Part 17

It was past three o’clock when he succeeded in getting Lilah away. The little group waited beneath the glass and bronze porte-cochère of the restaurant while a carriage-man in a white rubber overcoat pursued taxicabs, shrieking upon a tin whistle, vanishing and reappearing like an energetic ghost. A thin drizzle fell aslant the somber shadows of massed chestnut trees, tiny, broken splinters, glass-like, shivering out of a black sky. The women huddled in their wraps, their faces covered, their feet, in delicate slippers, exposed to the rain, to the sharp wind that whipped their floating chiffons about their ankles. The men were still fresh. Only Robert was tired, tired and childishly disappointed. Everything--Lilah’s eight months away from him, his rage, his love, his idealism, all of it was stupid, futile, because of these people and their casual worldliness; as if suffering and loneliness and pride and longing were inconsiderable, as if nothing were real but the things he had grown to despise. How on earth could he make it clear to her that there could be no satisfaction for either of them until they had discharged their duty.... And, suddenly, he was too tired to try....

That ghost of a carriage-man came panting back with a taxicab, and Robert selfishly took it for himself and Lilah. The others would have to wait. He hated them.... Lilah leaned against him. “I’ve had such a good time, Bobsie. I didn’t realize how starved I’ve been.”

“You forget--you haven’t told me anything about yourself.”

“Must I? Now? It’s so late.” She yawned. “I’m so sleepy!”

Away down the boulevard, like a pale new moon, Robert saw the Arc du Triomphe. An irrelevant thought came to him. Even heroism was futile. Great gestures. Wasted. That soldier, unknown, who was buried there, wouldn’t he have been better off in his orchard, his shop, his palace? But this had nothing to do with Lilah, with himself. He pulled himself together. “What do you want me to do? I’ve got to know.”

“Can’t we talk to-morrow?”

“One thing I promise: If you decide to come back, I’ll never question you. I’m not magnanimous. I realize that you would hate me if I made you feel that I had forgiven you.... We’ll consider the past eight months erased.”

“Not erased! Mine!”

“As you please.”

They sat very stiffly, scarcely breathing, not looking at each other.

* * * * *

“Telegram for you, madam.”

“For me?”

Lilah took the thin envelope. Yes. “Mrs. Robert Peabody.” She got into the elevator. Two men and a woman stood there, laughing, while the car soared up--one, two, three--_Troisième_!

“Madame.”

She did not open the telegram until she had lighted the light by the bed and had thrown aside her wrap. She kept assuring herself that Flagg had answered her wire. Some such message as: “All well.” Or: “I miss you.”

“Advise your immediate return. Major Flagg seriously ill.

“BACCI.”

Bacci! Who on earth was Bacci? Her heart contracted, expanded again. The doctor. That man who had come out to the Ponte a Mensola in a hired cab.... She sat down, trembling. Her hands shook so that the thin paper envelope rattled.

“Seriously ill.”

Dying. “Immediate return.”

She thought: “While I was dancing.”

She began to undress. She tore the fragile tissue because she hated it. She wanted to destroy the fact, to blot out the visible evidence, strip naked. She heard herself sobbing.... A curious, unfamiliar sound, as if some one else were sobbing in another room. Her eyes were dry. She took her hair down and placed the pins in a neat pile. She must start at once; she must get to him. “Because,” she said aloud to her reflection, “I love him.” Now, she knew, Flagg wouldn’t believe her. If she got there; if she was in time--something about her would show him that she had forgotten, that she had betrayed herself, and he would say: “I never believed.” And he would go away, without her. That seemed the most terrible possibility of all--that at the end his eyes might shut her out....

She glanced at her watch, wound it carefully. “I’ll bathe, dress. By that time it will be daylight and I can make arrangements.”

But when she was dressed, her veil adjusted, everything packed, it was still dark. She threw the window wide open and leaned on the sill, conscious of a cool current of air, a dampness rising from the wet pavements. A single pedestrian down there crossed the street at an angle, wavering, as if uncertain of a destination, and she thought: “I am like that.” The night is so intimate. She was alone with the night. Paris seemed a little place, all the lives gathered under that roof of darkness, all the lives helpless, pathetic in sleep, their defenses down. “I am alone.” Not since her father died had she been so alone. And she was afraid, afraid of death, of what she might be going to see, of the way that doctor would look at her, of Flagg, struggling with his enemy, alone. Every one was alone. Alone and afraid. She felt suddenly that she could not go to Florence. She would tear up the telegram, pretend she hadn’t heard, and they would wire her that it was over, Flagg was dead....

* * * * *

But even then the sky seemed to deepen, to become more dense, blacker. And a shaft of light sprang to the apex, opened, like a fan. Dawn.

Immediately there was a stir in the city. A stir of sparrows in the eaves. A stir of little, skulking people in the alleys. A stir of smoke from innumerable chimneys.

Lilah got to her feet. She was shivering. Because she saw that if she kept Robert off, prevaricated, perhaps promised him that she would return, there would be a way back, out of that other darkness, later....

But Flagg was in Florence, alone. She saw him, lying on his right side, with his arm under his head, struggling silently, not saying a word--as if he and his heart crashed together, like two dark, insane men on horses, tilting, splintering against each other, again and again.

She ought to go to Flagg, because she loved him. Why had God made her afraid of ugliness? Flagg was ugly because he was suffering. If she could only be spared! If only she didn’t have to go!

She went to the telephone. “What time is it?”

She had meant to ask about trains. “_Cinq heures et demie, madame._”

She put the instrument down again and sat on the bed, rocking back and forth with her arms folded, as if she were trying to put her thoughts to sleep. The room was still dark. The windows were gray. A hum rose from the streets, a silvery clink of chains along the wet asphalt.... She was envious of any one going anywhere.... Only not to be herself.

For an instant she was in Florence; she could smell the damp plastered walls of the house; the odor of wet stone and moss and verbena from the garden; Flagg’s pipe. A pang of memory. Herself, dragging Flagg down to her. The feel of his hair, furry, cool.

“I love him so!” she said again, aloud.

But to be poor. To be back where she had started, only weaker. A woman who couldn’t do anything, a fool, a pretty fool.

If Flagg died, he would never know that she had promised Robert....

Then why not lie?

Because she couldn’t.

She was afraid of life itself. She wanted to hide behind pretenses, behind beauty, behind her own charm, behind what Robert offered her. But she would have to go to Florence and watch Flagg die. Something new and wonderful was being born in her--that other self was thrusting up, like a plant, like the beginnings of a great tree, through the frightened Lilah that crouched on the bed.

There was no use in going back to the Point, to the warmth of that fireside, because she had never believed in it; it had never, from the beginning, been hers.

The only thing that had ever happened to her that belonged wholly to her was that moment in the dark when Flagg had sighed against her breast and the cats had frisked over her feet. That moment was hers. She had made it. She had created it out of pain and longing and honesty.

It was time that she stopped pretending.

* * * * *

She wrote hurriedly to Robert:

“MY DEAR ROBERT:

“Thank you. But I must go back to Florence. You have been very kind. Later, if you want a divorce, I will do everything to help you. I am leaving your grandmother’s emerald crown, the bracelet and some money in the care of the hotel management, with the understanding that you will call for them and identify yourself. The money I got for the pearls. I was foolish and wrong. But I can’t buy them back for you. I’m sorry.

“LILAH.”

She addressed the envelope and sealed it. She felt very small and unimportant, burned out, dry; she must look, at last, definitely old. She went to the telephone again, and, this time, she asked about trains.

The compartment was crowded. People kept popping in and out, asking questions, shouting, losing their heads, kissing noisily. “_Au ’voir! Au ’voir maman!” “Mignon!_” “Here’s your bag. And the fruit. I’ll put them here.” “Take care of yourself.” Anxious faces, detached, drifting along the platform, looking in or looking ahead, eagerly, as if everything counted on their getting somewhere. Here was life again--so terribly important and silly! Lilah sat by the window, her veil thrown back, staring out. She half expected to see Robert, pale, distraught, determined, searching for her in the crowd. “Here you are!” And it would be taken out of her hands. He would make her turn back; he would make her see that what she had intended to do was wrong. Robert didn’t come. An Englishman in a trench coat with shabby shoes searched and searched for some one. His eyes were like a dog’s and his pinched, brown face was puckered with longing. At last he saw whoever it was. “_There you are! Hallo! Just in time!_” And he leaped into one of the compartments with a bound.... Life was such fun for the living, for those who believed in it....

The train was moving. A telegraph boy rushed past, shouting: “_Madame de Lattre!_” But no one paid any attention to him. The Englishman leaped down again, his face very red, his eyes afire, and snatched off his hat. “_Good-by! Good-by!_” Steam. A flood of sunlight. Darkness again.

“Would madame object?”

And the little Frenchman in the corner of the compartment got up, stepped politely but firmly over every body and closed the window.

* * * * *

It was raining when the train drew into the Santa Maria Novella Station at Florence. Dusk was shutting down, blotting out the towers, as if snuffing lighted candles; one by one they disappeared. Lilah had been closed in a compartment with four soldiers, noisy, self-conscious _bersaglieri_ who had angled for her attention all the way down from Bologna. She had sat like a stone, with her eyes lowered. One of the soldiers had kept looking at himself in a little mirror; he combed his hair with a small, steel comb and smoothed his eyebrows. He wanted her to admire him. Whenever he said anything, his black, polished eyes rolled in her direction....

The train seemed to disgorge its passengers; it was like a long, spiney dragon vomiting people. People spilled from the open doors, mingled on the platform, crashed together--and through it all porters bawled “_facchino_!” One of them snatched at Lilah’s bag, her coat, her umbrella, angrily, with determination, and rushed toward the cab-stand, shoving his way through the crowd. Lilah cried, “Don’t hurry!” But he paid no attention, because, if he hurried, he knew he could get other customers and more pennies. A row of cabbies had backed into the square; they snapped their whips and shrieked at Lilah as she hurried after the implacable porter through the rain. Everyone was conspiring to get her to the Ponte a Mensola ... if only there hadn’t been any cabs, a delay, somehow....

She tipped the angry porter and the cab jerked forward, bouncing over the cobbles, bouncing, bouncing. The cabman’s umbrella dripped on Lilah’s feet. Had it been raining for five days? The rain frightened her; it was sullen and unkind, a purposeful torment. Puddles bubbled, the sidewalks were covered with tiny silver explosions and the great eaves poured out amber floods that gurgled in the gutters. And now it was dark.

“Seriously ill.”

Was Bacci with him? Who was with him? What should she do? She asked herself suddenly and sharply what she should do if she found him dying? And at the thought, she wanted the cabman to say that he couldn’t go on. She wanted some one to keep her from what she must see and do. But the cab jolted forward, turning corners recklessly, clattering over car-tracks, rolling smoothly, unexpectedly, on stretches of asphalt. Lilah stared out at the people and the lights, at faces caught and fixed in a brief immobility. She tried not to remember what was so precious and terrible. Yet her thoughts were unconquerable, rapacious; they fastened on her consciousness, and at last she sank back, defeated.

Love.

The word challenged her. She struck it away. She beat it back. It seemed to her that from the beginning she had been a prisoner, a woman too conscious of herself, tormented by herself, fascinated by herself, like that coxcomb of a _bersagliere_. If she could escape from herself, she might find what she craved, the freedom she must have or--But when you needed to know these things, you were too selfish, too happy to know them! When you were happy, the debt piled up and you were asked to pay it when you no longer cared.

The rain, incessant, indifferent, slanted out of a black sky.... A tram, brilliantly lighted, passed with a rumble, and Lilah glimpsed a row of people, unconscious of her, laughing and talking. A baby pressed its nose against the window spangled with big, white drops, like quicksilver, and the baby’s nose was flattened, pressed out of shape ... the tram passed, and Lilah was alone again in the darkness of the cab. She began to listen, attentively, to the clop of the horse’s hoofs on the wet pavement, as if, absorbed in that rhythmic, hollow sound, time would stretch out, and she would never, never arrive at her destination....

* * * * *

The cab lurched. They were on the dirt road, turning across the bridge, beginning the sharp climb ... a light in the window!

“Hurry!” she cried out.

She stood in the rain, her hands shaking, to pay the cab man. He swung himself down, grunting. It was a long drive out from the city on such a night, and his horse was tired.... He struck a match and scrutinized the coins Lilah gave him. What on earth was one supposed to tip; he looked disgusted--she gave him an extra five lire and he thanked her, as if he had been cheated and taken advantage of by a foreigner. “Good-night.”

Lilah opened the gate and stumbled up the path between the cypresses. The great pointed trees, so old, so quiet, so superior to the brief and unimportant tragedies of men, shook down a heavy splattering of rain....

The door opened. A strange silhouette against the light....

“I have been expecting you.”

“Can I see him?”

“Yes.”

She searched this man’s face. Behind glasses, his eyes were curious and tender. “I’ll take off my things. I’m wet and cold.” He seemed to be bowing, standing aside to let her pass. She went upstairs and the doctor followed, quietly, as if there were no hurry. No hurry at all. This struck her as ominous. But she did not dare to ask how Flagg was. Something prevented her from questioning the doctor, from, even, looking at him. At the top of the stairs she paused, stricken with fear. “Which--which room?”

He pointed. “In there.”

In his own room! She turned to her door, opened it, went in and faced her mirror. It seemed necessary to remove her hat, to go in to Flagg hatless....

She powdered, rouged, touched her lips with a perfumed stick of carmine paste.

In the hall, the doctor was waiting, his hands in his pockets.

“_Signora_,” he began.

Lilah threw out her hands. “No. Don’t tell me. I can’t bear any more. I want to see him.”

She pushed him aside and went in.

How tall he was. She had forgotten, in five days, how tall he was. His head, dark, round, rumpled, was deep in the pillow. Some one had put a newspaper over the light.

For no reason, with a rush of feeling, she was proud to be coming back to him. It was all right. She was safe. She had been decent. She had done what he expected of her. Now, perhaps, he would let her into his eyes....

She tiptoed. She stood over him.... Asleep.

She touched his hand.

He was mischievous in sleep, a satyr again, smiling....

“Signora.”

Suddenly she turned and ran back, away from the bed. Her legs moved strangely; her arms jerked. “I can’t bear it.” Yet he was beautiful, beautiful in death....

“He died an hour ago, _Signora_. I am terribly sorry. I did everything--possible.”

Through a burst of tears, uncontrollable, humiliating, an agony of tears, Lilah cried: “I’ll go back to-morrow and look at him.... Not now! Don’t ask me to, now! Is he dead?”

The doctor nodded. “An hour ago,” he repeated.

Lilah went downstairs. The doctor had been sitting in Flagg’s chair by the desk and a cigarette still burned in an ash-tray. He had been reading some of those scattered sheets of manuscript, Flagg’s last work. Now he stooped and gathered them up, without self-consciousness or apology. “A remarkable mind,” he said.

Lilah huddled in a corner of the divan, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. She shivered. Her teeth knocked together. Yet behind the atrocious confusion of her thoughts she was grateful that she had not arrived two hours sooner. Another idea fought to the surface, seemed to explode in her brain, to shatter her--she was alone. She had lost love.... And she saw herself, night after night, endless, identical nights, lying in her bed, her body rigid beneath the bed-covers. She had so little to remember and so much time to remember in--her experience reduced itself to that one victorious moment when Flagg had loved her without question--and there was no comfort in remembering....

“I cannot offer my sympathy,” the doctor was saying, “in the usual terms. I understand so well what it means to find oneself alone, the physical self cheated of the comforting reality, the spiritual self unaccustomed.... Later, a week, a month, a year, it will be more difficult for you. Then, suddenly, you will find relief--in work, new interests, another love.”

“Don’t!”

He spread out his hands. “Inevitable! This man has gone. But you remain. You must progress. Your education, if you will permit me to say so, is not complete. His, I dare say, was....”

He put the typewritten pages back on the desk. “Tell me about him.”

He leaned forward, offering a curious, leather cigarette case. “You smoke?”

“Yes.”

She saw his hand as he held the match for her, a hand at once sensitive and acquisitive; there was a large ring on one of the fingers, and Lilah thought: “How Italian!”

“You’re shivering. Give me your hands. Steady now! You mustn’t let go, _signora_. It’s devilish hard to pull oneself back.”

“You speak English very well.”

“My mother was English. But I was born in Persia and educated in Germany. Ah. Your pulse is better. Breath. Deep. Deeper! That’s it. Now, smoke? Later, I’ll get some coffee for you. I let the servant go. But I have made myself very much at home here.... I used to know your poet. Before his exile, he was an extravagant host. A charming, innocent fellow who enjoys his evil reputation. He is, actually, religious, but he is ashamed of his inclination and attempts to deceive us with abominable clap-trap.... You’re all right. All right.”

“You’ll stay here to-night?”

“Of course.”

“It is very kind of you. I can’t help shivering. Something in me is whirring--like a wheel--”

She had to try, at least. She was ashamed to shake and chatter before this stranger. He drew up a chair and sat before her, with his elbows on his knees. Then, for the first time, she looked at him. He was short and had ginger-colored hair and a ginger-colored beard streaked with gray. His face was lean; the skin was dry and tight, drawn over the bones so that you saw the structure, the modeling, extraordinarily precise and fine. His eyes were the color of moss agates, small, brilliant and inquisitive.

“I think I can sleep,” she said abruptly.

Her lids were heavy. She stopped trembling and yawned. Her head fell back against the cushions. She felt the doctor’s eyes, appraising her, but she could not meet the attack. Nothing was left of her audacity. This drowsiness was like a drug. And little by little consciousness of what had happened slipped away. She would start, gasp, reach out for that certainty, only to have it evade her, to have it submerged in great waves of sleep.... She struggled to recall what it was that needed remembering, what it was that was gone.... Nothing remained but the face of the doctor, thrust forward, still and absorbed. Suddenly it was jerked away and she sank down, down, into sleep ... for hours.

* * * * *

She woke again. It was dark. The windows showed, black squares, save one, where the lamp was reflected, seeming to burn steadily and brightly both within the house and without. The doctor had not moved. “How long have I slept?”

“About three minutes.”

“Oh.”

Then she remembered. Flagg was gone. She would never again feel his arm beneath her head, the tightening of the muscles in his shoulder, the weight of his sleeping body against hers.

She sat up. And instantly the doctor got to his feet. “I’ll make coffee. Wait. Don’t move.”

He was gone. What a strange man. What did he think of her? Whom did he imagine her to be? Would he question her? What would happen, now?

She went to a mirror and stared at herself, surprised to discover that she was the identical Lilah; again, she sensed a peculiar, penetrating delight in the witty outlines of her nose....

Strange, that in moments of tremendous meaning, meaningless things demanded attention. She was more aware of the things in the room--chairs, tables, ornaments--than of the body upstairs. The chairs were somehow strange and terrible at that hour--they were like listening people, spying people, ready to say in sharp, unnatural voices that it was late--turn out the lights ... let us sleep, let us dream in the shadows, our dark, mysterious dreams....

XII

The days that followed were too crowded to hurt very much. A procession of strangers came to the “Villino Sans-Souci”; Lilah was questioned, with respect, with pity, with impudence, with disdain. She discovered that she knew nothing of Flagg’s family, his affairs. Cables were dispatched to his bank and, after a delay, a dry, unemotional and explicit reply was received, not by Lilah, but by the Florentine bank which had handled the small matter of Flagg’s account. Lilah was visited by an Anglo-Italian who wore a white Imperial in the flamboyant manner of Maximilian and who gesticulated with small, self-conscious hands in black kid gloves. She was, he informed her, to leave Flagg in Italy, since there was no one to receive him in America.

“Then I am not to be consulted?” she demanded with a smile that should have humiliated him.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Those were our instructions, _signora_.” He rose and bowed, his eyes veiling their curiosity, his attitude a discreet expression of admiration. “We are also instructed to meet any expense--any necessary expense.”

“I suppose you mean that I am to get back to America any way I can.”

“I suggest that you wire your own bank, _signora_.”

“Oh, yes,” she said crisply. “Of course! I was not referring to money but to the indifference of Mr. Flagg’s family.”

Those little, initiated, trained hands made a gesture disposing of families. “The world is cruel, _signora_. If there is anything I can do for you, call upon me. I am not indifferent to distress. Permit me to say that I am more than sorry--”