.

Flagg was driven indoors. He began, tentatively, to write. The effort exhausted him. He would wrestle with his enemy, breathless, contemptuous, until he collapsed.

And suddenly, for no reason, out of her security, the idea came and persisted that her happiness was threatened.

Flagg was ill again.