Part 8

“Hello! Still awake? I thought you were sleepy, Robert! Who has a cigarette? I came back before I wanted to because I had twinges of conscience. I thought afterwards, that you might be ill. It was foolish of me. I made apologies to the Sinclairs and painted a terrible picture--Robert with a fever. They wanted me to go on to the Club, so I went. Reluctantly! Now don’t you both feel silly? I danced with Heifetz. He has eyes like agates set in satin cushions. He dances divinely, but I was afraid he might scratch one of his famous hands on this girdle of mine--the beads are so sharp. He thought me quite Austrian, not French. He is coming here with that American violinist who made such a hit in Rome and has married a pretty American girl when he had a choice of titles and millions. It was really awfully amusing. Poiret was there, looking us over. He is rather like a Bedouin--Barker’s Constantine Madras. He thinks American women potential; but they lack something the French have. Now you know, both of you, that we don’t know how to wear hats; if we’re picturesque, we’re not _chic_, and if we’re _chic_, we’re not picturesque. I’m sick and tired of hearing about Cécile Sorel. Poiret raved, too, and there was a little Roumanian attaché from Washington who declared that she is the most beautiful woman in the world. I can’t see it. She has a wonderful neck, but that mouth! And there’s nothing subtle about flamingo-pink ostrich feathers in a Roman helmet made out of rhinestones. Bordoni is lovelier; she has the most provocative feet in the world. Heifetz likes olive women with eyebrows ... at least, I think so--he danced with one and his expression was like the last movement of Debussy’s _L’Après-Midi d’un Faune_.... Another cigarette, Robert. Aren’t you two being rather glum? What have you been talking about? Me, of course! I suppose you dished me up from soup to nuts. Is there anything left of me? Do you like me? I’m a trusting soul, to leave you together! Not a servant in sight and you two marooned in the library, picking my mortal bones....”

She perched on the arm of Robert’s chair and the cloak fell to the floor. She was as alive, as vivacious, as if the night were only begun. She had an imperishable luster, a surface brilliance that was beginning to harden, like the skin of a pearl....

* * * * *

Lilah dreaded the approach of Spring. Summer meant the Point, where she had no one to stand between Robert and herself except Junius. There had been no appreciable abatement of the New York season; very few people had gone South, since all eyes were turning again toward Europe. Lilah suggested Paris to Robert, but he was, for once, determined. He expected her to go with him, in June, to Maine.

Lilah had been launched with a certain momentum; now she could not stop. She ran from one important pleasure to another. Her time was taken up by the meaningless activities of the young married set, the débutantes of an immediate yesterday who were now tasting freedom and a characteristic dissipation; marriage seemed to be not a bondage but an excuse for license; the manners, and the casual morality of these matrons were the result, they said, of the War. Most of them had married in a hurry, but there were no signs of leisurely repentance; rather, divorce was spoken of across the dinner-table and accomplished after breakfast. Speech was reckless, profane and satirical; there was nothing left to be shocked at because everything had been said. Love was always possible, but never probable unless tinged, at least, with the illicit. Concessions were made to any one who had “a line,” and lapses from social grace were condoned and even glorified.

There was, Lilah discovered, a code, astonishing to the older generation. But this had always been so. The difference lay, not in the code itself, but in the mental condition that had produced it. This generation had been hurled against the bayonets, into the mud-pits and stench holes, the heroisms and pitiless defeats of war. Brought up to believe in progress, in their own infallibility and triumph, they had, in adolescence, been stripped of their most inestimable faith. It was natural that they should scorn both their teachers and the untruth they had been fed, as with a spoon. They made their own deductions; impatient, ironic, and without sentiment, they raced forward.

The men were more balanced than the women; a preponderance of serious-minded men were intent on finding out something, no matter what. Lilah listened to much bitter speculation. While they speculated, they either drank or danced or, without emotion, experimented in the flesh.

Lilah met some strange fish. There were times when her over-stimulated mind refused to accept impressions and she saw faces swimming, floating, snatched away, reappearing, like the fantastic denizens of an aquarium. The city required that a woman should appear impervious to fatigue; Lilah fell into the luxurious habit of having her tired face “patted” into lines of animation at so much an hour. Tilted back in a combination barber-chair and operating table, she gave herself up to the fingers of a beauty specialist. Lilah submitted to hours of manipulation; her face was smothered in clay masks, packed in ice, slapped, pinched, and stroked. These were her only moments of relaxation. At the mercy of the expert, her body rested, her mind swam in and out of the mazes. At her side, upon a highly antiseptic glass table, bottles and jars contained the supposedly mysterious ingredients of youth; Lilah believed in their advertised potency. Lulled by the touch of soothing fingers and the odor of creams, lotions, tonics, herbs, sachets, rouges and powders, Lilah spent hours in these brocaded salons. Other hours, fixed appointments rigorously kept, were spent at the hairdressers’, where, before a triple mirror, beneath a cluster of lights, her vanity was fed by a mannered Frenchman who wielded the Marcel irons with a sort of tenderness. Her hands, surrendered to a pale girl in black, became smooth and pointed, tinted, polished. She enjoyed the odor of this establishment--a combination of violet brilliantine, singed hair and a Gallic thrift.

Early in February her life took a strange turn. She went around a corner into a new street.

* * * * *

She had been invited, significantly, without Robert. May Sinclair thought Robert a wet-blanket and had said: “Come alone. It’s going to be a bit wild. Robert wouldn’t understand. Give him his slippers and leave him at home.”

The Sinclairs lived in a Park Avenue apartment, fifteen stories above ground. A columbarium maze of small rooms had been transformed, by a judicious knocking out of walls, into a stately salon. Upon this lofty shelf Mrs. Sinclair lived and entertained, in the fashion of modern New York, any one who amused her.

Lilah found the company already there. A man sat at the piano, improvising. She recognized Montague Wilder and his inevitable tumbler of whisky. He couldn’t play, he said, unless he was thoroughly drunk. Then he played divinely. He looked up as Lilah came in and, not pausing, called: “Lilah! Lovely Lilah! Dance for us! This is a waltz on a poem by von Hofmanstahl. Listen! Isn’t it lovely? Dance. Something Viennese! Cupids and garlands, hoops and little waists....”

Lilah lifted her arms. Suddenly she felt very gay and triumphant. She was conscious of people sitting in the shadowy corners of the room, watching her. She began to waltz. The little square of cloth that did for a train got between her feet and she caught it up, exposing her ankles to the frank admiration of her audience. No one said anything. This was the lazy after-dinner hour before vivacity had worked its way to the surface. Later, every one would talk at once.

Lilah said breathlessly: “Mrs. Vernon Castle!” And waltzed into the arms of Chivers Chew, who was the only man in the room on his feet. They whirled for a minute (Chew danced abominably) and then Lilah sat down beside Wilder. “That was wonderful, Montague. But play something serious. Chopin.”

“For God’s sake, Montague, cut it out,” Chew complained. “I’m blue enough.”

“Use your mind,” some one advised. “You can do anything with your mind.”

Montague Wilder improvised on the theme “Kalua.” Glittering scales ornamented the melody; he took it by the hand and led it into the Debussy half-tones, so that the South Sea ragtime tune became a wistful French song, a thing of strangeness and nuance. His left hand reached for the whisky glass without seeming to know what his right hand did, but there was no break in the invention of technical feats. Through this dissonance and unexpected harmony the familiar melody seemed classical, important. “You’re wickedly clever,” Lilah said.

“Wait until I’ve had a quart,” he answered. “I’ll play the D-flat waltz in thirds. Rosenthal could do it, but no one else ever has.”

“Who’s here?” Lilah asked.

“Oh, the Heywoods. Pound, the shipbuilder. He’s middle-class English. ‘The wife’ is with him and she’s worse. Carey; the Hawaiian Carey. Miss Wagner--pronounced with a wag. Putnam Flagg and a girl from San Diego who writes. May has never drawn such a hand--aces and eights! Why are _we_ here?”

“Who is Putnam Flagg?” Lilah interrupted.

“I don’t know.”

“What is May going to do with us?”

“The opera. Then back here. And then talk, until morning.”

“Talk?”

May Sinclair unfolded and rose from a long sofa upholstered in taupe velvet. “Come on! ‘Butterfly’!”

“‘Butterfly’! Good God,” Wilder groaned.

“Let’s stay here and play, you and I,” Lilah whispered.

“No, you don’t!” May Sinclair’s clear, high voice came between them. “Drink that whisky, Montague, and bring Lilah! Farrar’s singing.”

“Worse and worse,” Montague Wilder said. But he rose, and Lilah found her wrap.

In the elevator she brushed shoulders with a tall man who stared at her down his nose. May Sinclair never introduced any one. This, Lilah supposed, was Putnam Flagg. Afterwards, long afterwards, it used to amuse her to think of their meeting in a stuffy little elevator that slid down fifteen stories while they stared at each other.

He had a curious, rather flat nose, eyes like an animal and the beautifully modeled full mouth of a satyr.

They did not speak, but Lilah thought: “I hope May will let him come with me.”

The Sinclair motor waited at the curb, and Lilah hung back, pretending to adjust the collar of her wrap. She heard Mrs. Sinclair call: “Lilah! Lilah!” With a flurry, the writer from San Diego and the elder Carey embarked, the Englishman and his wife followed and the attendant, closing the door of the limousine, signaled for Lilah’s little brougham.... She was to have the tall man and Montague Wilder to herself.

She beckoned to them; the car slipped into the stream of downtown traffic upon the heels of May Sinclair’s crowded chariot, and again she became conscious of the pressure of her shoulder against his.

“I am Mrs. Peabody,” she explained.

“Major Flagg,” he answered briefly.

They did not speak again until a skillful and precarious landing had been made before the Opera. It was Montague Wilder’s monologue. He complained on the way across town that opera in New York was debased, a commercial side-show. There were no voices worth mentioning. No one below the peanut heaven knew anything about music; tradition was lost on the balance of the house, and therefore the singers played fast and loose with the scores. He had heard a distinguished prima donna cheat three times in one evening, substituting a b flat for a high c to the rage and mortification of Moranzoni; but the audience was unaware, so why bother to sing? Galli flatted to her heart’s content. Now that Caruso was gone, there was no one. No one, that is, save Diaz, who was permitted to sing once or twice a season--it was worth going a thousand miles to hear him do the prologue of the “Coq d’Or” and the rag-picker in “Louise.”

But who could sing “Depuis le Jour” since Mary had gone to Chicago? Jeritza would snuff out like a rocket, in two years, or less. She was too damned Teutonic....

In the lobby, May Sinclair gathered her aces and eights and led them around the red velvet corridors to her box. She was a tall, blonde, long-waisted woman who had reduced from two hundred to one hundred and thirty-five pounds in less than a year and had had a sort of personal renaissance, a rebirth. From a fat placidity, a dowdy gentleness, she had entered upon a willowy emotionalism; she was enormously interested in what she had, for years, surrendered because of her sense of the fitness of things. She was experimenting; it was no longer ridiculous to experiment. She was forty but she was not fat.

Butterfly’s relatives were retreating before a matter-of-fact Pinkerton, sung by Martinelli. Farrar, in a nasturtium-red kimono with a metallic obi, her blue-black hair a pinwheel of lacquered ornaments, crouched before an artificial cherry tree in the fullness of unnatural blossoming. Lilah saw the stage, a pool of light, and the two small gesticulating figures, across the shoulders of Mrs. Sinclair and the writer from San Diego. That music, melting, propitiating, assailed her, like a personal appeal. _Bimba, dagli occhi pieni di malia--_

If Martinelli would only cut his hair....

The house was not crowded, but, as always, the boxes made a show--poor relatives of the holders, or relatives of the poor relatives, or music teachers, or God knows who.... Lilah had not heard “Butterfly” often enough to be bored. But Montague Wilder had curled up in the ante-room and had gone sound asleep.

Suddenly Lilah’s eyes turned to Major Flagg. She had wanted him to be watching her, and he was. Their eyes held. It was a game. His eyes were unwavering and yet something kept flickering in them; it was as if a shutter opened and closed. Whenever she was about to leap into his eyes, he shut her out. More than anything she had ever wanted, she wanted to get by that barrier, whatever it was, into his eyes. Once inside, she could conquer him, but never so long as he kept her out.

She had not spoken to him except to say that she was Mrs. Peabody and to receive his polite but noncommittal answer.

He was winning the game....

Lilah shrugged her shoulders and turned back to the stage, where Pinkerton, feeling carefully behind him for the steps, drew Butterfly into the _dolce dimora_. Farrar, abandoned, Carmen in a kimono, swayed forward, lost in ecstasy; her feet, in gold lacquer sandals, mounted the steps, slowly, slowly, as her head tilted back to that kiss on the threshold....

“Oh, God,” Montague Wilder said, sitting up, disheveled and sleepy. “Puccini! Lilah--let’s go back and drink more of May’s Scotch.”

She shook her head.

It was no use pretending they had not looked at each other like that.

In the corridor, pacing up and down with Mrs. Sinclair, who couldn’t find any one to smile at because it was a parade of “loans,” Lilah heard in snatches that Putnam Flagg was “queer,” that he had “ideas.” He had been gassed and had a bad heart. It made Mrs. Sinclair jumpy because at any moment he might faint.

“Talk to him, Lilah, I can’t.” Mrs. Sinclair caught sight of old “Rosie” Jackson and shed Lilah.

Lilah found herself at Flagg’s side. He was too tall. She felt little and silly. But more than that she was excited, a dangerous, unfamiliar excitement. She could not explain it, then, or later. He spoke of the opera. He liked it. He liked Farrar. “Because she is alive. A woman like that....”

“Well?”

“Magnificent! Not quite feminine.”

“Do you know her?”

“No. I shouldn’t want to.”

“Why?”

“I hate finding sawdust in dolls.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t.”

“I might.” He smiled down at her. “And then I’d have one less enthusiasm. I can’t do with too few! It’s lonely enough as it is. Rows of ’em, prone, with the sawdust spilling out of their heads! Leave me Farrar, please.”

After a moment he said: “This is the first opera I’ve heard in five years. I’ve been in New Mexico for two years. Before that, in France, I didn’t care to go. I hope Mrs. Sinclair won’t leave early. I want to be in at the death.”

“Montague Wilder would consider you very unsophisticated. He laughs at Puccini, or, as you know, he goes to sleep.”

Flagg seemed for a moment to consider. “I don’t dare to laugh at things,” he said presently. “It’s dangerous. You begin by laughing at your pet little detestations and you wind up by losing your big faiths. It doesn’t pay to be too fastidious.”

“Doesn’t it?” Lilah said lightly.

He shut her out again. As if embarrassed by having made a confidence, he turned his head away. People were staring at them and Lilah wondered whether she had been recognized. Her photograph, taken by a flattering man of title against a background of Florentine brocade, had been published broadcast in those magazines whose business it is to foster the idea that an American society really exists. Lilah had discovered that it is not altogether easy to get yourself advertised, even though you happened to be Mrs. Robert Peabody. But she had taken this hurdle, as she took all of them, with alacrity, and it was therefore not improbable that this strolling crowd stared at her for the reason that the American crowd loves its celebrity as the Englishman loves his duke. Ordinarily, she would have been content to enjoy the flattery implied by this attention alone, but to-night her pleasure was doubled because she particularly wanted this man to be aware of her. He could scarcely be unaware that she was attracting attention.

At the box door, Mrs. Sinclair waited with the air of being about to sweep them into a net. “We’re going on to the Rendezvous after the second act. Montague’s fearfully bored and Carey has a Gilda Gray complex. I hope you won’t mind, you two.”

Flagg made a polite if not enthusiastic gesture and Lilah, catching his eyes deliberately, permitted her own to say: “I’m sorry, for your sake.”

As they entered the box, he remarked simply: “I have a rotten heart and can’t dance.... Who is Gilda Gray?”

“She is a lovely, initiated, transplanted savage,” Lilah explained, “who dances the hula-hula on Forty-fourth Street.”

Again their eyes held. The lights dimmed; with a sigh, a rustle, the great audience faced again the glowing proscenium. Lilah had a curious sensation of being isolated, alone, in a crowded emptiness, with this man. Life, for the moment, was immeasurably suspended. There was a dignity, a beauty about the impending, the imminent disaster. She would love this man. She could not help herself. She paused, amazed, before the strangeness and the splendor of that recognition. The moment prolonged itself, until, in the fixed and intense meeting of their eyes there was mutual declaration. It seemed that they must sit thus, strangers, in a shadowy balcony above a pool of music, forever....

VI

When Lilah returned to the Thirty-eighth Street house, late that night, it was her inclination to avoid any encounter with Robert. She hoped that he had fallen asleep. Dismissing the servant, Lilah entered the electric elevator, another of De Blauvelt’s innovations, and got out on the second floor. The door was noisy and as she turned toward her room she saw a light flash on in Robert’s room across the hall. He called: “Lilah?”

“Yes,” she said, and paused, holding her breath. She ought to go in. But she could not. She felt that her excitement had written itself on her face and she hated to invent reasons for that animation. She wanted most of all to be alone and to see herself, clearly, before she went further. Robert might surprise her into saying something before she was ready.

“I’m tired,” she called out. “Good night!”

She locked herself into her room, suddenly determined to have her way. She must deal with this new feeling before anything happened to diminish it, to mar its shining beauty. Robert expected to be kissed; it was a part of the utterly stupid and peremptory rite of marriage, devoid of spontaneous affection or of that emotion which is led up to, prepared, by word and touch. Why did he insist, when he knew that it was a conventional gesture and could lead to nothing, create nothing, change nothing? She heard his hand sliding over the panels of the door, and again he called: “Lilah?”

She saw herself reflected in all the mirrors in an attitude of disgust and rebellion and she was struck by her loneliness. No one could help her. This was a primitive feeling, so powerful that it was all she could do not to hurl her dismissal at the closed door. What, in a man she loved, would have been lovable, in Robert was revolting.

“Go away,” she said in a low voice.

At once he was silent, as if she had struck him dead. She listened for the sound of his retreating footsteps, but she could hear nothing. He must have gone swiftly, silently; or else was still standing there, his hand suspended, his gesture arrested by something final in her voice.

She spoke again: “I’m very tired.”

There was no answer. And slowly she undressed, trembling as if there had been an actual disaster.

She slipped into bed and switched off the light. The silence of the room was permeated by a low and continuous sound, a distant mingling of voices, victorious, hopeless, a vast, removed dissonance.... The city.

She got up again and kneeled by an open window. There, the sound took form, was less terrifying. The street, beneath a moon at the full, was empty, like a street in a nightmare. Office buildings were like pyramids in a forest of pyramids, inscrutable, lifeless. And one tower, higher than the rest, was pierced by a loggia, rimmed with moonlight, romantic.

She tried to piece together the fragmentary happenings of that evening. The idea came to her that perhaps she had over-estimated Flagg’s interest; her own had been immediate, sharp, an emotion more penetrating than anything she had experienced. The meeting had upset her whole philosophy of conduct; she had thought herself safe within the defined circle of her material desires; her inner self, what idealists were pleased to call her soul, she had believed secure against temptation; beauty, in things, was to have been enough. And now she saw, dimly, that she had stepped outside the circle into a strange territory where beauty, to be beauty at all, must be of the spirit.

She recalled their silence in the motor, the brief contact of shoulders, an ostentatious indifference when, seated at the Rendezvous, their interest had either to disguise itself or be subjected to remark. Flagg had not danced, but Lilah did, because it was expected of her. The writer from San Diego claimed Flagg. She was witty and tangibly human, a woman, Lilah decided, in daylight. Broad of feature, with a tanned skin and careless braids of thick brown hair, she had an enviable indifference to what men thought of her which assured her their instant, delighted attention. Whenever Flagg laughed Lilah’s heart contracted with something like hate. She had thought herself incapable of jealousy. What she felt was worse than jealousy; it was a primitive, an atrocious suffering. She had gone on dancing, smiling, but her eyes had sought Flagg again and again, had sought, across the crowded room blue with smoke and dust, confirmation of something she had only glimpsed and might have imagined--his head, the short, smooth hair, his features, his expression of humorous, sensitive understanding. He leaned a little sideways, to catch the ironic comments of the sun-burned lady from San Diego, but his eyes never failed to meet Lilah’s, to let her in a little way and then, abruptly, to shut her out....

Once, she had found herself alone at the table with him.