Part 7

She collapsed against him and he drew her down on his knees. His unsteady hands caressed her hair. She felt his lips on her neck. She drew in her breath sharply and the tears stopped; with shut eyes she remained against his shoulder, motionless. The storm of feeling had passed, leaving again that curious unreality. Robert was not a part of experience; he was in her life for some purpose, to carry her forward a little way. Without discontent there could be no advance. From him, she would go on, perhaps to love.... But he already felt what she could not feel, and this involved her because she had given herself. She shivered and a deep sigh cut through her immobility. His arms tightened. He kept on whispering, with his lips against her ear, but she heard nothing.

She became conscious again of the large expanse of Aubusson and of pools of light in which hot-house flowers seemed made of wax, and of sleek surfaces, smooth contours. Her own slippers, the chiffon across her knees, were a part of the vision.

Robert was saying: “We mustn’t quarrel. It’s childish. I’ll do any earthly thing for you.”

With a quick, almost feline motion, she turned in his arms. “Here goes,” she said to herself.

And very deliberately, purposefully, she kissed him.

V

With that perilous moment bridged, Robert given again his unquestioning security in her, Lilah began her search for experience, for satisfaction, for a vague, undetermined happiness. She had for so many years peered over the wall at the social garden-party, at women in light dresses and men in polished hats, marionettes, voiceless, yet animated, infinitely removed--she had imagined so much, given these people a wholly romantic and unnatural luster--Now she found herself about to drop into the garden, among them, and her eagerness took Robert’s breath away. He told himself that he must be patient; when the novelty had worn off, when Lilah had rubbed elbows with a world already familiar to him, she, too, would discard it. In the meantime, he tried to content himself with her rare impulses of affection, hasty caresses, light kisses that stung his flesh and penetrated to his heart like thin, precise knife-thrusts. For the most part she met him with banter and postponement, as if she were skimming over the dark depths of life, a vivid and elusive skater on silver skates....

He found himself, suddenly, a slave to hope. Some day she would skim back to him, into the circle made by his love, his arms, and remain there, safe. But she must first dart here and there, fearless and foolish, enjoying herself. It became his dubious pleasure to watch, ready to pull her out if the ice should crack.

Robert was not exactly a fool, although he took no pains to appear otherwise. What he had seen of the world had landed him back at the Point again, where, he argued, all the facts of life and death, of love and hate, were uncomplicated and recognizable. He could not see, he told Lilah, why experience should acquire anything by multiplication. You were born, you loved, hated and died. You could do all these things, and get out of it what there was in it, as well in one place as in another; nothing was gained by chasing down the horizon--once you got there, it was the same, love and life, hate and death. He preferred a limited existence to the accumulated sensations offered by such cities as New York and Paris. Crowds gave him a mental indigestion. Ideas, unless they were based on truths, caused him to suffer an intellectual heart-burn. He was not swift enough to chase the casual and elusive theories of most modernists, who were content with the haphazard because no one could pause long enough to argue or to prove.

But he was willing, after that sharp quarrel with Lilah, to experiment.

He made a hurried trip to Maine and shamefacedly kissed his spaniels, turning back to New York with an assumed eagerness that deceived even himself. In the train, he left the sleeper for the smoking-car and sat up all night trying, as he put it, to reduce Lilah to a common denominator. The secret of her fascination lay in her swift and inexplicable changes of mood; he waited for favors with a feverish sort of excitement. It was probably unhealthy, bad for him to be so buffeted about by feeling, alternately exalted to heaven and left flat, with a sense of humiliation and shame.

Another type of man might spare himself indignity by letting her see a certain brutality. But Robert was not so gifted. He could only be himself.

For her he had abandoned his “drinkin’” and had tried desperately to part his hair on the side. The green sweater had gone down before her contempt. In a hundred little ways he tried to re-make, improve, the outward man; he knew when he bored her, although he was never certain why he bored her. His enthusiasms were as authentic as hers. But Lilah was Lilah, and for such a woman he, any man, would attempt the impossible.

He had wanted a strong, sweet, fearless love, ecstasy and pride and recognition.

What he had was different, but he could not be sure that he had not wanted too much. Perhaps all women were like Lilah, and tormented you, where they should offer their breasts for you to put your head against and rest, and rest, from life.

* * * * *

When Grace Fuller moved in, Robert felt more comfortable. She was a familiar, understanding sort of woman.

He wondered whether Lilah were justified in calling Grace a deliberate celibate. He began to study her face, to question his knowledge of her. She had never enjoyed kissing him, but had always pushed him away, with an expression almost of fear in her eyes. He couldn’t say that he had enjoyed it, either; it was too much like forcing her to his will.... There were times, at night, when Lilah was strange and emotional, when she pressed against him and ran her fingers up and down the back of his neck with the caress he liked, and kissed him, quick, almost furtive kisses; when she relaxed in his arms, suddenly, as if she were about to surrender, and then was tense again, pushing him away, turning her face aside....

He couldn’t understand.

Grace left him alone, left his senses alone. She was a good companion in spite of her sharp tongue. He supposed that all nurses had that same air of watching out for you, mothering you, seeing that things were comfortable and orderly. There was no trace in her manner or her look, of remembering; she let him off, magnificently. He would say that for her; she was a sport! They began again, as people who have only just met. And all those meaningless kisses and casual, artificial embraces were forgotten in their common passion for Lilah.

Lilah became a bond between them. When Robert came in and Lilah was not at home, he sought Grace and questioned her.

Lilah was fascinating, reckless, just a little terrible and they never tired of discussing her. She had done this, or that. This one and that one had telephoned. She had bought a new dress or a new book. Everything she did startled them, because, once certain of Robert, Lilah had become more startling, more reckless and more insatiable than ever.

It was as if she had come into full possession of life without questioning her right to it. She was not, as far as Robert could see, happy, but she was, on the other hand, arrogant with fulfillment. Because she herself had succeeded, she could not help having contempt for people who had failed.

This amused Robert, but it was also cause for a certain amount of chagrin, since he saw that his position had been the lever she needed to lift her out of obscurity. She could never have done it alone.

But because he loved her, he did for her everything she seemed to require. Before long, she knew every one of importance in Robert’s world. It was a world limited by necessity to a few hundred souls. Lilah called them Murray Hill blackbirds. They were, in fact, the old guard, a thinned-out company of so-called Knickerbockers, New Yorkers long enough to cherish their few square blocks of sacred soil with a tenacity that was almost aristocratic.

They gave Lilah critical inspection; her house was less important and could, in its severe restraint and exact emphasis, be taken for granted.

Flushed, beautiful, excited, Lilah received them. The sleek Aubusson became the arena of her first social struggle. These people were fashionable but not modish. For them, sensing their prejudices, Lilah wore black and was over-careful of her accent. Her Russian atmosphere was discarded for the occasion, and Robert and Grace were amazed, embarrassed, by a totally different Lilah, a châtelaine, wistful, eager and disarming.

Robert was rather proud of the gathering; people like this made him feel safer about the future; they cemented the cracks in society. He adored dowdy wealth because it was an indication of permanence, a stand against the upstart, ’Change. There was something plucky about foulard, sensible shoes and elaborate whiskers in the Jazz age. While these people lived, the last cable held. Their names were less impressive now that their city had become unaware of them. But Lilah seemed to enjoy juggling these rather musty titles. Robert didn’t know it, but she was, consciously, laying a foundation down. She would stand, eventually, not upon the quicksand of new, untried, if glamorous names, but upon the veritable, bed-rock Manhattanese.

Afterwards, to Grace and Robert, she was explicit: “What fearful bores! All of them, except Mrs. Humphrey-hyphen-whatever-her-name-is.... The red-headed one.”

“She goes everywhere,” Robert explained, “and is invited nowhere. She _was_ glorious, thirty years ago.”

“She is now.”

“She’s a bad egg,” Robert said.

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“Oh, she left her husband, and lived with a chap--some one--I’ve forgotten.... She’s quite purple.”

Lilah laughed. “I’d die if I had to know these people.... I liked your purple one. She was human. The rest ... _blackbirds_!”

She was being Russian again.... While the new servant, placated by the announcement of so many celebrated blackbirds, removed the tea tables and gathered up cups and saucers, Lilah disposed of Robert’s friends with a tirade of pointed witticisms. She could afford to laugh at them because now, she knew, she could subjugate them. All she had to do was to snub the purple lady, entertain discreetly, grow old, and die. In ten years she would look just like the rest of them--ground-grippers and a pince-nez, a maribou boa, a bit of real lace, amethysts and rheumatism in her finger-joints.... She preferred more difficult attainment....

Suddenly she went to the piano and, still smoking, played a rakish accompaniment to a French song.

“_Je sais que c’est une folie!_”

Robert and Grace Fuller turned about in their chairs and listened. She seemed to be unaware of them. With her head thrown back, the cigarette aslant, she sang in a light, high voice, a little song about madness and youth and _la tendresse_ and, meltingly, _l’amour_.

* * * * *

From this little occasion, Lilah stepped off into New York. There were, she discovered, no barriers raised against a pretty, witty and wealthy woman. She had all the ingredients to make a very potent brew.

In the beginning, Robert was always at her elbow, puzzled, but stimulated in exact proportion to her own pleasure. New York was not “dry” and before long Robert was drinking again with that boastful abandonment characteristic of prohibition. Everywhere there was gin, and according to the social scale, it was either genuine, or frankly synthetic. Lilah drank for the first time in her life, steadily, carelessly. She explained to Robert that there was no other way to “fizz” at dinner or to hold off fatigue. And, happening to discover a substantial supply of good wines and whisky in the cellar of the Murray Hill house, she wrote to Junius Peabody and obtained his somewhat satirical permission to uncork all but the rarest vintages. Those, he explained, belonged to his “heirs” and were to be handed down as historical evidence. Lilah must consider, take pity on the parched palates of her sons....

Lilah tossed the letter into the fire. She did not intend that there should be sons. She was infected by the casuistry of the age, a total lack of interest in the coming generation. Behind men’s lives there was no longer any sustaining idealism, any heroic faith in an unbroken purpose. The war had severed a link in the chain of passions, spiritual, national and racial. The day, the needs and fulfillments of the day, sufficed.

Robert could find nothing to refute her claim that the war had made morality ridiculous and had stripped adolescent humanity of its illusions. Everywhere, in both men and women, he encountered the cynicism that goes, usually, with embittered old age, with failure and disappointment. People were reckless because the moral skids were off; there was a gay determination, everywhere evident, to meet disaster as gayly as possible. But this was not heroic; it was cowardly, and Robert found himself despising the times he lived in.

As usual, he was not expressive. Something about his physical pinkness and blondness, his air of being extremely well-fed and well-brushed, held him back from complaining. Lilah might be right. Certainly, there was no evidence of spirituality, of change.

* * * * *

New York was dancing-mad, in a mood essentially unlike the madness of Nineteen-Fourteen, when blind satiety had twirled on the lid of a seething volcano. This madness was sophisticated and purposeful. The Argentine tango had given way to the primitive rhythms of Africa and Maylasia, a brutal tom-toming, savagery stalking progress through a maze of the senses. There were very few private dances. Robert could remember the day of the cotillion leader, Ward McAllister’s reign. Now, society patronized the commercial dance-halls or the exclusive “clubs” given over to all-night dancing, in defiance of a closing law which arbitrarily separated jazzing couples at one in the morning. There were few formal occasions; hostesses relied upon haphazard dinner-parties, a box at the theater or the opera, and the confused, prismatic, exciting contact afterwards.

Lilah danced beautifully, without a trace of vulgarity, but Robert objected to the frank enticement of her gowns that displayed her flesh to the casual observer. She answered that he belonged in the Dark Ages; no one paid any attention to backs and arms; the sight was too usual. Fashion had freed women because women had first freed themselves. They were too frankly undressed to be alluring, and men ought to be grateful; nudity rid them of obscene imaginings.

Robert was not certain that women’s clothes were a symbol of masculine indifference. Lilah might be right; she was infinitely more clever than he, and besides she said things with a conviction, a finality, that floored him. It is hard to contradict a woman you love. He had his reservations.

They rarely dined at home. As the winter progressed, their program of pleasure became more complicated. The details were left to Grace Fuller, who sat at a desk the better part of every day, answering the telephone and attending to Lilah’s correspondence. An avalanche of people had swept Robert’s handful of Murray Hill blackbirds out of the picture. It had been but a step from these conservatives to their children, the reckless generation that had outlived but had not out-thought the war; and from them to the professionals, a little world of hard, bright, amazingly talented modernists, racially nondescript, intellectually polyglot, artistically indeterminate.

Robert encountered too many enthusiasms to have much faith in a standard of taste. A sort of united press-agentry conspired to prove that there was an American art. Painstakingly, Robert sought what Lilah declared already existed, and he failed to find it. He found, instead, a horde of facile, astonishing copyists. The extremists irritated him because they struck him as being too lazy to study. Further than that, he refused to express himself.

For several months he followed wherever Lilah led. Then it became an easy matter to excuse himself. He did not dance, and the rôle of caryatid to the striped awning at the Palais Royal was proving irksome. Conversation, he insisted, had been annihilated by those jungle noises produced by the saxophone, the oboe, the violin, the piano and the bass-drum. He was not capable of feeling the necessary emotion; he preferred staying at home to holding a half-dozen strange and hectic women in his arms.

“By all means, stay,” Lilah said agreeably. She kissed him on the top of his head and went out, wrapped in a voluminous coat of gold cloth, from which her face emerged, powdered, delicately rouged, like the face of a bisque figurine.

Her mistiness had taken on a certain sharp and defined quality; she was more accentuated, less shadowy. The petulant droop of her lips was pronounced; her eyes were larger and more brilliant--they sought admiration frankly, if disdainfully, and gave nothing in return.

Robert went to his easy chair with a sense of having been left flat. He expected at least a show of protest, of regret.

Grace Fuller was at work, in the library; he heard the click of her typewriter. He might go to her. Damn it, why not? She might be able to tell him what Lilah had meant when she said, “By all means, stay.”

He climbed the stairs slowly, puffing his cigar. He was, he realized, very tired. Pleasure exhausted him because he didn’t believe in it. To Lilah, it had all the luster of a Cause.

Grace Fuller glanced up.

“Not going?”

“Not going.”

“Why?”

Robert said lightly: “I’m fagged. Old age, I suppose.”

She pushed the machine away and sat staring at him with an expression which made him vaguely uncomfortable.

“What did Lilah say?”

Robert laughed: “She invited me by all means to suit myself.”

“You made a mistake. Why didn’t you tell her how tired you are and make her stay at home?”

“I can’t _make_ Lilah do anything.”

“I wouldn’t admit it, if I were you.”

“Why not? She is undisciplined, but I would be the last one to try to curb her.”

“It’s too late, Robert. Lilah has taken the bit. She’s running away from you.”

With a pang of irritable fear, Robert said sharply: “Nonsense.”

Grace Fuller jerked the typewriter forward again and struck at the keys with her long, cool fingers. Her mouth had hardened; her eyes were obstinate. “Very well,” she said.

“See here, Grace. Don’t exaggerate! Lilah’s excited. She has never seen life. She isn’t stale. And you and I are.... She’ll get over it. There’s good in her.”

“It isn’t ‘bad’ to love life,” Grace answered. “I am only suggesting that it is bad for you.”

“I can stand it.”

Grace Fuller gathered together her day’s work with deliberate gestures, sheaves of gray note-paper heavily embossed with the Thirty-eighth Street address in the English fashion, square envelopes, checks and receipted bills. Then she rose and stood for a moment looking down at Robert.

“I’m really very happy, Grace,” he said, on his guard against something in her expression.

“I’m awfully glad,” she said finally, “to hear that.”

She turned to leave the room, but Robert spoke quickly: “Don’t go. I want to talk to you....” He hesitated, and then said awkwardly, “about yourself.”

“Myself?” Grace Fuller hesitated, flushing. “Please don’t.”

But she came back, and sank with a deep sigh, a sudden, almost pathetic relaxation, into a chair before the fire. Robert had never seen her looking so positively ugly; the guards were down; her distinction had given way to the essential woman, a creature defeated by her own disbelief. It was shocking, and to Robert, humiliating. He turned his eyes away.

“Don’t talk about me,” Grace said. “I prefer to be left in my own Nirvana of self-forgetfulness. I have conquered ambition and regret, and you’re sorry for me! You ought to congratulate me....”

She caught her breath sharply. “How well that sounded! I almost convinced myself....” She smiled crookedly at him, with a funny little grimace. “You can’t get Nirvana without surrendering. I suppose there’s some primal bug of hope in my system; I still cherish the unattainable. I wish I had had the courage to fling myself away, as nuns do. What peace! To believe ... I can’t.... Here I am, talking about myself....”

“There ought to be some way,” Robert said, “to live in the world and like it. I used to. At one time I had things reduced to pretty simple terms. Lilah has shaken me out of my security. She is like a humming-bird, or something swift and alive. You’re right--she has left me behind! My own world is stale, and hers is beyond my comprehension. Those darts and flights and quick stabs at things.... When a man gets to be my age, he wants to stand on a sort of hill and look off at his future. I’m too old to be puffing up the nether side. Frankly, I don’t know where Lilah is leading me, or whether, if I ever over-take her, I shall see anything beyond. Have I said too much? This isn’t in the nature of a confession. I’m not disgruntled. Only I thought that you might....”

Grace interrupted: “I can’t analyze her. She dazzles me. For all I know she is shallow water, but I am more inclined to think that she is beyond our depth, yours and mine. We’re making rather fools of ourselves trying to reach her and drag her up to our level into the common light of day. I adore her. She is the only human being I’ve ever known I could believe in, because she is absolutely honest.”

“Then why--” Robert began.

“Because you’ll never understand her! Dear old Robert. You’re a brownstone-front and Lilah is an English basement. You’ve inherited all the prejudices and social quaverings of the ’Eighties. Lilah is--I wish there were a superlative for the word modern; would it be futurist? She has bolted into a new generation, with all its recklessness and daring and passion for facts. She likes things as they are, raw and naked. And that makes her saner than you and me, and safer.”

“I’m not sure that you’re right,” Robert said after a moment. “I think Lilah dodges reality. And what I’m afraid of is that the facts will spring out from ambush and hurt her terribly. I don’t want her hurt! There’s something ... at times ... like a willful child....” His expression changed. He became unaware of Grace Fuller’s watchfulness. “I have failed to show her anything.”

* * * * *

When Lilah came in at two o’clock, she found them still together, in the library filmed with the smoke of cigars and cigarettes and before a fire that had burned out.

She crossed the room swiftly, letting her gold cloak slip away from her as the petals of a flower fold back from a slender stamen. She was dressed in pollen yellow with amber ornaments; barbaric ear-rings brushed her shoulders. She wore no rings, not liking them; her wedding ring had been discarded an hour after her wedding.