Part 6

“It doesn’t exist any more. You’ll never see Ethel Barrymore in ‘Captain Jinks’ with those eyes of hers and that bass voice and that Barrymore bend. Davis was on the crest of the wave and Gibson was immortalizing the shirtwaist. It meant something in those days to be tailored in England and to wear the kind of shoes I wear--look at ’em--no tips--soft as a glove! Davis and I wore wing collars when it was considered degenerate, and we carried canes in the face of public ridicule and private envy. Stanford White was building glorious houses. Most of us were in love with Minnie Ashley. Talk about the age of innocence! Clyde Fitch, Maxine Elliot, Elsie de Wolfe and Clara Bloodgood.... I could name a dozen. We were the American aristocracy of wit. What we said and did was shocking and unique. It was worth while being clever because almost no one was. To live in Gramercy Park, to eat at the old Café Martin and _not_ to wear pads in your shoulders--”

He went back to his canvas with a sort of violence.

“I object to to-day because every one is superficially clever! And there are ten geniuses to one, twenty years ago, men who can write colossal novels about the war; men you’ve never heard of, like Dos Passos, producing a sort of heroic poem, every verse beginning and ending with Goddam! Gorgeous! And chaps like Manship and Simonson. And Bellows. And God knows who--there are thousands of ’em.”

“Well?” Lilah said, being very Russian with her cigarette.

Shawhan came down the ladder. He had a most engaging and roguish smile. With the neck of his shirt turned in, he was more Byronesque than vaudevillian; he would have been romantic if he had not looked out at you through eyes so initiated and so skeptical.

“And there you are! Genius is a drug on the market.”

“Then you’re asking too much for these panels,” Lilah said sweetly.

“I’m a specialist,” was his shrewd reply, “not a genius. I have cashed in on my facility. You’re paying, not for my work, but for my name. When people come into this room, they will know who decorated your walls and your stock will jump!”

“How did you manage it?” Lilah asked.

He smiled. “The New York way. A very exotic house and studio. Two marriages with famous and temperamental women both of whom divorced me, quite amicably. A dash of scandal. Parties every one wanted to get to because they were both beautiful and risquè and the guests were limited.... Thirty, no less, no more! An impassioned, and anonymous, press agent. Kissing the finger-tips of such women as you. Getting the reputation of being a misogynist. _And legs!_”

Lilah laughed. “And now?”

“You pay for it.”

“And you?”

“It doesn’t leave much to believe in, does it? That’s why I sneeze when people drag in art. Art! Oh, my God. The whole thing is an elaborate hoax. You want these walls--these lovely empty spaces--filled with something gracious, pretty, to harmonize with your furniture and your lamp-shades.”

“Oh, no--” Lilah interrupted.

“Oh, yes! I beg pardon. Yes! Your husband wouldn’t live with a wall by Michelangelo--big, fat torsos and bumpy females and snakes. And how would you look, in that gown, against a Gaugin jungle? Be honest.”

“Well--”

“You go to Miss de Blauvelt. She wants to sell you some Louis Quatre chairs and one of those French sofas, an escritoire and a five hundred dollar footstool. So she looks through her mental card-index and says: ‘French. Shawhan.’ Then she phones me. I get the specifications and the limitations and the architects’ blue-prints. I go to the Palais Royal and make sketches on the back of the menu-card. Mrs. Robert Peabody’s Louis Quatre drawing-room for November twenty-eighth. Lots of pink. A swing, with four Watteau ladies and satin garters, a poodle on a yellow cushion, some fuzzy trees, a cupid on a pedestal and five hundred yards of Alice Blue silk looped back with Fragonard tassels. One Tiepolo column, one Boucher bosom and a knot of flowers.”

“You’re disgusting,” Lilah said.

“This is the Twentieth Century,” he reminded her, “and you are living in New York.”

He backed away from his work, twisting the ladder aside. “What do you think of it?”

“I like it. I believe you do. Isn’t your contempt a part of your business manner?”

“Don’t you see--all this is very sad?” he remarked. “What I’ve told you--what I am and what you are, and our buying and selling this way--” He broke off. “Yes, I like it,” he admitted.

He stood, his hands on his hips, his head tilted, staring at the exquisite thing he had somehow summoned out of his staleness and disillusionment. Into his expression something mocking appeared to contradict his absorption.

“Some day,” he said, “I shall decorate a pork-packer’s ballroom. Two hundred thousand down and no interference! I shall paint what I like--a series of cartoons--sky-scrapers, flappers, head-waiters, taxicabs, chorus girls, Jews and fashionable women, cabarets, streets, theaters and--the whole mess! Wouldn’t it be gorgeous? A parade, all the way around the ballroom, where my pork-packer had expected nymphs in panniers?”

Lilah tossed her cigarette away and yawned. “I see. You’re an artist, after all. And a humbug.”

He laughed, and their eyes met with appreciation.

“Perhaps,” Lilah suggested, “you’ll put me into that cartoon.”

His glance deepened; his expression changed; as if he sensed the trap laid down by her, he said dryly: “Perhaps.”

* * * * *

Lilah told Robert that Elmer Shawhan was an egoist.

“Probably,” Robert said. “He looks it.”

“Why? Because he is spectacular?”

Robert sensed opposition. “Why, yes. His hair--”

“Externals!” Lilah cried.

“That’s one of your phrases, Lilah. Don’t trip me unfairly. Hair _is_ an external, but the way a man cuts it is indicative of something internal. I suspect your artist of being what you call him, an egoist, because he has patiently cultivated a pompadour. Now, whiskers--”

Lilah put her fingers in her ears.

As the house began to take form and to emerge from the chaos of reconstruction into a very harmonious and comfortable air of permanence, Lilah discovered that she was being too extravagant. The bills for all this mannered luxury began to appear, statements that had a matter-of-fact coldness, a finality. She must face, placate Robert, make him see, as always, in smaller things, her rightness.

Miss de Blauvelt had an exaggerated and flattering conception of the wealth of her clients. She was accustomed to magnificence and munificence. She spent other people’s money, Lilah discovered, with the largest possible gesture, and then added her own fee, a compensation out of all proportion to her services; she was “cheeky” in a way too subtle for rebuff.

With a graceful sweep of her hands, she would say: “I can do a delightful boudoir for ten thousand. Not perfect, of course--for _that_--but modern and witty, a perverse little room. Leave it to me. You don’t mind?”

The names of social celebrities flowed in and out of the stream of her talk like minnows. She knew every one. Lilah gathered that at her own house at Dinard she gathered together the froth of fashionable and artistic Europe--skimmed off the cream for her own amusement. With this woman, business seemed to be an excuse for indulging in extravagances. The account, rendered before the workmen were out of the house, staggered Lilah. She had, she realized, spent a fortune. Her heart contracted and the blood rushed to her face, receding to leave her trembling, frightened, sick. She had no idea how she was going to face Robert with this fact--it was done; there was no going back. She should have consulted him. The whole thing suggested a sort of vulgar eagerness on her part, a head-long impatience. And she had made it only too evident that Robert bored her. She must go back, patiently, and try to understand herself and him, prepare him, somehow, for this preposterous bill headed simply De Blauvelt, Interiors, Paris, New York.

Miss de Blauvelt appeared on the following day to make what proved to be a final inspection of her handiwork. Lilah, caught unawares, felt at a disadvantage in the presence of this compact little cosmopolitan. There was something decidedly challenging in the frivolity of her beautiful feet and ankles and the whiteness of her hair. She was an old woman sustained by the success and color of her life. Everything had been done that could be done by science and art to preserve, make permanent, her famous slimness, her provocative and ugly features, her _chic_. The result was not quite human; there were no wrinkles, no visible signs of age; in the transparent mask of her face, only her eyes seemed to be alive, black, intelligent and cruel. She never smiled and Lilah decided that she couldn’t; plastic surgery had deprived her of animation. She wore a tube-like dress, short in the fashion of the moment, a turban of dyed metallic cloth and the curious square-toed, clumsy, strapped slippers affected by the Parisian _mondaine_.

“Well? You like it?” she demanded.

“Very much.”

“You had better let me do your country place before I go back to France.”

Lilah said decidedly: “Thanks. No.”

“Why not?”

“Your bill was exorbitant.”

Miss de Blauvelt’s eyes came around with a pounce. “Nonsense. I was more than charitable! If you expected department store economies--”

She broke off. “Surely, you understood--”

“Oh, yes,” Lilah said hurriedly. “But I shan’t undertake another--not now.”

“You must come to Dinard,” Miss de Blauvelt said in an even voice; “I live there with two amusing and talented women, a sculptress and a pianiste. It’s very simple and very beautiful.”

She made an expressive gesture. “This is my last house in America. You may tell every one so. It will give your interior a peculiar luster and perhaps reconcile you to the expense.”

And with a nod, she walked quickly out, and across the pavement to her motor.

* * * * *

Lilah spent the rest of the afternoon at her desk adding up a list of bills, De Blauvelt, Shawhan, plumbers, painters, masons, upholsterers, warehouses, rugs, electricians, florists, contractors....

She was interrupted by a servant, a new acquisition like everything else, who said: “Miss Fuller” in a dubious voice as if he were weary of ushering in tradespeople and nobodies.

Lilah turned with relief. She hated details. She almost ran forward to meet Grace Fuller, who came into the room unruffled and casual, as she had entered the flat in Ninth Street.

Lilah forgot the bills in the excitement of displaying her possessions. And as Grace Fuller followed her from room to room she felt her enthusiasm mounting. For the first time her dreams seemed to be concrete, her security certain. Her feet slipped along the rugs with a luxurious appreciation of their softness. Grace Fuller followed, saying very little. But then she never did have any enthusiasm. She might be regretting--poor soul! This warmth and glow, after the room in Ninth Street, the gas-log, the oak table, the green lamp and her father’s chair, worn hollow.

“It’s quite like you,” Grace Fuller said. “Purry. I feel stroked myself. Tea? By all means. I’m dog-tired.... New York all summer--heat that withered the geraniums on the fire escape! I had to open the dumb-waiter door for ventilation....”

She lighted a cigarette. “How’s Robert?”

“Awfully well.”

Lilah busied herself with cups and saucers. She did not care to discuss Robert. But Grace Fuller said: “He hates New York at this time of year.”

“He has his club.”

“Has he?”

“Are you being disagreeable?”

“I don’t think so. I want you to be happy, and it seems to me that you are doing figure eights around the danger sign.... In November, the Maine natives go down East for deer. Robert always hunts with his gang of Perkins and Littlefields and Brewsters. Hasn’t he told you?”

“We have been married less than six months. He wouldn’t leave me,” Lilah said concisely.

“He would, if you gave him the least little push! He wanted a moose this year.”

Abruptly, she changed the subject. She told Lilah that she was very nearly worn out. It seemed to be her fortune to get nothing but “hopeless cases,” invalids engaged in the long-drawn-out process of dying by inches. She had had to witness so much poor, human suffering, to face the mute or the querulous questions of people who “had to know.” “The ones who suffer most are the ones who want to stay. They seem to love life. They’re so futile, so pathetic! I’ve listened for hours to women who could remember every detail of their girlhood--how pretty they were, and the number of tucks on their graduation dress, and all about their wedding day: what he said and the cinders on the honeymoon journey, and how he took the littlest, weeniest bite out of the lobe of her ear.... They want it all back again! I’m dog-tired, trying to get it for them. When they die, they give me just the funny, accusing look that boy in France gave me.”

“Poor Grace.”

“I’d like to nurse an alcoholic case or a pretty actress with the mumps. Something to amuse me. I don’t understand death. I wish I did. To put us here, to inform us that our stay is limited, to offer no proof of immortality--it’s damnable! Animals don’t know, do they? They’re afraid of being hurt, but do they know, when they’re old enough to know anything, that some day, no matter how brave and quick they are, they’ve got to give it all up?”

Lilah twisted her shoulders. “For heaven’s sake, Grace, be cheerful.”

“I can’t. I live in an atmosphere of dread and tip-toeing. Doctors tip-toeing in and out. Relatives tip-toeing in and out. And the poor creature on the bed yearning for life! I’m no good any more. A rebellious nurse had better stop nursing. I’m going to stop, and come back again when I have found something to offer them.”

Lilah had been turning a new idea over in her mind. Sparring for time, she said: “You can’t justify death, Grace.”

“I might. I sometimes think it is more justifiable than life.”

“Don’t be bitter.”

“I’m not.” Grace Fuller put her tea-cup down. Her expression was excited, she flushed and clasped her hands together as she always did when she felt anything deeply. “It seems such a waste of power. Youth, with all that energy. A wave of youth rising up in every generation and spending itself against the facts of life. Why must it be? I remember, when I was a child, how wonderful it all seemed, fields and clouds, and wind. Even the seasons were exciting; when the first snow came, I was in ecstasy, watching the landscape change. Something was always waiting for me. I never knew, or cared to know what--but if I were to open my eyes wide or stretch out my hand, there it would be--shining and glorious, mine!”

She relaxed and sank back, the old cynical look reappearing, as if she had lost hope again.

“I’m a fool. It happens to everybody.”

Lilah turned quickly and asked: “Would you have been happier with Robert?”

That slow flush remounted. “No.”

“Then I want you to do something for me. I’m swamped with details, correspondence, bills, people I don’t want to see and people I must see. I need some one to help me. Some one, like you, who has a good telephone voice and decent manners. Will you try it? Please don’t say no! I hate talking business, but I assure you you won’t lose anything. You can rent the flat in Ninth Street and come here. Now that the second floor is finished, you can have our quarters on the third. The servants are on the fourth.”

Seeing Robert in the doorway, Lilah called to him: “Hello! Just in time for tea! Grace is going to be my secretary. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Robert took Grace Fuller’s hand and bent down a little to smile at her. “I’m glad,” he said.

“Then I’ll come,” Grace Fuller answered.

Robert sat down beside Lilah on the narrow French sofa that bulked so conspicuously as an item in the De Blauvelt account. He seemed heavier than usual, very pink from his walk across town in a sharp November wind. His eyes had that untroubled expression which particularly irritated Lilah because it was an indication of profound inner content. She did not want him to be contented, to take for granted her love, as if a gift so inestimable could be accepted easily. Something warned her to keep her temper; if Grace Fuller were watching for a rift in the lute she would be disappointed.

She may have made a mistake in asking this waspish woman to live under the same roof. Strangely enough, the prospect excited her. Without Grace Fuller, there would be no rebound to life. She could fling her challenge: “See what I am, what I have become,” at this surface, and catch, in the deepening irony of the other, her own particular shimmer and brilliance. Lacking Junius Peabody, who was desirable because he enjoyed watching Lilah wrestle with destiny, Grace Fuller would be the necessary audience. To know that she had loved Robert would make Robert more endurable. Grace would pore over his stamp-albums and condone his canine complex and perhaps read aloud to him the terrible books he preferred, murder mysteries and western melodramas: “Nothing like a crackerjack mystery, Lilah! Now this chap, Jenkins, was locked up in a house on the Hudson and there was a sort of secret passage leading down to the river--”

Lilah came back with a start to the unfamiliar outlines of her drawing-room. Robert was being very genial and talkative. His enameled boots caught the fire-light. Lilah’s eyes rested on his hands; she noticed for the first time the breadth and strength of his fingers, the blond hair on the backs of his hands. Whenever she came in contact with the physical, she felt revulsion. She would have preferred a disembodied Robert, or no Robert at all. She turned her eyes away with a little shiver of apprehension....

When Grace Fuller had gone, Lilah sat for a long time in silence. Robert lighted a cigarette mounted in a long tortoise-shell holder with a gold mouth-piece. One hand rested over hers. She wondered what he was thinking, whether he liked the room, the house, this brand-new air of expensive perfection. The sound of his breathing, heavy and regular, was audible above the muffled rumble of traffic in the street. A servant removed the tea things and drew the shades, kindling lights here and there on tables and against the paneled walls.

“Do you like it?” she said at last.

Robert moved. His answer came with the usual slow marshaling of facts and words: “Shall I tell you the truth? I prefer the old house at the Point.” His hand tightened over hers; she tried to draw her fingers away, but he held them within his. “I’ve hurt you! But you don’t want me to be a lap-dog, do you? Must I bark every time you say: ‘Speak, Fido’?”

“Why didn’t you tell me so in the beginning? did you let me spend all this money?”

“Because I love you,” he said simply.

“Do you?”

“Very much.”

Lilah hurried to the issue. “I’ve spent thousands and thousands. For something you hate--”

“I know very little about such matters,” he said. “I left it to you to re-furnish the house. I expected a certain expense. Ten or twenty thousand--”

“I’ve spent forty thousand,” Lilah said, trying to keep her voice steady.

There was a short silence. Robert’s grasp relaxed and she drew her hand away. Presently he said: “That is a great deal of money, my dear.”

With a flash of temper she answered sharply: “Why didn’t you stop me, then? Instead of letting me go blindly on, believing that I had your consent? Was it a trick to trip me up?”

“Lilah!”

“Both you and your grandfather think I married you because I was hard up and frightened! You’ve made me feel your suspicion. Suppose I had really loved you--and I tried to make you see that I did--wouldn’t your doubting me make me self-conscious?”

“Now you’re being nasty.”

She closed her eyes. Shivers of feeling ran through her like currents of poison. “Nasty! What a primitive word! I’m being frank, if that’s what you mean.”

“I thought you _did_ love me,” Robert said. “I’m probably old-fashioned, but I admit that I had an entirely different idea of love. I’ve read a lot of trash and believed a lot of sentimental idiocy, perhaps....”

“What, exactly, did you expect?”

He turned. “Lilah! We mustn’t talk like this!”

She insisted: “What did you expect that I haven’t given you?”

He made a gesture of surrender. “If I told you, you’d laugh at me.”

“Do I laugh at you? How unfair you are! You are trying to make me out a cheat.”

“No. I love you. Only don’t you see--I wanted, and still want, companionship. You rather took this house out of my hands, didn’t you? As far as I’m concerned, it might be a hotel. Even if I have rotten taste, I like a little of it around--in my own room, for instance. Why not? Am I irrational?” He unclasped his hands and clasped them again with a slow pressure that whitened his knuckles. “I wanted to plan things--go over things with you. I didn’t want this woman to buy my bed--it’s none of her business! I’ve always dreamed of building a home with the woman I loved and married.... I suppose you’re laughing at me.”

Lilah said nothing. She could not trust her voice.

She felt that her power over him had been shattered. None of the old tricks would do. She must find new magic, and quickly, if she wanted him.

“I’m not laughing at you,” she said at last. “If I’ve done wrong, I’ll do the only thing I can do, under the circumstances; I’ll go.”

“You mean, leave me? Lilah, you’re joking! We’re a grown man and woman trying to understand each other. I don’t care a damn about that forty thousand. It’s you I’ve got to get at--and I can’t buy your heart. I’m not rich enough....”

“That was a very pretty speech, Robert.”

“I didn’t mean it to be. I’m in deadly earnest. I’m not contented with myself as I am. No one is, perhaps. But my case is extreme. I’m pretty much of a waster. I waste myself on harmless amusements, but I waste myself. I thought--I just imagined--it was a damn foolish notion--but I wanted you to stir me up, get me started at something, make me want to serve, somewhere, somehow. And when you married me, you dropped me out entirely--” he spread his hands, “for this.”

He turned to her, his face white and strained. “There shouldn’t be much of a toss-up between a house and a human being.”

She did not answer, but sat with her body drawn away, her shoulders hunched, her breath quick and shallow. Her expression was guarded but she permitted herself a half-smile that was both patient and contemptuous.

“You’re so damned feminine,” he said. “My mother was like that. She’d bang doors and sulk. And my father would rap and beg her to come out, and she wouldn’t. Not for hours, while the rest of us went around with lead in our hearts, feeling ashamed! When she did open the door, she’d sort of smile. She was my mother, but I hated her when she did that....”

“What do you want me to say?” Lilah demanded.

“Something honest,” was his surprising answer.

She stood up suddenly. “I won’t stand this any longer. I won’t!”

She did not cry easily, but now she burst suddenly into a storm of tears. The flood gates of fear and questioning broke; she was swept away. Through it all, she was aware of the room, of her own attitude and of Robert, frightened, aghast, repentant, trying to tear her hands away from her face.

“Don’t cry. Lilah, don’t cry.”