Part 4

The idea trailed off into a vision, a spectacle, a kind of entertainment in which she played the leading rôle. She saw the house she would have in New York. Herself, in gray brocade trimmed at the neck and hem with fur, her feet in brocaded slippers, advancing across an immense, glowing room, her hand outstretched....

* * * * *

She did not want to hurt Grace Fuller. At breakfast she shivered with dread. It would be like putting poison in a cat’s milk. She expected to see Grace Fuller actually foam and shriek and stiffen and then stretch out dead on the kitchen floor, her bang in curl and the pallor of her cheeks brushed faintly with expensive rouge.

Lilah was very tender. She made pop-overs and cooked the hominy in a double boiler. She hovered over Grace Fuller, who ate with precision, as if she were afraid of exuberance, as if, Lilah thought, she were guarding herself against some strain of hysteria.

Lilah said suddenly: “Robert asked me to marry him last night. I said I would. I know you’ll think I’m a liar. I didn’t really want him yesterday morning! When he kissed me--I did.”

Miss Fuller went on buttering a slice of toast. She did it thoroughly. Then she said in an absolutely unchanged voice: “What are you going to do for a trousseau?”

Lilah flushed crimson. To cover her relief, she opened the oven door. She had expected something more--more feminine. She said: “I thought you cared.”

“I do.... I learned certain things in France. One of them was not to care too much.”

“I didn’t know you went to France, Grace.”

“Three years.... And things like this happened.... At Soissons there was a French boy, about twenty-two years old. He looked nineteen. They brought him in with a wound in his abdomen--he told me, that first day, that he had looked down at himself and had seen his own intestine. He was going to die. They all said so. We were being shelled, and every night we had to carry the wounded into the cellar. He couldn’t be moved. And while all the rest of them cried out and groaned or made a joke of it, he said nothing. The wards were dark. They let me have a baby flash which I held under my apron, and I used to run back to him. Sometimes the racket was fearful--that long howl and screech of shells passing over. Sometimes it was quiet as the tomb. I was never sure whether that boy was alive until I saw his eyes, blue, steady, patient, asking me to pull him through.... Well, I did! He was my case. He got well. The day came when he was out in the garden in a chair, and then he was in uniform again, going home....”

Grace Fuller shrugged her shoulders. “I cared. Terribly. It was my own little victory. He was a brave boy. I used to gloat over the fact that I had cheated death.... Then, one night, a year later, they brought him in again. I was standing in the hall when the ambulances came. There had been a drive and we had our hands full. Suddenly I saw him. His stretcher was sopping with blood. He had gone back as an observer and his plane had been shot down ... he was riddled. But he knew me. And again he asked me to see him through. _I couldn’t!_ He died there, in the hall ... my victory! And I had to see those patient eyes fill up with distrust, with protest, with a sort of mocking challenge, as he felt himself slipping out of my arms into that red tide....”

She rose, folding her napkin into a neat square.

“Since then, I haven’t let myself care.”

“How did you stand it?”

“What?”

“The war.”

“I didn’t stand it. I changed my nature.”

Lilah said: “I wanted to do something--help.... But the women over here acted so badly I was ashamed.... They seemed to enjoy, some of them, all the risk and death. You’d see them rushing down the library steps, their faces red, clutching at men, trying to drag them into it: ‘You’re going to fight, aren’t you? Why aren’t _you_ in khaki?’ And then the Liberty drives ... a sort of circus parade of ambulances, stretchers, posters smeared with blood, pictures of atrocities--that terrible one by George Bellows, of a massacre at Dinard.... People were excited. They took a sort of morbid pleasure. I wanted to stay out of it and hold on to sanity, if I could. It never ‘got’ me. And when the wounded began to arrive, it was worse. One of the doctors at Greenhut’s told me that they had to force the women out. They weren’t all of them sympathetic; they wanted to look at the wounded. The way a crowd rushes to an accident.... Morbid. Even the women who danced with the soldiers and sailors and knitted in the theaters struck me as ridiculous.... I hated it.”

“It was better in France.”

A silence fell and Lilah’s cheeks burned again. She rolled the sleeves of her dress above her elbows and began to clear the table. Miss Fuller stood, rigid and uncompromising. Presently, in her usual precise voice, she said: “If you are going to marry Robert, you’ll have to have some clothes. Have you any money?”

“No.”

“How much would you need to see you through? I have saved a little. I’ll let you have it.”

“I can’t allow you to do that.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve hurt you----”

“No, you haven’t.” Unexpectedly, she put her arms around Lilah. “I want you to be happy. I admire you enormously.”

Lilah hugged her. “Darling Grace! After all, it’s better that I should have him. You’ve got strength, and I haven’t. Left alone, I’d sink.”

“Oh, I’ll swim,” Grace Fuller admitted. “Women like me always do! We give the impression of strength because we have our imaginations under control. I’m as helpless as you are, but I won’t admit it. The men of my family were all farmers. From them, perhaps, I got my tolerance. I can’t blame you. I wish I could! I can’t blame Robert. I have none of the usual feminine eagerness to blame men for everything that goes wrong. You probably think I have no standards. I haven’t. I understand too well.”

She went into the other room and came back wearing her hat, with a rather dog-eared fur neck-piece clasped under her chin; in high, tight collars she had the swan-like look of Consuela. Lilah was deeply sorry for her. For the moment she felt herself inferior.

“I can let you have five hundred dollars, Lilah. Don’t tell Robert.”

The telephone rang. They looked at each other with a glance stripped naked of pretense.

“Go. It’s Robert.”

“No! No!”

“Hurry! Please.”

Lilah went. She put the receiver to her ear with a certain dread, a reluctance.

And she heard Robert’s voice, vibrant, saying: “Lilah? Sweetheart! I want you to meet me for lunch. We’ll buy that ring. What d’you say?” He broke off. “Is Grace there?”

“No,” Lilah said distinctly.

She turned her head and saw the door closing.

“No,” she repeated. “I’m alone.”

* * * * *

Lilah was married a month later, in Junius Peabody’s house at the Point.

She had had an overwhelming four weeks. Grace Fuller’s five hundred dollars had no more than cleared the first hurdle. When Robert Peabody asked her whether she wanted pearls or a bandeau of diamonds, she had replied: “I prefer the money. I don’t care for jewels, and there are all sorts of things I want, and need; foolish things I can’t afford.”

He had given her a check for five thousand dollars.

With this sum deposited and in possession of a book of blanks smartly bound in leather, Lilah reversed her mask of poverty. She wore, instead, her most devastating sophistication, a fetching air of patronage and sweetness. Her first pilgrimage was to the gray stone house in the Fifties occupied by the esthetic and sharp couturière who had refused her a chance to work. She sent word to him that she was interested, this time, in a “wardrobe.” She was wearing a slim and expensive frock of red crêpe and a Paisley turban. She was positively beautiful; her slimness, her arched feet in delicate shoes, her gloves, were dominating.

The dressmaker (his name was Maurice) pretended not to recognize her. With a bow, he led her to his show rooms and, summoning a saleswoman, entered, in French, into a passionate discussion of Lilah’s height, her coloring, her possibilities. One of the deep-skinned models trailed upon the scene in a sheath of gold cloth, dragging behind her a tail of emerald green chiffon. She met Lilah’s stare with an expression totally blank, as if she were walking in her sleep. Maurice sent for materials, yards and yards of brocade, metallic cloth, crêpe de Chine; jade, orange, violet and dull red mingled on the floor, the backs of chairs, across lacquered screens and tables. This profligate heap of stuffs went to Lilah’s head, but she preserved her air of polite indifference, sitting with crossed knees, her feet, in the elaborate, strapped shoes, displayed.... The model, she decided, had ugly ankles.

* * * * *

At lunch that day she told Robert of her purchases.

He shook his head. “Where shall you wear them? Peabody’s Point is a wilderness--the three houses, my own, my father’s and my grandfather’s, a deep forest of maples, pines and birch, and the sea! We seldom see any one, but when we do, they come on horse-back or by motor. It is astonishing when the women wear evening clothes. On great occasions, a house warming or a birthday or a dance--once, or twice, a year--there is some show of ceremony.... You will find us very rural.”

Lilah stifled her disappointment. “Shan’t we live in town in the winter?”

“If you like. We have a house in Thirty-eighth Street. It is closed now.”

“Take me there!”

The rooms were dark, and when, admitted by a caretaker, Lilah and Robert explored the first two floors, they found the furniture swaddled in linen, the chandeliers wearing net veils, like Bluebeard’s brides, and the rugs rolled back. The house was an exact example of the New York residence of the early Eighties. The marble mantels were surmounted by elaborate, wooden fret-work, an intricacy of shelves and pilasters, screens and grills, roosting place for those useless, ugly and enormously expensive vases of the period. Mirrors divided the windows and curtains of dark red velvet were looped up, held clear of the floor by chenille ropes. There was a multiplicity of cushions, tables, tabourettes; paintings, in deep frames, by Rosa Bonheur, Henner and Corot, and one luminous and arresting Inness, a landscape with elms and a river, sunlight and haze, russet, gold, and blue. Lilah seized upon this as a reason for enthusiasm.

“My grandfather understands pictures,” Robert explained. “Even the modern fellows! I don’t. No one has ever taken the trouble to explain what they’re all about.”

“Don’t you like this?”

“Oh, yes. But Inness wasn’t a modern exactly.”

Suddenly he put his arm through Lilah’s and said: “You’re so clever. If I didn’t know what a darling you are, I’d be afraid of you. I want you to teach me all these things--what I should like, and why. I don’t want you to be ashamed of me.”

Lilah, with a pretty bend of her head, put her face against his shoulder. She was feeling mellow, generous. This house, a valuable property in Murray Hill, was soon to be hers. Going from room to room, she mentally refurnished it.

“I don’t like the house,” she said frankly. “It’s hideous--all this Victorian velvet and ebony. Horrible!”

“Lilah!”

His expression warned her. “You sweet old stupid! Of course it’s horrible.”

He stammered: “It’s a sort of--of monument to my grandmother.”

“A mausoleum,” she corrected. “We’ll change it.”

* * * * *

Miss Fuller would not go to the Point for the wedding. She had, she insisted, an important case out of town. And, with her neat traveling bag and the fur neck-piece, she started off the day before Lilah left town. She had agreed to keep the apartment and to pay the astonished agent on the first of every month.

Lilah went alone. Robert had engaged a compartment for her; she found flowers, candy, books there; _Lilah Norris_, written on Robert’s cards, thrust hastily into envelopes stamped with the names of shops internationally famous. The porter, judging from his eagerness, had been tipped. When he closed her into this walnut and green plush cell, he reminded her that he would call her at five. She would be “put off” at Peabody’s Point at five forty-five....

The train moved out of the city, boring its way through the tunnel into a twilight studded with red and green, white and topaz-yellow flashes. A glimpse of the river. Tall stacks. Then darkness, broken by suburban stations, where, for an instant, people and motors were glimpsed in a strange immobility, as if painted on the car windows.

Lilah undressed. She enjoyed the unaccustomed luxury of her traveling things, so unlike the pack she had slung across her shoulder in Switzerland. Her night-gown was sheer batiste, scalloped, threaded with white ribbon. She braided her hair, switched off the light and lay on her side, staring out of the window. The silence was clamorous, yet she could hear the beating of her own heart. She pressed her hands there, frightened.

She was going to marriage, in which, supposedly, she would never again be alone, like this.... Never again alone.... She ran her hands over her body, jealous of herself. Life, the crude fact, was unimaginable; she was aloof; somehow, she would gain time, hold herself for herself a little longer.... Outside a late moon had pierced the usual smokiness of a city sky. Trees brushed by. The odor of the flowers sent by Robert was sickish in the close room.... Lilah felt suddenly the weight of his affection, his conquest. She burned with anger, with a sort of resentment. How could he think, expect.... She thought of running away, giving him the slip.... They would find the compartment, the roses, his fatuous cards, but no Lilah. No woman. She pressed her face into the pillow and cried. She was infinitely sorry for herself, desolate. If only she were simple! If only she could love, accept, like other women!

* * * * *

In the morning she was happier, sustained by excitement.

While she dressed, she glanced out of the window at a northern landscape of carelessly cleared fields now white with daisies, patches of pine and maple, and, beyond, a range of hills, sharply outlined against a clear, white sky. Puffs of air came through the screen infinitely fresh and cool; country air. Lilah took deep breaths.

At the station, where the train stopped only long enough to let down a grinning porter and a step, Robert was waiting. He lifted her down, kissed her. She was instantly conscious of a difference in him; his coat was rough and cold; his face was red, sun-burned. And his hair, always so smooth and well-brushed, had blown askew, over his forehead. It got in his eyes and he smoothed it back with an impatience, a carelessness, new to her.

“Grandfather is waiting. The early morning air isn’t awfully good for him. He sent apologies.”

He hurried her into an open motor and the robe was adjusted about her knees. Robert drove. And again she noticed that he was in some sense more free. His hands on the wheel were casual but in control; with a quick turn of his head he scanned the road and turned north with a burst of speed startling in a man usually so hesitant and cautious.

“Five miles,” he shouted. “We live at the end of nowhere. Our property already--all these fields. Wait until you see the woods!”

The woods were somber in the morning light, green as trees are in stage-settings, immensely tall and close and straight, upon a carpet of moss and fern, wintergreen and arbutus. The road at intervals crossed a bridle-path, now and then emerging into cleared spaces where a tangle of clover, buttercups and daisies grew lush, knee-deep.

Robert brought the car to a standstill and turned to Lilah. His face was older in an unexpected seriousness. “This is all yours, Lilah. I am yours. Does it mean anything to you that I love you so? Your coming here has made me terribly happy--a queer sort of happiness, for I can’t sleep or eat. I ache for you. I want you to kiss me of your own accord....”

“Haven’t I, ever?”

“No.”

She lifted her face, but at the first light contact of her lips, he could not have told whether she loved him or not. He gave to the embrace all the feeling he craved from her. She was overwhelmed, relieved. Nothing was required of her; she need not show herself, give herself up. Not yet.... She smiled, with closed eyes....

Suddenly he let her go. Almost violently he relaxed his hold, so that she fell back and away from him.

“If you don’t love me, Lilah,” he said, in a dry voice, “say so.”

Lilah protested: “I do! What on earth makes you ask?”

Robert Peabody did not answer, but sat bent forward over the wheel, as if, at a signal from her, he would start the car and drive back to the station. His expression was terrible; somehow, she knew that he had sensed her relief in the moment just passed. She had hurt him. It wasn’t going to be altogether easy.

In a silence made poignant by a stir of branches and the early morning clamor of birds, she fought for the right words, the gesture that would reassure him. Her hand touched his sleeve, crept down to his hand clenched on the wheel. “It is all new,” she began, “strange.... It isn’t love so much that I feel, but recognition ... of you, and this place ... mine ... you might be a little patient....”

He bent swiftly and kissed her fingers. The car sprang forward into the forest again.

* * * * *

She did not glimpse the sea until they were fairly out of the wood and making a wide turn in a sort of park, where moss and fern gave way to an incredibly deep sward, smooth, emerald-green. She saw a house, another, and a sparkle of water beyond. At once she could smell the sea, kelp, sweet and sickish, salty. Robert had not spoken, but now he turned and said: “Here we are! Lilah! Home!”

He swept into a gravel driveway and under a porte-cochère.... She was getting out, rather faint, frightened now that she had committed herself.... A servant spoke to her and Robert said: “Miss Norris, Maisie.”

“How do you do, Miss Norris? I’m sure we’re all very glad.”

The hall, within, was dark--too much wood-work, and a huge, stone mantel, top-heavy. Lilah put her hand up to her hat, and, turning instinctively in search of a mirror, found herself confronting an old man.

“My grandfather,” Robert said. “This is Lilah.”

Junius Peabody was tall and very handsome, at eighty-four. He offered his hand, and Lilah, giving her own into that dry, rather bony clasp, met his eyes. They were black, deep-set, with something ironic, quizzical, in their depths, like a spark of light at the bottom of a well. He wore a heavy mustache, perhaps to hide the leanness of his cheeks. He had what Robert had missed, a flame of some sort, a feeling for things, for life, for women, for beauty.

“Lilah? May I?”

She felt his lips on her cheek, and noticed a faint odor of Cologne.

“You must be tired. Will you breakfast with us? Or, perhaps, later--”

“Breakfast, by all means,” Lilah said. “I’m not tired. I’m very excited and happy.”

She was, inexplicably, exhilarated again. The old man’s look had been appraising, and satisfied. He found her delightful. She knew this, and because she was certain that he was not easily pleased, she could afford to be flattered. He moved at her side through the house, across a large, cluttered room to a veranda, where Venetian shades were half-drawn against the brilliance of the sea in full sunlight; a table had been set for breakfast. Geraniums in boxes hedged the veranda on three sides. Beyond, a narrow garden separated the house from a pebbly beach and rocks covered with brown kelp.

“Low tide,” Junius Peabody remarked.

It was not the house she had pictured. There were no Italian gardens. But there was something substantial and vigorously assertive in the ugly width and spread of the wings, the turrets and verandas and useless, expensive ornamentation. In the Eighties this would have been a “place.” Meadows of wet kelp mingled with the fragrant spiciness of geraniums. A man servant in an apron, very old, with a crumpled mouth in a pink face, brought coffee. And Robert said: “Miss Norris, Edwin.” Lilah put just the right shade of interest into the pronouncement of the word “Edwin” with a rising inflection. She loved Edwin. She loved Junius. She loved Robert. She was conscious of being more charming, more herself, than she had ever been in a life given over to being, always, some one unlike the real Lilah. The real Lilah was a delightful, amusing, affecting little person.

Once over that moment of appraisal, Junius Peabody made it plain that he approved of her.

And after breakfast, brushing his mustache with a large cambric handkerchief, he walked with her into what he called the “greenery,” a park-like place at the back of the house away from the sea where a gardener worked among formal beds of Spring flowers. “No, Robert, you stay back--I want Lilah to myself.”

Robert disappeared and Lilah threw a kiss, very prettily, at his back.

“Robert would like to show you the kennels, but that can wait.”

Lilah said impulsively: “It was good of you to let me come here to be married. I am very alone.... The few relatives I have are in the West, and I don’t like any of them. They will not approve of my marrying so soon. But my father wouldn’t care, so why should I?”

They crossed the greenery and, without comment, Junius Peabody pointed out another house. “My son’s. He died ten years ago. We have closed the place. Robert didn’t like it. I’ll show you his house, later. Although I dare say you will want to change it, it is modern enough. This, you see, is what I call the East Aurora period; it was built in nineteen-four, when America was beginning to absorb the Morris a b c’s. Inside it is worse.... Hand-tooled by Fra Bunco....” He broke off. “What perfume is that? Sandalwood? Delicious. My dear, we are delighted to welcome you.” And before she could thank him, he began again: “I am really astonished. I didn’t expect you to be--what you are. You are very clever; I can see that. Robert won’t understand you, but that won’t matter if you see to it that he isn’t humiliated. A woman must never be conspicuously superior to her husband. I dare say you know just what you are doing.”

With a flash of anger, she said: “I am very fond of him!”

“I’m glad of that.”

They came into a small grove of pines, young trees near the sea, and on the shore, built upon the dunes, she saw another, smaller house, gray-shingled with gray blinds and stone chimneys. This, she realized, was to be her home. At first glance, it seemed a desolate place; there was no garden, only the white sand blown into little hills, and glistening, thick blades of dune grass and, beyond, the sea. Always keen to beauty, she resented the uncompromising grayness of the house. “The blinds should be blue,” she said quickly, “and there should be yellow and blue awnings and a brick terrace at the back with hydrangeas in pots. Why not a wall on this side and turf and some poplars?”

Junius Peabody laughed. “You must ask Robert. He will do anything you suggest. He is very much in love with you.... I think you two will make a go of it if you won’t be impatient. Robert will be stubborn if you criticize him. He isn’t as simple or as pliable as he seems, on the surface, to be. His father, not I, was responsible for his career. My son had no more sense of the beautiful than his house indicates; he lived only to serve my creation, Peabody and Sons. He never loved or needed to love. He quite literally worked himself to death and collapsed in harness. But he wanted Robert to do the same thing, and, to prepare him, sent him to a boys’ school at Territet and then to Columbia! And then, by way of hardening him, a trip around the world! For one year before his father died, Robert sat in an office in the Peabody Building in Boston, staring out of the window.... It might have been, in the end, a tragedy.”