Part 5

He took her arm. “Let’s go back. Robert will want you, and I don’t like the sun.”

* * * * *

That night she talked to him again. A mist had come up, opaque, chilly, and at intervals a buoy beyond the reef tolled like a ship’s bell. A fire was lighted in the drawing-room, and Lilah, in a gown of disturbing simplicity, very short, faced Junius Peabody. He had the outlines she most admired, a distinguished thinness; his wrists and ankles were characteristic, slender. His elegance was stressed; he had not Robert’s unawareness; the details of Junius Peabody’s dress were, to the least fold of a tie, considered, epicurean. And this ceremony somehow detracted from his age, gave him an appearance not in the least jaunty, but vivacious. When Lilah dressed for dinner, she chose her gown for him, not for Robert; she had found, in Junius, an audience appreciative of those things Robert overlooked. She thought: “While he’s alive, I shall be happy here. I like him because he won’t give in to being old. He never apologizes.” She had, she knew, brought him something he longed for and was too proud to seek, youth and the little drama of furbelows and perfumes, ribbons and silk stockings. She was pert enough to amuse him. He would have despised a sentimental woman.

Robert left them again. One of his favorite dogs had developed a distemper and he went away, wrapped in a great coat, to spend a watchful night beside a box full of straw where the silver gray bitch lay on her side, panting. Robert’s face was puckered with regret and humiliation. “I know you’ll think I’m a fool! But that dog’s damned sick, Lilah.”

When he had gone, Junius Peabody said: “In my day, Edwin would have sat up with the dog. Love isn’t what it used to be.”

“I don’t mind,” Lilah said. “Grace Fuller warned me.”

“She did, did she?” The old man jerked in his chair. “Unpleasant female. I never liked her. She made me feel that my illusions were hocus-pocus, rubbish. As if she had spotted all my weaknesses and could put her finger on them, the way those osteopath chaps pick out sore spots on your spine. Here, vanity. There, arrogance. And down the line.”

He chose a cigar from a silver box at his elbow.

“I don’t want the truth. At my age, it’s dangerous. I am like a twist of paper that has gone up in flames; the shape remains, but at a touch will crumble away.... Excuse me, my dear. I do not often mention my age. After all, I may live twenty years, and I must not shrink from the dust too soon.”

He reflected, with a curious gratification, that he was at last very safe from life, because he no longer cared what happened to him--nothing _could_ happen. He was free from his old restless curiosity, his desire to be always in contact with experience.

“You, my dear, are still seeking the unattainable. Immeasurably superior--old age! You want big happenings; I am content with little happenings. Thank God, I’m not a dyspeptic ... men who understand food never are. I’ve never bolted, like these modern business men. To be appreciated, done justice, breakfast must be given half an hour, luncheon an hour, dinner two hours. There’s something vulgar in this dishing up and gobbling down.... Robert says you’re a good cook.”

“I am,” Lilah admitted.

“You must make something for me. Even a potato--boiled with art--Consider the slow, the exquisite processes of its growth! The earth must be turned, the seed planted. Then the feathery stalks, the white blossoms, the root upturned, the gathering.... Some conception of the potato must be in the seed, an immortal thought contained within the physical means of realization. Very comforting, that idea! It gives one at least the security of divine attention. Could there have been, before I was at all, a picture of me, dry as dust, tall and gaunt, with this mustache? Perhaps! The finished product must be contained in the germ, irrevocable, bound to materialize.”

“Fatalist!” Lilah cried.

“Otherwise, wouldn’t an onion grow into an oak tree, a toad into an eagle, a mushroom into a man? The intention must be there along with the cell structure! Stay as you are, my dear--you are a lovely celestial mistake, an orchid grown into a woman!”

He was very particular about his cigar--a mild panetela with an easy pull. He sliced off the tip with a pen-knife, squeezed slowly between thumb and forefinger, held the cigar against the light, took it between his lips, sucked, closed his eyes, and, opening them suddenly, applied the match.

“Havana,” he said. “I smoked my first cigar in Hergesheimerland.... But I mustn’t go back! Old men are always doing that, perhaps because youth takes on a patina with years.”

“Were you happy?” Lilah asked.

“Never! Avid. Insatiable. Restless. Always goaded by desire--but not happy. Now, at eighty-four, I know how to live. I know that familiarity is more precious than novelty, and that relaxation is sweeter than distraction.”

Lilah shook her head. “I don’t believe you. You are as eager as I am, perhaps more so.”

“The world of men is behind--the world of spirit opens up. You don’t believe that, either. Wait until you are alone with yourself--if you out-live your family, as I have. My wife, Minnie, my two brothers, my son. Robert doesn’t count. He is a remote descendant.”

“You won’t die,” Lilah said.

“I may,” he admitted, with a smile faintly ironic. “Although I have always believed that I neither would nor could! The earth is too sweet and I have loved ... everything. Other men don’t. They die complaining of a lack, where I have found a surfeit of beauty. For twenty years I’ve been burying people who didn’t love enough, little disappointed people, jealous, enraged, all of them! Because youth had gone! Youth!”

He stood up. And with that quick, faintly unsteady gait, he went to the mantel, staring up at the portrait of a young man in a black coat, a white waist-coat and tie who sat, stiff and somehow violent, in a red velvet chair. The thick, black brows almost met above the bridge of the nose; the lips were full, both sensual and ironic; the eyes small and dark. A dark skin stained with red--

“They used to say I was ‘foreign’ looking. And I was proud of it. My wife rather disapproved.”

He sat down again, stroking his chin. “Poor Minnie! Poor girl! To be foreign wasn’t quite respectable in the ’Sixties. But there you have me--young! And miserable.”

“Why miserable?”

“What do you know about love?” he demanded suddenly. “Pretty minx, sitting there with your cigarette, talking to me when you should be out in the fog with your lover. You modern women are as cold as ice. You’re not normal. Nothing about you is rational except your love of finery. I have a streak of it in myself. I can remember my wife’s night gowns where I have forgotten her opinions. You haven’t changed in _that_. So many scents and sachets, little scissors, sticks, powders, essences, curls, bandoline and brilliantine, creams and rouges. Precious things put away in drawers, wrapped in tissue-paper, hidden in boxes! Rites of beauty! For men? For love? Instinct? Nothing else is left--”

He broke off. Lilah watched the fire-light strike flashes in the buckles of her slippers. What an amusing old sensualist! What was he trying to prove? That he hadn’t loved his wife or that she didn’t love Robert?

“I won’t argue,” she said. “Women _are_ different. Why not? They are no longer deceived about love....”

“Ah.” He stared at her down his nose.

“There isn’t time for loving nowadays.” Lilah insisted. “Not your sort.”

“My sort?”

“I realize--”

“What you youngsters _don’t_ realize,” he interrupted, with a touch of anger, “is that the old are unchanged, within. The casing is rusty, but the springs and wheels are as good as ever. What makes us different is our nearness to death. We don’t change, otherwise.”

He rose again and beckoned to her. “Come into the library; I want to show you something.”

As she followed him, he said: “This isn’t my taste. My wife controlled the furnishing of our houses--a Victorian feminine prerogative.”

“I know. I have seen the house in Murray Hill.”

“I never live there. It is cruelly innocent.”

“May I change it?”

“Of course.”

“Then you aren’t sentimental.”

He stroked his chin, again Lilah saw that look of rather Hogarthian humor.

“My wife was a dear little soul. She loved me; she disapproved of me; she died for me, not guessing, thank God, that she had never entered my imagination.... This tobacco jar was my grand-uncle Stephen’s. He brought it from England, a hundred years ago.”

He paused in the hall. “A few of these things are mine. If I could count on twenty years, I’d build the sort of house I like. These Chippendale chairs--gratifying, aren’t they? That ship’s model over the door--a full-rigged whaler! And this jade; milky, like moonlight.... The Chinese are real craftsmen. ‘White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, ringed with blue lines--’ Eh? Why not? Better than hymns and prayers and incantations. Now you know how spiritual I am! If love of this sort of thing is pagan, then I am pagan, and proud of it. I would rather carve a piece of jade into such loveliness than save a soul....”

He opened a door and Lilah preceded him into a room smaller than the others. A coal-fire had burned low in a shallow grate. There were several lamps, easy chairs and many shelves of books.

Lilah put her pointed slipper on the fender and glanced up at him. “Your room?”

He said: “It’s quiet, and everything is mine. That picture up there is by Kent.”

“I don’t like it. It’s too frosty.”

“How about this Shinn?”

“Naughty!” Lilah exclaimed, rather shocked by the naked little woman in a garden hat who was reading a French novel. “Do you like it?”

“Very much.”

Suddenly he tossed the unfinished cigar into the grate. “Sit down. I want to tell you something. Something very personal. About myself. I’ve never told any one. It needn’t embarrass you. But it might help you.”

He went to a writing desk that was closed, and, producing a key from his watch-chain, he unlocked the top and opened it. It seemed to Lilah that he was a bit unsteady. Perhaps so much talk wasn’t good for him. He turned, holding a small package of letters, the envelopes, inscribed to Junius Peabody in a big, square hand, bearing the stamp of Italy like a seal. “I can recapture,” he said, “the old magic, just by touching these letters.... They are letters from a woman.... They have nothing to do with my wife, or my son, or Robert. But they have everything to do with people like ourselves.”

He sat down in the chair facing hers; sank back, still holding the slender packet of letters. He seemed, in an odd way, to be conjuring up some memory, summoning back a great happening that had grown dim in outline. For a moment, she thought he had ceased to breathe. Then, in a rather broken voice, he began to tell her what he saw:

* * * * *

He was in Venice, Venice still under the shadow of the Austrian eagle, yet, as always, incomparable; a city of bizarre façades reflected in salty lagoons; nothing classical--he despised neo-classicism--but cupids, garlands, fore-shortened goddesses, golden! He had sensed the Venice of Longhi, thank God! Of Titian. Of Veronese. These catapulting Venuses and rampant Mars, these lions and gilt domes and love-songs! Nothing mattered save his own recognition of beauty. And for a while it bowled him over.

A woman was part of it, touched by the same unreality, removed from all experience.

He had left Minnie, his wife, that summer, in this very house, while he went off to Europe chasing rainbows.

The quest had been much deeper than that, only he had been afraid to acknowledge it. Rainbows were no part of his need; he was in pursuit of the intangible justification, something Minnie could not give him. Minnie was life. He wanted, as he supposed all such men sooner or later want, the illusion of life.

In Venice, he had met the woman. No need to tell Lilah her name; that would be beyond the point. She had put him right again, reaching delicately, expertly, into his spirit, setting his psychic house in order.

How? He didn’t know. She was a woman of women, sane, fearless, magnificent.

A week only. Out of a lifetime, he reflected, this seemed meager compensation. Yet he supposed that few men had had as much. A week in Longhi’s Venice with a woman in whom purity wore a lace mask; a woman strangely aloof, strangely seductive, possessed of a miraculous and unbroken mystery. She had loved him and had told him nothing of herself.

He remembered her, wearing white; he could not recall the style, but people stared at her. She was a tawny woman, dark-skinned, tall, with topaz eyes, and she moved with a sort of slow grace--every pose an immortal loveliness. A foreigner. That something “foreign” in him had leaped to the encounter. So, at least, he justified his passion. They seldom spoke. It had been, nevertheless, communion. Everything about her delighted him--her jewels, her parasols, her perfumes. She was distinguished.

Yet she could play her part in their brief personal drama like an artist, delighting in him, in their climaxes, their interludes, their sure approach to the inevitable finale, savoring each detail. What a woman! He had had no twinge of conscience; almost, he had forgotten Minnie. He had had his week. No vulgarity. No reproaches. No questioning. Beauty.

Well....

She had gone.

These three letters, written from Belaggio. Then, no more, as it should have been!

“There must be some reason, my dear, for these glimpses. A divine tantalization, perhaps. Souls led to heaven as a donkey follows a carrot to the crest of a hill.... Some day you will love this way. Wouldn’t it be wiser to wait? You are very like me.”

Lilah stood up with a quick, almost violent gesture of rebellion. “No! How can you?”

A door opened out from the library to the veranda. Lilah threw it back and ran outside.

The veranda was wet, and a heavy mist poured in from the sea. Lilah crossed the garden and hurried toward the kennels along a narrow gravel path. The mist stung her bare arms, drenched her hair, soaked through the thin soles of her slippers.

Some one loomed out of the shadows and she recognized Robert, still in his great-coat, bare-headed.

He cried: “Lilah!” And, startled, blocked the path.

Lilah caught his arm. “Robert. Kiss me again. Again. Make me kiss you.... I want to! I want to! Your grandfather’s wrong. I’ll love you. Kiss me.”

They clung together. Her emotion, her fear, became desire. She could not see Robert’s face; his restless hands slipped down her arms to her waist, back again to her shoulders. She cried, pressing herself against him: “Robert!”

“Poor little girl. Poor little Lilah. It’s all right....”

Her lips against his, her arms pinioned, she thought: “I love him. That detestable old man.... This is love--_this_.”

Aloud, she asked again: “Do you love me?”

For answer, he lifted her clear of the ground and held her, so that she could hear his heart and her own, beating together.

IV

There was no going back now, and Lilah went forward swiftly, forgetting, in the excitement of the wedding, her hours of doubt. She clung to the memory of that moment in the fog; it was at once a disguise and a justification. To Junius Peabody she had said simply: “I promise you; it will be all right.”

She was married one morning, out-of-doors, before an altar made of syringa bloom. For this occasion, Robert’s Aunt Whiteside came from some Virginia spa, caparisoned, as Junius Peabody put it, like a Christmas tree. She found Lilah a “useless ornament.” And said so in an astonishing bass voice.

There was nothing fashionable about this wedding. A few friendly, rather shy and inarticulate people, appeared for the ceremony, were introduced, and disappeared immediately.

Lilah kissed Junius, noticed again the odor of Cologne, and was hurried away toward the traditional honeymoon in Robert’s motor ... Portland ... Bath ... Bar Harbor.... It would soon be over and she could be herself....

Six months later she was established in Thirty-eighth Street.

A small army of decorators occupied the doorstep and besieged Lilah by letter and telephone. And Mrs. Junius Peabody’s Victorianism was pulled up, literally, by the roots. Gilt-framed mirrors went headlong down the “stoop” into moving vans. Chinese porcelains and top-heavy vases disappeared into barrels. Mantels were ripped out, parquet floors became, in some instances, black and white tiles, in others smooth painted surfaces. Tabourettes, gilded what-nots, ponderous buffets vanished on the backs of moving men, and the discreet marbles and pedestaled bronzes were banished to heaven knows what storage vault.

“No one would _buy_ these things,” Lilah explained. “You couldn’t _give_ them away! The Ladies’ Home Journal has changed all that. I’m not sure whether what they’ve got is any better, but at least it’s no worse.”

“I liked it,” Robert said. “It was cozy.”

Lilah sniffed.

During the reconstruction they lived on the top floor, in rooms occupied in Mrs. Junius Peabody’s era by servants. Lilah had painted the furniture herself and had hung at the windows curtains of glazed chintz--parrots, cabbage roses and gay Kundry-blooms. Robert slept in a cottage bed beneath a quilted spread and shaved peering into a crackled mirror. He was vaguely uncomfortable and dubious. Beneath him, the familiar house of his childhood was disintegrating, falling to pieces. One by one the precious familiarities disappeared. But if it pleased Lilah, why, for God’s sake, on with the game!

What it all meant was beyond Robert’s comprehension. His mother had been content to spend half a lifetime with walnut and plush.... And why all the fuss about the front door, the brownstone steps?

“But they’re _hideous_,” Lilah cried. “_No one_ has them! Every house on the block, except ours, has an English front.”

Robert shrugged his shoulders, and a month later the stone façade became a brick façade; the steps gave way to a white doorway with a fan grill, and window boxes planted with evergreens added that touch of a Mayfair dwelling. It was all very discreet, and, to Robert, very startling. He could not believe his eyes. He wrote to his grandfather that Thirty-eighth Street was “jolly giddy.”

Lilah was supremely happy. She wore chintz aprons and bound her hair in silk, as if she were gardening. Her eyes had a critical, appraising look. Robert never saw her unless he pursued her to the top of a step-ladder or forced his way through the ranks of decorators. These people frightened him; they had such an air--as if they thought and spoke in symbols. It was a secret order to which, apparently, Lilah had been initiated, for she tossed off the phraseology with a reckless, and sometimes condescending, carelessness.

“Isn’t it too delicious? This needle-point? Miss de Blauvelt wants brocade, but I insisted....”

“It’s rather--pale,” Robert said lamely.

“Nonsense. It’s exquisite.... The panels are to be painted all the way to the ceiling. Ships and cliffs and trees and great folds of silk, like Claude Lorraine, with steps, you know”--she made a gesture--“and funny clouds.”

She pulled him by the hand. “Come into the dining-room--I want you to see something. It’s here! The Venetian glass.... Look! Look!”

Robert said guardedly: “Purple glass? What for?”

“For use, silly.”

“And what are these--vegetables?”

“For the console--they’re merely decorative.”

“But I don’t like them!”

“Never mind. You will, when everything is finished! An Aubusson rug. Gray walls. A great mirror, cut in squares, here. An enameled table with strips of old lace or brocade. Your grandfather’s Boucher here. A screen, there. And crystal--”

“Lilah! Lilah!”

Robert picked his way through plaster, lathes, packing-cases and excelsior whenever he left the house to go to the dubious comfort of his Club. He wanted the country, his dogs, his old green sweater. But if Lilah was happy....

And Lilah happy was less difficult than Lilah unhappy. At the Point, during the summer, there had been days when she was too restive to be quite comfortable. He was to blame for something; eventually he discovered that he was to blame for liking the out-of-doors. The implication was vague. Whenever Robert let himself go, Lilah would say: “Beautiful? Yes?” As if there were some reason for resentment. When Robert discovered that she wanted New York, and Thirty-eighth Street, he capitulated at once. But he had faced mysterious rebuffs, inexplicable moods, hurts that were more damnable for being beyond analysis. He had wondered. He had questioned himself. He had, more than once, blamed himself. For what? Why, for failing her somehow! He hated to see that look of resentful discontent. He was ashamed of being happy! And this was a new sensation. He had always been happy. But he encountered the feminine rebellion against a mood which does not exactly match her own; and at last depressed by the atmosphere of blame, he gave way to temper, flung himself down and hid his head in his arms. Then, Lilah had been repentant; he felt her hand on his hair. “Robert, what’s the matter?” He had not answered. And Lilah had kissed the back of his neck and had called him “cross old Bobsie.”

With New York an accomplished fact, and the woods, the rocks, exchanged for a sultry October in town, she was gracious, delightful.

Robert promised himself that he would never again deprive Lilah of anything. She was worthy of the most unselfish behavior.... He adored her.... He would do anything to hear her call him “cross old Bobsie.”

He made the mistake of becoming his most cheerful, his most optimistic self.

* * * * *

The panels were to be done by an American artist, a man famous for the facility of his execution; he painted like a fury. One day you had the cartoons, in red chalk--a swirl of draperies, figures of long-limbed, rather sheep-like women and top-heavy columns in the Tiepolo manner. The next, a finished canvas.

Robert began to stumble over this Elmer Shawhan in his comings and goings. He had none of the trappings Robert expected of painters, but worked in a disreputable coat, collarless. He was small and agile, Irish, with the head of a vaudeville actor and the feet of a Brazilian dancer.

Lilah found him violent and amusing.

“I despise women,” he told her, “but I can’t keep away from ’em. It’s their drawing--ankles and knees and long arms and necks. They’re so damned graceful.”

He was sitting on a scaffold ten feet above her head, dangling a pair of patent pumps and ankles encased in sheer silk socks. Lilah’s walls were already transformed. Shawhan painted the panels in his studio and mounted them himself.

Lilah could not rest until she found out whether he considered her pretty. He made her feel dumpy and too blonde, because the women he painted were like fresh strawberries mounted on long silk legs. No woman had legs like that....

“I know,” he said. “I paint legs plus the universal male exaggeration of their importance. That’s why my stuff sells. I got seventy-five thousand dollars for covering a millionaire’s home with silk stockings and frillies. He thinks he likes it because it’s art.”

“Isn’t it?” Lilah demanded.

“My stuff? Of course not. Mister Tiepolo of New York! No, I’m clever. I have a certain facility, that’s all. I learned to draw when I was a cub reporter on a southern daily--I had to make quick sketches of murders, suicides, hangings and celebrities; President Cleveland in the morning and Lulu the opium-queen in the afternoon. I _had_ to draw! Then I came to New York and drew New York. Slums and ‘L’ stations and bums in the park and snow and fire-engines and horse ’buses. In those days New York was a _place_. Twenty years ago....”

“I was seven,” Lilah interrupted.

“Well, I wasn’t! I was twenty-three. And what I had you’ll never have.”

“Why?”