Part 15

Lilah never knew the precise moment when she was first aware that he might not be going to live. His eyes were frightened most of the time, although he kept on smiling at her. Noises irritated him. He wanted silence. He would sit at his desk, writing, into the night, obstinate. And when she spoke to him, he would shake his head and ask her to go away. There was something he wanted to do, to finish, before he called quits. It was absurd to say that he couldn’t work. He could.

On fine days he sat in the arbor, holding the cat and smiling a queer, fixed smile that terrified Lilah. When it rained, he moved indoors and sat, bent, in an attitude which was belligerent and pathetic, at his desk--that “battle-ground of literature” inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

At night he would come into her room and lie with his face pressed against her shoulder, like a child that is afraid of what he might see in the dark.

When she questioned him, he was perfectly still.

And now, she knew, she loved him more than anything in the world.

* * * * *

Love, complete love, came because she knew she could not have it. Flagg was going to die. She had let herself off from feeling, because there was always time to give way to an emotion that would be so great that something of herself would have to perish. Now, because there was so little time, she surrendered to it. She could not dodge facts any more; she must face them and make of her life what she could with what she had. Her nature was terrible to her because she was in the grip of a genuine passion; she wanted to make herself over in time to conquer Flagg’s reticence, to have him for herself. She had been selfish. She had taken whatever she wanted, without caring. But she had cared.... It hadn’t been easy to give up everything and come to Flagg. She wasn’t superior, as Flagg was superior, to humiliation.

But now she saw what she had come for.

She saw herself, little, defeated, having to start all over again. She was humble, frightened. She saw that she could have nothing without earning it. And this revelation was like an unendurable light beating against her consciousness. There was no escape. Because the future held no happiness, the present was terrible, since it contained the essence of the thing she would go on wanting all the rest of her life. It was so precious, so elusive, so beautiful, and so inevitable.

She could not bear to watch Flagg’s suffering. She sent for a physician who came out from Florence and was alone with Flagg for two hours. Lilah waited, her heart fluttering as if she, not Flagg, were going to die.

When the two men finally opened the door and came out, Flagg was still smiling, but it was not that fixed, self-conscious smile Lilah had come to fear. He seemed relieved. The physician nodded casually to Lilah and drove away again, in a rickety cab, toward the city. Lilah thought: “He can’t be a great specialist and come in a _carozza_. I won’t believe anything....”

Flagg said: “It’s all right, Lilah. I’m sorry you worried. I’ve got a chance. Only I’ll have to stop writing.”

Lilah thought: “He’s not telling me the truth. He’s going to die and he’s glad of it.”

After that she felt that everything was against her, even Flagg’s will to die. If he had really loved her, he would have wanted to live.

She heard from Junius Peabody toward the end of December. The familiar, heavily embossed stationery post-marked Peabody’s Point bore her name and the frivolous address: “Villino Sans-Souci” in Junius’ spidery hand. Lilah tore the envelope open with a feeling of impending crisis.

She read:

“DEAR LILAH:

“Your letter, the first from you in over six months, contained no news of yourself. I wanted to know whether or not you had made a success of your experiment. Society has never been charitable to women who take happiness they are not entitled to. A few celebrated women of genius have escaped criticism because their contribution was superior to their ‘transgression.’ I am not preaching to you. In this day and generation there are no fixed standards of behavior. I am only complaining because there is something shoddy, to me, offensive, in a woman of your quality ‘taking’ life in a rented villa--one of that pathetic band of outlaws who play at respectability in the smaller cities of Europe. I admit my part in the affair. But I somehow had faith that you would send that fellow packing when you were well enough to recognize his peculiar selfishness. I cannot resist begging you to consider seriously returning with Robert. He will, as you request, meet you in Paris on the first day of January. I am enclosing the name and address of his lawyer there. I will see that your position, in America, is secured.”

He signed himself, characteristically: “Junius.”

Lilah thought angrily: “Hypocrite! He wants me there, because I amuse him.”

His own indiscretions had been made palatable, sugar-coated with secrecy. She was happier than he had ever been in his selfish enjoyment of women who had had to leave him because he was respectable. He had spared Minnie’s Victorian sensibilities by carrying on an elaborate, an “artistic” deception....

“I despise men,” Lilah said aloud.

Flagg glanced up. “Why?”

“Read this!”

She tossed Junius’ letter across the breakfast table.

Flagg’s expression was both contemptuous and embarrassed. When he spoke, his voice was unsteady. “It seems that your husband is, after all, going to let himself be divorced.”

The question of money came up immediately. Lilah couldn’t go to Paris because there wasn’t enough money. They had spent their month’s allowance already and the January draft, which wouldn’t come until the tenth of the month, would have to be used to settle the December bills. “I could wire for a few hundred. I’ve never told you. This money is mine during my life-time. It comes from an estate held in trust for my younger brother who’s out in India. When I die, it goes to him. I could borrow on the future, but I don’t want to. I never have.”

“But I’ve got to go. Think, darling, what it means! Surely, you aren’t jealous of Robert--now.”

“No.”

“I’ll have to see him. But it will be formal, embarrassing. The lawyer will explain things. And before you know it, I’ll be free.”

Flagg turned to Junius’ letter. “I’m not sure. I hardly think it will be as simple as that. They’ll urge you to go back. They’ll put up all sorts of arguments. They’ll make it hard for you. I’d prefer that you didn’t go.... Later, will be time enough.”

He got up and came around the table, touching her hair, a caress that always stirred her to the heart, it was so unconsidered and gentle, the caress of a friend; it made her precious to herself. But now, in her eagerness, she drew away.

“I must go! I want to marry you! Then, you can return to America, to the work you like. Or we can live here--properly. Be the sort of people you despise, upright, tipping-over-backward people! But we can always laugh at ourselves. We needn’t lose our sense of humor simply because we happen to be respectable....”

She paused, scared by his look, aware of her failure, but sustained by a conviction that she was misunderstood.

Flagg reminded her again that there was no money. “Only a few _lire_, unless I cable for more.”

Lilah cried: “But I have some money! Lots of it. I meant to tell you. I sold my pearls.” She laughed: “Like the lady in the melodrama....”

“I didn’t know you had any pearls.”

“They weren’t becoming,” she said carelessly. “I prefer jade, or ivory--”

“Were they valuable?”

“I got seventy-five thousand _lire_.”

“Good God.”

Flagg turned abruptly and went to the window. He stood there looking out into a downpour of rain, at Florence, sodden and drenched.

“The pearls were mine,” Lilah remarked. She felt herself growing angry. She felt that she would lose her temper if he pressed her; say things she would regret. The old self wasn’t conquered. She despised criticism. She wanted to be thought right.

Flagg turned. His face was dark again, but his feeling had driven the look of fear out of his eyes. He had forgotten himself. “You left the Peabody’s under circumstances that required the most absolute honesty. You should have come to me with the clothes you stood in. I forgave you the eight trunks full of finery--after all, your husband had no use for it, and you, apparently, did. It doesn’t matter, to you, who pays for the things you want, or whether you are giving value received. To me, it does matter.... What we did might have been splendid. It isn’t! I’m as ashamed as you are. Because of these damned, petty things--this letter, for instance! And what you’ve just told me. The stinking ugliness of desire and compromise....”

He got control of himself with a wrenching effort. “You’d better go to Paris. I’d rather compromise than be ashamed.”

* * * * *

Flagg went out and did not come back. She watched him hurry down the path to the gate, bending his head against a downpour of rain. She said bitterly: “You shouldn’t have spoken to me like that.” But he couldn’t hear, of course--the window was closed, and the rain beat against the ground with a harsh, rhythmic clatter, the noisy rain of southern countries.

Flagg disappeared up the road to Vincigliata, into the forest of young cypress trees.

Lilah thought: “I ought to feel more than I do.”

What had happened was too important for concrete, recognizable feelings. She couldn’t grasp it all at once. She was numb with misery. She went about the house doing unimportant things with great seriousness, an exaggerated attention. She put a book-shelf in order and cleaned Flagg’s study. The dust flew out of the window as she would have liked to shake out her thoughts, scatter them, get rid of them.

At ten o’clock the casual servant who came in from a near-by farm appeared under a _contadino’s_ green umbrella, like a big, wet lettuce-leaf on legs.... Lilah was explicit, much more so than usual. She set the table herself, humming, “as if nothing had happened,” she reminded herself. She had the feeling that if she ignored what had happened it couldn’t be serious. But everything she touched seemed to be impermanent; knives and forks and plates had a sort of unreality.

She went upstairs, frightened by the dread that clutched at her throat. But she must put off remembering. She would count the money--try to understand what Flagg had meant about her selling the pearls.

She counted the bills, laid them in little piles, was relieved by their ordinary appearance. Surely Flagg hadn’t stopped loving her because of these little green notes.... She put them away, confident that she could make him understand as soon as he came in.... It was absurd for a man and woman in love with each other to quarrel over something petty....

But she mustn’t think of that.

Flagg did not come in for lunch. The sky was leaden, yellow, and the rain came down in solid sheets. She couldn’t bear to be alone in the house. That wet lettuce leaf stumbled down the hill. There was no one but Aphrodite in her niche, a painted goddess with gilded ringlets and heavy lids, the smile of a courtesan, the little hands of a child.... No wonder the poet had turned to warfare for sensation. Things. Things. Things. And nothing got you anywhere. First, you thought it was this and then that. And nothing satisfied the you that was personal and aching. Not even love. For then things like this happened....

She thought: “I’ll go out. I’ll feel better if I go out.”

She splashed down the road and stood, holding her umbrella against the rain, waiting for a tram.

Twenty-five centesimi. Cheaper than a cab.... She sat with the dripping umbrella pressed against her knees and stared at the people. An old man. His trousers were baggy at the knee and the skin of his hands was like brown corduroy. A young girl with bold, unwavering eyes stared back at Lilah; there was an imitation diamond ring on the first finger of one plump, red hand.

The city closed around the street; great, drenched walls thrust up, cornices leaned over; people surged along the narrow sidewalks under a tossing and writhing of umbrellas; priests, fascisti with curled forelocks like young game-cocks, like frizzed savages ... girls....

Here and there a shop-window was lighted.

Lilah walked through the square and across to the Tornabuoni.

She went into a hairdresser’s establishment. A warm, sickish odor, perfumed, assailed her. She explained to a pale woman in pearl earrings and clinging black satin that she wanted a “wave.” Madame could be accommodated because, on a rainy day, there were many cancelations. Right here.... In this booth. _Subito!_

A small, blackish man removed Lilah’s hat. Her hair fell down on her shoulders and she thought with a stab of pain, acute, physical, of Flagg’s fingers, caressing, caressing....

The marcel irons twirled. Did Madame want pompadour or straight back? It was becoming fashionable to clip the hair at the nape of the neck, close, like a boy’s.... It would be very becoming to Madame.

Did this man love? Every one did, sooner or later. Why was it that the world wasn’t smitten with madness; would she ever be sane again.... She fingered the bottles on the dressing-table. Brilliantine. Rouge. Skin tonic. Pomade. _Mettre cette poudre avec la houppe, s’essuyer avec un linge...._

Sooner or later, she would have to question not only her reflection, that face, unchanged by dread and bewilderment, but Lilah, the woman. It wasn’t possible longer to avoid that encounter. She, herself, had failed.... _Not yet!_

“Madame has pretty hair. In French, we say _cendrè_--the colour of ashes.”

* * * * *

She found the English pianist in the drawing-room when she got back to the “Villino Sans-Souci.”

“Hallo! I thought you’d give me tea. Beastly day. Where’s Flagg?”

“He’s not here,” she said coldly. Suddenly she wanted to hurt Flagg. “I don’t know where he is.”

The Englishman’s eyes grew round. He made a sound like a whistle. “I _see_! You’ve quarreled.”

“Yes.”

Let him know it. It didn’t matter. Flagg was trying to frighten her.... She took off her hat and sank down on the divan. “I don’t want to talk. I want you to play for me. Something strange, ugly. I see now why modern art is out of balance and discordant and crooked--the world is sick at its soul. When you’re sick at your soul you don’t want beauty. You want something clever and horrible, like the evil in yourself.”

The Englishman’s eyes, always flickering, as if there were little flames in them, blazed up. His lips parted. He was like a smooth, too fat faun smoking a cigarette. His eyes appraised her. And, for a terrible reason, Lilah was glad that she was beautiful. She tipped her head back so that he could see her throat.

This man understood women; he pitied them and desired them; but they never loved him unless they had lost love; he had never known, never would know, the best of love, because he expected the worst of it.

Suddenly he jumped up and went to the piano. “I’ll play you the Saint-Sebastien; I know your real mood is religious, not evil at all! A woman of your experience buries each amour with a _Te Deum_.”

Lilah wanted to tell him that she had had no experience, but she knew that he wouldn’t believe her. Her life with Robert, with Flagg, had never really changed her; she hadn’t loved Robert, and Flagg hadn’t loved her; when people spoke of experience she supposed they meant that dedication of self which is spontaneous, mutual, irrevocable....

“Stop! I can’t bear that sort of music.”

He spun around, seized another cigarette. “Then we’ll talk. I’ll cheer you up. Poor, lonely, adorable Lilah.” He sat, too close, on the divan. “What on earth possessed you to fall in love with a man whose mind is fixed on the primeval atom?”

Lilah shrugged her shoulders. It was easy to say: “I don’t know! Why do we?”

“You ran off, didn’t you? Cut loose? I’ve heard rumors--I beg your pardon, but things get about a small place like this. Infernal curious, most people. They like to eat a pretty woman up; crunch her bones. Now, if you were ugly as mud and fat and forty, they’d call you ‘emancipated.’ Waving the banner of personal freedom and all that sort of thing.... They’d make you out a martyr to unholy matrimony, meaning matrimony which is no go. But since you’re young and lovely--very lovely--they’re tearing you to bits down there.”

“Are they?”

“I’m no end sorry for you. Really.” His eyes said more. “Doing all this for a man who doesn’t appreciate--well, you--” his eyes said. But he was too clever, too wary, to put the thought into words.

A bitterness surged up in Lilah’s heart. Six o’clock. And Flagg hadn’t come in. He might have taken a train to Rome. She saw him in Rome walking up a street in the rain, wearing that fixed smile, alone. Or Milan. Another picture. Only this time, she saw him sitting in a hotel bed-room in his shirt-sleeves.... He might have died, up there in the cypress grove. He might, even now, be lying on the soaked ground, his face pressed into the sodden leaves.

She got up. “I think you’d better go,” she said. “I want to be alone. If you don’t mind.”

The Englishman rose. She was too miserable to sense the danger. He stayed, looking down at her. And then he caught her shoulders, pressed her against him and kissed her. She could feel the softness of his body. She shivered, gasped and pushed him away. She hated him.

“Abominable!” she said.

“Oh, very well.”

With a gesture of contempt, as if it really mattered very little, he got his hat and went out, slamming the door.

* * * * *

She went upstairs, followed by the black cat and the only one of the kittens they had saved. It, too, was black, with eyes like jewels and an incredibly thin, flexible tail. The cats did not seem to know or to care whether Lilah suffered, and she wanted them to know; she said: “You little brutes! Don’t frisk! I can’t bear it!” But they frisked on the gondola-bed, over it and under it, scratching and leaping, as if nothing had happened.

Lilah undressed. Then, in a warm negligée, banded with fur, her hair under a sort of gypsy cap made of purple chiffon, she went into Flagg’s room and peered at his things, his brushes, his coats, on hangers, his handkerchiefs, in neat piles. She touched everything, sensing his dear person.... She would wait until eight o’clock, and then, if he hadn’t returned, she would go out, alone, and look for him in those dark woods.

Eight o’clock came, but she didn’t dare to go out. She got into bed, instead, and lay in the dark, listening to the rain. She was terribly afraid. Life was inimical again, and she had lost faith in herself, in her ability to be pert and to win success with the misty quality of her loveliness. Accepted things, long-established ideas, convictions, had failed. There was nothing to go on.... She began, reluctantly, almost with terror, to look herself straight in the face. She saw an image of herself, silly, vain, rushing in pursuit of unimportant things. Always things! And where had they gotten her?

A motor, turning into the Vincigliata road, cast a swinging light through the windows, across the walls, across Aphrodite, imponderable and secretive in her niche....

Flagg!

Her heart stopped.

They might have come to tell her....

No. The downstairs door opened, closed again, and she heard his footsteps, coming, coming....

She thought: “He’s been cruel. I ought to punish him.” But she called him.

She saw him in the doorway and summoned her half-glimpsed self with a passionate and peremptory cry. Flagg hesitated, a dim figure, silent, remote. Then he moved forward and, quivering, her nerves unsteady, she felt him leaning down over her. She could not see his face. She could smell the cloth of his coat, wet.... And with a sudden lifting of her arms, she dragged him down to her. He had to kneel. His face pressed into her throat. Again she felt his hair, the shape of his head. He was warm and alive; he was all of life. How could she have doubted, questioned, hesitated, when this, this was the answer to everything--to be near him.

“I thought you’d never come. I wanted to tell you that I’ll give the money to Robert, all of it. I understand.”

Flagg said nothing. He sighed. His body relaxed. He pressed his face closer against her. His arms went around her.... Lilah could feel the two cats frisking over her feet, and she thought: “They know. I’m happy. I’m happy.”

They clasped each other, for the first time, with that love which is pity and forgiving and ecstasy.

XI

Lilah went to Paris.

In a compartment on the Rome-Lausanne express, she sat with her chin in her hand, staring out of the window at the slow unrolling of the landscape, fields, towns, mountains, fields, towns and mountains. But she was conscious of being stared at from the corridor, and it was pleasant, even exciting, to attract attention, after six months of life in the country.

Flagg had not been well, but he had reassured her: “I’m all right. Only hurry back. I’m going to miss you.”

How strained and white his face had been when, at the station in Florence, he had followed the moving train for a way, looking up at her with a curious, unreadable expression.

She thought: “He’ll be all right. I mustn’t worry.”

And the further the train was from Florence--Bologna, Milan, Brigue--the more certain she became that Flagg was quite well. She could see him walking up the Vincigliata hill, whistling, swinging along with the gait of a man who had no enemy. She was comforted by this vision. The more she thought about it the more she believed in it. And the memory of his face at the train in Florence faded, was at length forgotten, since she preferred not to remember. Later, she promised herself, she would remember.

But now. Paris.

Again she was at that crowded, noisy gateway to Paris, that sordid, ringing, clashing place full of people with bundles, porters with luggage, soldiers, nuns, tourists, a mad jumble of dingy, dusty, worried-looking, crumpled people all going somewhere and in a terrible hurry. Florence, everything to do with her life there, seemed unreal. How could she have let herself suffer so? How stupid of her! It was a mistake, dangerous, to concentrate oneself too much; it would do her good, do Flagg good, to break the thread of their intimacy; both of them had been overanxious to prove their right to each other. After all, who knew or cared whether they succeeded? Lilah hurried through the crowd, refreshed, as if bathed in that cool, manifold impersonality.

She leaned forward in the taxi, staring at Paris, searching for some indication of recent wounds. None. None! The streets, shining in a thin, cold drizzle; a swirl of umbrellas; lights and kiosks; vistas converging; and that air of brittle gayety, that something precise, insouciant, perverse--the same! Lilah tapped on the window. “I’ve changed my mind. The Ritz.” For two days! Why not? But now she could laugh at herself. She knew that she was ridiculous; a _pension_ would have done just as well! Only that she longed for warmth and color, the pageant, not without meaning, of the worldlings. This would be her last bow before the curtain. And that precarious few hundred dollars cabled to Flagg after an interval of doubt, of suspense ... her last fling at luxury. Make-believe.... At least, Robert wouldn’t think that she had come down in the world! She could confront him clothed in the accepted garments of his kind, on common ground.... She would wire Flagg at once: “Ritz. Paris. Love. Lilah.”

* * * * *

When she saw Robert crossing the lobby of the Ritz with that vague, amiable, short-sighted manner, she was not surprised. This was the sort of thing that was bound to have happened, what, perhaps, she had hoped would happen.

“Lilah! Well, I’ll be damned!”