Part 16

They confronted each other. Robert flushed. He laughed, offered his hand, remembered, and said miserably: “I suppose this is shocking. I’m awfully sorry.” But his question, immediate, with an accent of surprise, irritated her: “You’re staying here?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “Are you?”

“I’m at the Meurice. I’m dining here with the Gaylords, but I can shift ’em, if you say. That lawyer needn’t know, and I want to talk to you.” He added: “I need to talk to you, Lilah.”

Lilah considered. “I’ve only just come. I haven’t unpacked. I’m fearfully dusty.”

“I’ll wait.”

Something reminiscent twisted Robert’s face into a sort of grimace. “Oh, Lord, Lilah--Here we are! There’s no precedent--What am I supposed to say?”

And, out of the past, Lilah flung back at him: “Something honest! I’ll dine with you, of course.”

An admiring look came into Robert’s eyes. “Here, then, in an hour,” he said simply. “I’ll wait.”

* * * * *

Lilah was prompt. She found Robert, characteristically, exactly where she had left him. She thought, before he caught sight of her: “This is my husband.” And she gave him a quick, appraising look, trying to realize what he had been. She failed. He was some one she hadn’t known.... He turned, and in the meeting of their eyes there was an immediate recognition, a searching, reproachful, profoundly intimate encounter. Both of them trembled and pity ran through them. Lilah felt as if she could not, under any circumstances, speak to him.

“Let’s go where we’ll be alone,” he said. “I know a place across the river--decent food, French--we won’t see any one we know.” He flushed again. “Oh, my lord--don’t misunderstand me. I’m not ashamed! Only I hate advertising my emotions.”

In the taxi, drawn away from him, huddled in her furs, Lilah shivered. Life had never seemed more of a picture-puzzle; all the pieces lay about her, and she could not put them together again. The piece that was missing, the necessary piece--Freedom. It was the answer to everything. If she could find the meaning of freedom.... Every one to-day, old and young, cried out for freedom, to put their scattered picture-puzzle together with, to make it whole and reasonable and recognizable, something to enjoy. Every one searching, picking up now this, now that, expedient and finding that nothing fitted, nothing matched.... Freedom for oneself had been the cry of the generation. But was there such a thing? Weren’t people, lives, inextricably woven together, so that one experience involved another, one giving another, one selfishness another? She could never be free again because of this man at her side.

She stole a look at his face. There was something pathetic in his expression, as if, he too, were groping for the missing fragment, baffled by the confusion of ideas and morals; pitying her, loving her, despising her, yet, in spite of himself, understanding her.

They were afraid to say anything; afraid and miserable.

The restaurant, Robert’s choice of a place where they’d not see any one, was half-way down a short, dark street. He had engaged a private room; before a coal fire burning in a shallow grate a table had been set for two. The room was small, of the eighteenth century, faded, crackled and mellow. And an old waiter in an enveloping apron took Lilah’s cloak with that paternal gesture which is the gift of inspired waiters, waiters of a certain persuasion, a genius, a _flair_. His exit was discreet, but promising, and when he returned, with _bisque_ of crayfish, he offered it as an artist turns a canvas from the wall: “_Voila!_”

Robert’s glance was beseeching. You couldn’t disappoint such a fellow as this waiter; he expected them to be jolly! Lilah felt this, too. A room so exquisite. The festive air imparted by the _bisque_, steaming in real Sèvres bowls. Her gown, the last of the trousseau, a slip of metal cloth, girdled with flat emerald stones set in silver.... Suddenly, she felt smooth, like the _bisque_, exclusive and desirable. The walls of the little room seemed to shut her away from confusion in a world made secure by the tradition of elegance, by the permanence of all rare and lovely things. She felt again the conviction that she belonged peculiarly in this world; it was stimulating, just for an hour or two, to pretend that she had never left it. It was stimulating, also, to discover that Robert could still look at her as if he found her the most mysterious and delightful woman in the world. Perhaps he wanted her back, at any cost--She looked at him with that half-smile which means: “Do you forgive me?” But she waited for him to speak, to commit himself, because there was always the memory of Grace Fuller, in a gray dress and a clever hat....

“Lilah,” he said suddenly. He stopped, as if appalled by his audacity. He stretched out his hand and she took it. They clasped hands solemnly, with scared looks. And the waiter, lowering his eyes, whisked the crayfish away and disappeared behind a silk screen decorated in the Fragonard manner.

“Lilah,” Robert began again. He couldn’t go on. He squeezed her hand, held fast to it as if he would never let it go. “Isn’t this a nice place? Chew told me about it. The _filet_ of sole’s famous--better’n Marguery.... Lilah....”

Lilah wanted to laugh. She shook her head, instead, and tears came into her eyes; it was easy to cry nowadays. She wiped them away with the tips of her fingers. Then Robert said the one thing he should not have said: “It was all my fault, Lilah.”

The waiter came in again, bearing a silver platter with a great dome of a cover. “_Filet Esterhazy_,” he announced. He looked as if he had presented them with an heir.

Robert said: “Ah!” He loved good food. Lilah remembered how she had grown to wince inwardly whenever he leaned forward at the table with that look of dedication and rapture, that sort of hovering, like a gull over a floating morsel. She remembered the way he had of flapping his elbows, as if he were skimming down, close, to snatch the tid-bit; only, he never snatched; he ate slowly, with the peculiar relish, the rapt appreciation of the gourmet. “_Bon!_” he said in a loud voice. “_Tres bon!_”

“_Merci, m’sieur!_”

“You’ll want wine, of course, Lilah--champagne; what d’you say to champagne?”

Lilah thought: “Just this once.” She nodded. In Florence they had red wine, thin and sour, if they had wine at all, wine that puckered her mouth, the strong, sharp wine of Dionysius. But this--a pale amber bubble, an eternal spring of levity and carelessness, of love and daring, of wit and dreaming.... She lifted the glass and a little light danced on her bare arm, leaped to the table-cloth, frisked and quivered, a drunken little light....

“I remember....” Robert began. He stopped.

The waiter hurried away, as if he were saying: “One moment! One little moment! I’ll leave you alone as soon as I can.”

A perverse notion caused Lilah to say: “How is dear old Grace?”

She could see the slow, inevitable flush, self-conscious, painful, the sudden mistiness of his eyes. Elaborately careless, he said: “She’s awfully well.”

“Where is she?”

“Now?”

Robert drained his glass, set it down again. “At the Point.”

“Your grandfather isn’t ill?”

“No.”

Lilah thought: “I see. He’s going to marry her.” And she felt a tightness around her heart.

“Grace is awfully fond of you, Lilah.”

“Is she?” Lilah smiled. “Are you going to marry her?”

“Damn it all,” Robert cried. He pushed his plate away with a violent gesture. “No!”

“Meaning you are,” Lilah said sweetly. “Meaning, it’s none of my business. But it is! After all, I’m your wife, my dear.”

“Don’t be too modern, Lilah.” But in spite of himself, he smiled. Lilah couldn’t be sure. She smiled back at him while the waiter filled her glass again.... They were all three playing a game. What if they should speak what was in their minds? The waiter would probably say: “It’s late. I’m tired. I want to be at home with my family, reading the newspaper by the lamp, with my tired feet in slippers.” Robert would probably say: “I want you, and I want Grace, too. I don’t respect you. I love you and I want my freedom.” And she would say: “I love Flagg. But I’m afraid.” Because, it was true, she was afraid; she was at the mercy of her fear. She could not remember the wonderful self she had been a week ago, three days ago; it seemed far away, unreal, the self that had loved Flagg, that had promised to give seventy-five thousand lire to Robert, the self that had feared nothing, nothing. That self had fluttered away out of this warm, bright room, away from her body into the darkness outside and there it was waiting, mournful and alone, for Lilah. Which was Lilah? This, or that other?

“_Salade, madame._”

A plate. A deep bowl. A wooden spoon. Lettuce. String beans, very green. How did the French do it? And a dressing flavored faintly with garlic.

“I’m going into my grandfather’s business,” Robert said. He mixed the salad thoroughly, tossing and stirring it, his face intent. “Seriously. I had to do something. I found that sitting in the shade wasn’t enough; I had to plant some trees of my own. You remember what Dave Harum said about a dog and his fleas....” He paused to stare at the salad. Then he said suddenly: “It was a good thing you left me. Good for me, I mean.”

“Oh.”

“I was counting on you to make something of me. It’s a damn sight more fun to make something of myself. A rum world, Lilah. We’re put here for some reason. I didn’t used to think so. Now I know! I’m not inquiring the reason. It’s enough to be sure that the lessons we learn aren’t wasted.”

“_Fromage, madame?_”

Lilah looked at the creamy pie-shaped wedge of Camembert.... Robert was reminding her that she had failed. “_Oui_,” she said to the waiter. She must not let him sense her humiliation. She must make him see that she, too, was triumphant. And the image of Flagg, walking by the train as it pulled out of the station, assailed her. She said: “Mmm! Good cheese! Try it. Delicious.”

“I prefer American cheese. They make a cheese in California--I’ve forgotten what they call it--a rich orange color, finely flavored....”

“Then you’re glad I left?”

He looked up. His eyes were startled. “No. I loved you.”

“Don’t you love me now?”

The waiter disappeared at the word love. The verb _aimer_ ... _to love, I love, you love_ ... these people were _amants_, after all.

Robert got up. He came around the table. Lilah said nothing, did nothing to stop him. He came slowly, but his intention was in his deliberate gesture. And Lilah thought: “This is my worst self.” A wave of pity engulfed her; she closed her eyes. She wanted, wanted everything Robert could offer her; her mind flew back to the “Villino Sans-Souci”; she did not see herself in Flagg’s arms, submerged in that deep rapture; she saw herself, alone. She waited.... But Robert did not touch her. With a feeling of faintness, she opened her eyes again. Robert was standing just there, his napkin in his hand, as if he had been frozen. “You didn’t mean that, Lilah.”

“Sit down! The waiter--”

The waiter appeared, very sorry, with downcast eyes, just as Robert hurriedly regained his place. This time, the talented one bore a silver tray full of pastries, fat chocolate ones and long, snaky green ones and twisted ones full of cream, and pink ones upon which a devilish clever pastry-cook had painted flowers and bow-knots of sugar.

“You haven’t told me about your grandfather,” Lilah said, in her special voice, eyeing the pastries as if she hated them. “The green one--that one--please.”

“_Oui, madame._”

Robert answered that Junius was well. “Wonderful old chap! You can’t imagine how gratified he is that I’ve taken hold. He’d about given me up.”

“I suppose Grace Fuller’s responsible?”

Robert flushed again. He said nothing. Lilah smiled and stretched out her hand. “Cigarette, please. And don’t frown like that! Why shouldn’t you marry Grace Fuller if you want to? That’s why you’ve come to Paris, isn’t it? For her sake. Not for mine! One of the last things you said was that you’d never divorce me....”

“Lilah....”

At last the waiter was gone. They were alone in the room.

Lilah put the cigarette between her lips and tilted her head: “Light, please.” And while Robert struck the match she watched him, her eyes enigmatic. A quiver passed over his face. His hand trembled. “Lilah. Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“You’re trying to get at me. God knows why.” He tossed the match away. “After all, we have things to say that aren’t easy to say. It’s all very well to pretend that what we’re doing to-night is usual--it’s wrong, terrible, and I’m sorry we tried it. We’re married. That’s my ring, isn’t it? You left another man to come here with me and make believe before a waiter that we’re friends. Friends! Let’s be honest. We’ve failed at a great undertaking. We ought to be down on our knees praying for a chance to make good! I’ll take my half of the blame. Neither of us tried. I loved you. I still love you. I thought I didn’t. I told Grace Fuller that I didn’t. But she’d be the first to welcome us, if we were to go back together.”

He paused, his hands, with the fingers interlocked, pressed violently together. “There’s such a thing as moral insensibility.... You’ve had your fling. What has it proven?”

Before she could answer he went on: “What does that sort of thing prove to any one? No one will profit by our separation, not even Grace, because I love you, and she’ll know it.”

“Happiness--”

“A chimera of childhood! I’d like to blot the word out of the language. You were after something for yourself--something ready-made, something you didn’t have to work for. What you had--me-- Well--I want you to come back. Try again.”

“Did Grace Fuller know that you intended to invite me, after what has happened, to go back where I will always be on suffrance--an object of suspicion, perhaps of amusement?”

“I don’t understand,” Robert said impatiently, “why you harp on Grace Fuller. The issue is between you and me.”

“But if you promised her--”

“I sometimes wonder whether you have forgotten that you are married to me--you behave as if you considered the whole thing an episode, both of us absolved--I haven’t promised anything.”

Lilah got up. There was a divan near the fire, upholstered in shabby yellow sateen. Lilah’s cloak lay across the end, Robert’s overcoat, his muffler and gloves beside it. She thought: “How domesticated. Like Robert’s imagination. How can I make him understand when I don’t understand myself? She felt suddenly tired. The bubble of gayety had burst, was gone. She had a passing, a poignant regret at the inevitable bursting of all such pretty bubbles....

“If I fail with you,” Robert was saying, “the whole past has been wasted. You can’t erase marriage by simply running away from it. Or, like the magician, by exchanging one marriage for another ... a sort of social legerdemain ... dangerous, because I believe once married always married.... I may be old-fashioned. I dare say I am making myself ridiculous.... These things go deeper than words. If I could make you see what I’ve seen....”

Lilah wanted to say: “But I don’t love you.” She didn’t dare say it because there was something she wanted to hold to, a thread, a fragile link between herself and security. She recognized the ugly need of security; her own weakness made it imperative that she should hold Robert off until her own future was certain, until she had found the strength to admit that other self or to close that self out forever. A little time. If life only didn’t press you so....

Robert followed; he, too, seemed to press close, although he stood some distance away, his hands still tightly pressed together in a curious attitude of supplication and misery. “You’re afraid of public opinion.... At the Point, you have nothing to fear. We can prove, by the dignity”--he hesitated--“the decency of our lives that there is such a thing as courage. Both of us will need it, but not because of criticism; we were both born into a reckless society. You can’t tell black from white, nowadays! And yet--we’re like ships without rudders, drifting, drifting in the open sea, all pretending that we’re getting somewhere. We call it revolt; we call it breaking chains; we call it by a dozen high-sounding names, ‘reality’ among them. But none of us is satisfied.” He suddenly pointed at her and raised his voice. “You’re not!”

“I am,” she said. “I have love.”

Robert turned away. His face was drawn. He looked old. He went back to the table and poured out another glass of champagne. The rattle of ice in the bucket, the clink of glass against glass, summoned the waiter who re-appeared, blinking, as if he had dozed off behind the screen. “_M’sieur?_” At once he began to clear the table, his sleepy look giving way to a half-smile, as if he were thinking of the embrace he had probably interrupted. But he wanted to go home. It was ten o’clock and his feet were tired.

“Let’s go somewhere,” Robert said angrily. “We can’t talk here. And I’ve got to convince you--”

He did not glance at the bill but paid it with the indifference to other people’s honesty which characterized him.

“I have convictions,” he said in the cab. “I’m not the flaccid fish I appear to be. There was a time when I approved of men, and women, too, smashing down every door that kept them from experience. It was exciting to watch the new generation kicking convention in the face. It cleared things up, for a while. I foresaw a new race of straight thinkers, purged of fear. What you did didn’t shock me. It seemed necessary--”

He turned to her, trying to read her face in the uneven flow of light. “Where’ll we go? We can’t ride around Paris all night.”

“Let’s dance,” she said.

“Dance?”

After a hesitation, a silence she could not read, he rapped on the window and ordered the driver to take them to a club in the Bois. Lilah thought: “This will give me time.”

At the club, a smart restaurant given over to a jazz orchestra and a dancing floor, food had taken second place. Lilah was stimulated by the rush of waiters, the whirl of dancers, the cascading crystal chandeliers, the monotonous and passionate rhythm of the music. Florence, the “Villino Sans-Souci” were part of a dream. She had dreamed of the melancholy weeks of rain, the somber, suggestive call of birds in the cypress groves. This was being awake. Her body came alive. She felt herself swaying to the provocative melody as Robert frowned at a card. “What’ll you have, Lilah?” “Anything!” While he ordered, she let her cloak slip away from her bare shoulders; instinctively, she fell into the attitude of fashionable unconcern. “Anything.” The rite of dining was lost in the need to dance. People came here to indulge their senses in the barbaric measures of a simple people unknown to them; the negroes, perspiring, hysterical, carried beyond themselves by their success, swayed, jerked, stamped, shouted. Their leader, holding a violin at arm’s length, played a melody; the voice of the instrument, thin, sweet and penetrating, rose above the relentless tom-toming of the drums, the frantic unceasing blare of horns, an accompaniment soulless and exciting.... In a pool of light, revolving, the dancers seemed beyond themselves. Other dancers, revolving, moved in the mirrors, silent, remote, like a company of ghosts....

Robert said politely: “Will you?”

They rose. He clasped her with a sort of shiver, almost a reluctance, and they were caught by the tide, whirled and buffeted. Lilah’s face was pressed against Robert’s shoulder. He noticed again the faint and seductive odor of sandalwood; he sensed the peculiar flexibility of her body--she had always seemed to be both fragile and powerful. He saw her eyes, wide with excitement, lifted to his face, scrutinizing him--did she love or hate him, or was she only trying to decide whether she could, after all, live with him again? “Wonderful music.” Robert’s clasp tightened. And he felt a deep pity, for her, for himself, for all these foolish, fatuous, bewildered people twirling around a polished floor in each other’s arms. “Yes, wonderful,” he said.

* * * * *

At their table again, confronted by a chafing dish in which chicken and cream and mushrooms bubbled energetically, Robert remarked that he hadn’t any appetite. But Lilah had. “I haven’t been anywhere; I haven’t seen any one, or done anything, for six months.... I’m really enjoying myself. Am I wicked?” And she held out her plate. “I’m starved. Wolfish! What’s that they’re playing? We never hear anything in Italy except Neapolitan love songs and the ‘Merry Widow’ waltz. Jazz ... after all ... it’s my native music. It goes to my head.... You dance better than you used to, Robert....”

She glanced up. Her expression changed; a look of panic flashed across her eyes. “People I know--”

A flurry of women, slim, bare-armed, in the simple gowns of the period.... Aureoles of hair, short, frizzed.... Make-up.... The fashionable drawl of the young New Yorker....

“Lilah! Robert! Of all the cool ones! Honeymooning in Paris.... What’s the plot? We thought you two had parted forever! Lilah, where’s the villain? Did you park him in Florence? What a lovely dress.... Poiret?”

Chairs were brought. Three amiable and vivacious Frenchmen were presented to Lilah, to Robert. Bare shoulders, long white arms, manicured finger tips, a medley of perfumes, cigarette smoke.... “Have you been to--” “Have you seen--?” Talk crossed talk. Lilah, on her guard, but eager, eager, as if she were again drinking champagne, tasting the little golden bubbles of gayety. Poor Lilah! Robert pitied her and understood her; but more than ever he wanted her, because he divined, beneath the fixed and purposeful animation of her face, her profound confusion.

The music began again after a pause no longer than a heart beat, and Lilah whirled away in the arms of one of the Frenchmen. Robert rose politely and claimed the girl at his right, a slim, arrogant young thing with sharp shoulder-blades and shingled hair; she had the misty, brushed-in eyes of an Oriental, the lips of an odalisque. “You don’t remember me, do you? I’m Marian Forsythe--I live near the inlet; we can see your house on clear days. I know your grandfather. Wonderful music, isn’t it? I’m over here with the Careys. Isn’t Paris awful in winter? We’re going to Algiers next week. I like to run away from things, don’t you? I get bored so easily.” She twisted a little in his arms. He felt her hand, sharp, nervous, against his shoulder. “I must say I think Lilah’s a sport. She tried it out, anyway. I suppose she liked you best, after all. If more people were sensible about such things....”

Robert interrupted sharply: “You don’t know anything about it.”

He had an hysterical desire to shake her. If men didn’t protect girls like this against their own ignorance, the world would be better off. “I’m getting to be a damned reactionary,” he thought. “It may be progress, it may be transition--whatever it is, I’m out of it.”

He was too angry to dance, but Marian Forsythe was inexhaustible. “Don’t be a grouch,” she advised him sweetly. “Lilah’s perfectly happy with Captain Romain. Let’s waltz.”

* * * * *