_ CHAPTER IV - PART 1
Twice, the following day, Lee telephoned to Fanny, but neither time was she in the house; and, kept at his office, he was obliged to take an inconvenient train that made a connection for Eastlake. When Lee reached the countryside opening in the familiar hilly vistas he had, in place of the usual calm recognitions through a run of hardly more than an hour, a sense of having come a long way to a scene from which he had been absent for years. It appeared to him remarkably tranquil and self- contained--safe was the word which came to him. He was glad to be there, but at indeterminate stations rather than in Eastlake. He dreaded, for no plainly comprehended reason, his return home. The feelings that, historically, he should have owned were all absent. Had it been possible he would have cancelled the past forty-eight hours; but Lee was forced to admit to himself that he was not invaded by a very lively sense of guilt. He made a conventional effort to see his act in the light of a grave fault--whatever was attached to the charge of adultery--but it failed before the conviction that the whole thing was sad.
His sorrow was for Savina, for the suffering of her past, the ordeal of the present, and the future dreariness. There had been no suggestion of wrong in her surrender, no perceptible consciousness of shame: it was exactly as though, struggling to the limit of endurance against a powerful adverse current, she had turned and swept with it. The fact was that the entire situation was utterly different from the general social and moral conception of it; and Lee began to wonder which were stronger--the individual truth or the imposed dogmatic weight of the world. But the latter, he added, would know nothing of this. Concisely, there was to be no repetition of last night; there would be no affair.
Lee Randon had completely and sharply focussed the most adverse possible attitude toward that: he saw it without a redeeming feature and bare of any chance of pleasure. His need for honesty, however special, was outraged on every facet by the thought of an intrigue. Lee reconstructed it in every detail--he saw the moments, doubtful and hurried and surreptitious, snatched in William Grove's house; the servants, with their penetration of the tone of an establishment, knowing and insufferable; he lived over the increasing dissatisfaction with quick embraces in the automobile, and the final indignities of lying names and rooms of pandering and filthy debasement. The almost inevitable exposure followed, the furies and hysterical reproaches. That, indeed, would have involved them fatally: in such circumstances the world would be invincible, crushing; holding solidly its front against such dangerous assault, it would have poured over Savina and him a conviction of sin in which they would unavoidably have perished.
As it was, he had told her--with, in himself, the feeling of a considerable discovery--that they were to a marked degree superior: he could find no more remorse at his heart than Savina showed. This, exactly, was his inner conviction--that, since he had given something not in Fanny's possession, he had robbed her of nothing. It was a new idea to him and it required careful thought, a slow justification. It answered, perhaps, once and for all, his question about the essential oneness of marriage. Yes, that was a misconception; marriage in an ideal state he wasn't considering, but only his own individual position. To love but one woman through this life and into a next would be blissful ... if it were possible; there might be a great deal saved --but by someone else--in heroically supporting such an Elysian tenet; Lee Randon definitely hadn't the necessary utopianism.
Love wasn't a sacred fluid held in a single vessel of alabaster; marriage didn't conveniently create shortsightedness. Lee couldn't pretend to answer all this for women, or even in part for Savina. Her attitude, he knew, in that it never touched the abstract, was far simpler than his; she didn't regard herself as scarlet, but thought of the rest of the world as unendurably drab. The last thing she had said to him was that she was glad, glad, that it had happened. This, too, in Savina, had preserved them from the slightest suggestion of inferiority: the night assumed no resemblance to a disgraceful footnote on the page of righteousness. It was complete--and, by God, admirable! --within itself. No one, practically, would agree with him, and here, in the fact that no one ever could know, his better wisdom was shown.
About love, the thing itself, his perceptions remained dim: he had loved Fanny enormously at the time of their wedding and he loved her now, so many years after; but his feeling--as he had tried so unfortunately to tell her--wasn't the same, it had grown calm; it had become peaceful, but an old tempestuous need had returned. Yet, until he had gone to the Groves', his restlessness had been trivial, hardly more than academic, a half-smiling interest in a doll; but now, after he had left the realm of fancy for an overt act, a full realization of his implication was imperative. Without it he would be unable to preserve any satisfactory life with Fanny at all; his uneasiness must merely increase, become intolerable. Certainly there was a great, it should be an inexhaustible, amount of happiness for him in his wife, his children and his home; he would grow old and negative with them, and there die.
But a lot of mental re-adjustment, understanding, was necessary first. Suddenly the minor adventures and sensations of the past had become, even before the completeness of the affair with Savina, insuperably distasteful to him; he simply couldn't look forward to a procession of them reaching to impotence. No, no, no! That was never Cytherea's import. He didn't want to impoverish himself by the cheap flinging away of small coin from his ultimate store. He didn't, equally, wish to keep on exasperating Fanny in small ways. That pettiness was wholly to blame for what discomfort he had had. His wife's claim was still greater on him than any other's; and what, now, he couldn't give her must be made up in different ways. This conviction invested him with a fresh sense of dignity and an increasing regard for Fanny.
What a shame it was that he could not go quietly to her with all this, tell her everything. A lie was rooted, concealed, beyond removal at the base of the honesty he planned. There was, of course, this additional phase of the difficulty--what had happened concerned Savina even more than it did his wife and him. He had Savina Grove, so entirely in his hands, to guard. And the innate animosity of women toward women was incalculable. That wasn't a new thought, but it recurred to him with special force. As much as he desired it, utter frankness, absolute safety, was impossible. Fanny's standard of duty, or responsibility, was worlds apart from his.
Bitterly and without premeditation he cursed the tyranny of sex; in countless forms it dominated, dictated, every aspect of life. Men's conception of women was quite exclusively founded on it in its aspects of chastity or license. In the latter they deprecated the former, and in the first they condemned all trace of the latter. The result of this was that women, the prostitutes and the mothers alike, as well, had no other validity of judgment. The present marriage was hardly more than an exchange of the violation of innocence, or of acted innocence, for an adequate material consideration. If this were not true, why was innocence--a silly fact in itself--so insisted upon? Lee was forced to conclude however, that it was the fault of men: they turned, at an advancing age when it was possible to gather a comfortable competence, to the young. By that time their emotions were apt to be almost desperately variable.
In his case it had been different--but life was different, easier, when he had married--and his wedding most appropriate to felicity. Yet that, against every apparent reason to the contrary, had vanished, and left him this calm determining of his fate. Through his thoughts a quirk of memory ran like a tongue of flame. He felt Savina's hand under his cuff; he felt her sliding, with her arms locked about his neck, out of her furs in the automobile; a white glimmer, a whisper, she materialized in the coldness of the night. There was a long-drawn wailing blast from the locomotive--they were almost entering the train- shed at Eastlake. When Fanny expected him, and it was possible, she met him at the station; but tonight he would have to depend on one of the rattling local motor hacks. Still, he looked for her and was faintly and unreasonably disappointed at her absence. An uncontrollable nervousness, as he approached his house, invaded the preparation of a warm greeting.
* * * * *
Fanny was seated at dinner, and she interrupted her recognition of his arrival to order his soup brought in. "It's really awfully hard to have things nice when you come at any time," she said in the voice of restraint which usually mildly irritated him. He was apt to reply shortly, unsympathetically; but, firm in the determination to improve the tone of his relations with Fanny, he cheerfully met the evidence of her sense of injury. "Of course," she added, "we expected you yesterday up to the very last minute." When he asked her who exactly she meant by we she answered, "The Rodmans and John and Alice Luce. It was all arranged for you. Borden Rodman sent us some ducks; I remembered how you liked them, and I asked the others and cooked them myself. That's mixed, but you know what I mean. I had oysters and the thick tomato soup with crusts and Brussels sprouts; and I sent to town for the alligator pears and meringue. I suppose it can't be helped, and it's all over now, but you might have let me know."
"I am sorry, Fanny," he acknowledged; "at the last so much piled up to do. Mina Raff was very doubtful. I can't tell if I accomplished anything with her or not." Fanny seemed to have lost all interest in Peyton Morris's affair. "I had dinner with Mina and talked a long while. At bottom she is sensible enough; and very sensitive. I like sensitive women."
"You mean that you like other women to be sensitive," she corrected him; "whenever I am, you get impatient and say I'm looking for trouble."
There was, he replied, a great deal in what she said; and it must be remedied. At this she gazed at him for a speculative second. "Where did you take Mina Raff to dinner?" she asked; "and what did you do afterward?" He told her. "She was so tired that she went back to the Plaza before ten. No, I returned to the Groves'. It's no good being in New York alone. We'll have our party together there before Christmas."
"I imagined you'd see a lot of her."
"Of Mina Raff? What nonsense! She is working all day and practically never goes out. People have such wrong ideas about actresses, or else they have changed and the opinions have stood still. They are as business-like now as lawyers; you make an appointment with their secretaries. Besides that, Mina doesn't specially attract me."
"At any rate you call her Mina."
"Why so I do; I hadn't noticed; but she hasn't started to call me Lee; I must correct her."
"They played bridge afterward," Fanny said, referring, he gathered, to the occasion he had missed. "That is, the Rodmans and the Luces did, and I sat around. People are too selfish for anything!" Her voice grew sharper. "They stayed until after twelve, just because Borden was nineteen dollars back at one time. And they drank all that was left of your special Mount Vernon. It was last night that you were at the St. Regis?"
"No," he corrected her, "the night before. Last evening I had dinner with the Groves." This was so nearly true that he advanced it with satisfaction. "Afterward we went to the Greenwich Follies."
"I don't see how you had to wait, then," she observed instantly. "You were in New York on account of Claire, you stayed three nights, and only saw Mina Raff once." He told her briefly that, unexpectedly, more had turned up. "What did you do the first night?" she persisted.
"I dragged a cash girl into an opium place on Pell Street."
"That's not too funny to be borne," she returned; "and it doesn't altogether answer my question."
"We went to Malmaison."
"We?" she mimicked his earlier query.
"Oh, the Groves. I like them very much, Fanny--" To her interruption that that was evident he paid no attention. "He is an extremely nice man, a little too conscious of his pedestal, but solid and cordial. Mrs. Grove is more unusual; I should say she was a difficult woman to describe. She dresses beautifully, Paris and the rest of it; but she isn't a particle good-looking. Not a bit! It's her color, I think. She hasn't any. Women would fancy her more than men; no one could call her pleasant."
"You haven't asked about the children." She had apparently heard nothing of what had gone before.
"Of course they are all right or you'd have told me."
"Lee, you astonish me, you really do; at times I think you forget you have a family. We'll all be dead before you know it. I'm sorry, but you will have to get into the habit of staying home at least one night a week. I attend to all I can manage about the place, but there are some things you must settle. The trouble is I haven't demanded enough from you."
"That's silly," he responded, almost falling into his discarded irritation; "I practically never go out without you. Unless you are with me I won't be in New York again for weeks."
"I should have thought you'd be back at the Groves's tomorrow. It's more amusing there, I don't doubt; but, after all, you are married to me."
"Good heavens, Fanny," he protested, "what is this about? You're really cutting with the Groves--two excessively nice people who were decent to me."
"You are such an idiot," she declared, in a warmer voice. "Can't you see how disappointed I was? First I had everything laid out on the bed, my best nightgowns and lace stockings, for the trip; then I couldn't go; and I arranged the party so carefully for you, Gregory had a practice piece ready for you to hear, and--and nothing. I wonder if any other man is as selfish as you?'
"Maybe not," he returned peaceably. "What happened was unavoidable. It was a social necessity, decided for me. I couldn't just run into the house and out again. But there is no need to explain further." He left the table, for a cigar, and returned. "You have on a new dress!"
"I ought to be complimented," she admitted, "but I am not; it's only the black velvet with the fulness taken out and a new ruffle. Clothes are so expensive that I wanted to save. It isn't French, either. Perhaps you'll remember that you said the new length didn't become me. No, you're not the idiot--I am: I must stop considering and trying to please you at every turn. I should have gone in and ordered a new dress; any other woman you know would have done that; and, I have no doubt, would have told you it was old when it wasn't. I wish I didn't show that I care so much and kept you guessing. You'd be much more interested if you weren't so sure of me. That seems to me queer-- loyalty and affection, and racking your brain to make your husband comfortable and happy, don't bring you anything. They don't! You'll leave at once for a night in New York or a new face with an impudent bang at the dances. I have always tried to do what I thought was right, but I'm getting discouraged."
"Don't lose patience with me," he begged gravely. "If I am worth the effort to you, Fanny, don't stop. I do the best I can. Coming out in the train I made up my mind to stop petty quarreling. No, wait--if it is my fault that makes it easy, we're done with it."
"From the way you talk," she objected, "anyone would think we did nothing but fight. And that isn't true; we have never had a bit of serious trouble." She rose, coming around to him:
"That wasn't a very nice kiss we had when you came in. I was horrid."
Lee Randon kissed her again. The cool familiarity of her lips was blurred in the remembered clinging intensity of Savina's mouth. "Lee, dear, blow out the candles; the servants forget, and those blue handmade ones cost twenty-five cents apiece." They left the dining-room with her arm about him and his hand laid on her shoulder. Lee's feeling was curious--he recognized Fanny's desirability, he loved her beyond all doubt, and yet physically she had now no perceptible influence on him. He was even a little embarrassed, awkward, at her embrace; and its calmly possessive pressure filled him with a restive wish to move away. He repressed this, forced himself to hold her still, repeated silently all that she had given him; and she turned a face brilliant with color to his gaze. Fanny made him bring her stool--how sharply Savina's heels had dug into him under the table at the Lafayette--and showed him her ankles. "You see, I put them on tonight for you." Her stockings, he assured her, were enchanting. A difficulty that, incredibly, he had not foreseen weighed upon him: the body, where Fanny was concerned, had given place to the intellect; the warmth of his feeling had been put aside for the logic of determination; and he was sick with weariness. In his customary chair, he sank into a heavy brooding lethargy, a silence, in which his hands slowly and stiffly clenched.
* * * * *
On the following morning, Sunday, Lee rode with Claire Morris. Fanny, disinclined to activity, stayed by the open fire, with the illustrated sections of the newspapers and her ornamental sewing. Claire was on, a tall bright bay always a little ahead of Lee, and he was constantly urging his horse forward. "Peyton went to the Green Spring Valley for a hunt party last night," she told him; "he said he'd be back." Why, then, he almost exclaimed, he, Lee, had been successful with Mina Raff. Instead he said that she would undoubtedly be glad of that. "Oh, yes! But neither of us is very much excited about it just now; he is too much like a ball on a rubber string; and if I were a man I'd hate to resemble that. I won't try to hide from you that I've lost something; still, I have him and Mina hasn't. They shouldn't have hesitated, Lee; that was what spoiled it, in the end beat them. It wasn't strong enough to carry them away and damn the consequences. There is always something to admire in that, even if you suffer from it."
The night had been warm, and the road, the footing, was treacherous with loosened stones and mud. The horses, mounting a hill, picked their way carefully; and Lee Randon gazed over his shoulder into the valley below. He saw it through a screen of bare wet maple branches--a dripping brown meadow lightly wreathed in blue mist, sedgy undergrowth along water and the further ranges of hills merged in shifting clouds. A shaft of sunlight, pale and without warmth, illuminated with its emphasis an undistinguished and barren spot. On the meadows sloping to the south there were indefinite spaces of green. Claire was heedless of their surroundings.
"What does surprise and disturb me," she continued vigorously, "is that I haven't any sympathy for him. That is gone too; I only have a feeling that he bitched it. As you may observe, Lee, I am not at all admirable this morning: a figure of inconsistency. And the reason will amaze you --I've rather come to envy what they might have had. I am afraid that if the positions of Mina and me had been reversed I wouldn't have seen you in New York. I found that out last night when I knew Peyton wasn't going. What he said over and over was that everything could be just as it was." She laughed, riding easily, subconsciously, on the snaffle rein. "Peyton's simplicity is marvelous. In a year, or maybe less, he will be quite the same as always. I had nothing to do with it; Peyton and Mina will go on as fresh as daisies; yet only I'll be damaged or, anyway, changed. What shall I do about it?" she demanded of Lee Randon, so sharply that her horse shied.
"About what?" he returned. "My senses are so dulled by your ingratitude that I can't gather what you mean."
"Well, here I am--a girl with her head turned by a glimpse at a most romantic play, by cakes and champagne cup, and then sent home to bread without jam. Since I've known of this it has taken most of the color out of everyday things, they are like a tub-full of limp rags with the dye run from them. I want Peyton, yes, I love him; but what I thought would satisfy me doesn't. I want more! I am very serious about the romantic play--it is exactly what I mean. I had read about great emotions, seen them since I was a child at the opera, and there was the Madrid affair; but that was so far away, and I never thought of the others as real; I never understood that people really had them, in Eastlake as well as Spain, until I watched Peyton miss his. And then it came over me in a flash what life could be."
"We are all in the same fix, Claire," he told her.
"But not you," she replied impatiently; "your existence with Fanny is the most perfect for miles around. Fanny is marvelous to you, and you are as sensible as you are nice."
"You think, then, that I haven't seen any of this romantic show you are talking about?"
"If you had you wouldn't let it spoil your comfort."
The pig again!
"Well, what is it here or there?" she cried. "I'll feel like this for a little and then die alive. Did you ever notice an old woman, Lee? She is like a horrid joke. There is something unconquerably vain and foolish about old men that manages to save them from entire ruin. But a woman shrivelled and blasted and twisted out of her purpose--they either look as though they had been steeped in vinegar or filled with tallow--is simply obscene. Before it is too harrowing, and in their best dresses and flowers, they ought to step into a ball-room of chloroform. But this change in me, Lee, isn't in my own imagination. The people who know me best have complained that what patience I had has gone; even Ira, I'm certain, notices it. I have no success in what used to do to get along with; my rattle of talk, my line, is gone."
"Those relations of Mina Raff's, the Groves," he said, shifting the talk to the subject of his thoughts, "are very engaging. Mrs. Grove specially. She has splendid qualities almost never found together in one person. She is, well, I suppose careful is the word, and, at the same time, not at all dull. I wonder if she is altogether well? Her paleness would spoil most women's looks and, it seems to me, she mentioned her heart."
"Good Lord, Lee, what are you rambling on about? I don't care for a description of the woman like one of those anatomical zodiacs in the Farmers' Almanac." She turned her horse, without warning, through a break in the fence; and, putting him at a smart run, jumped a stream with a high insecure bank beyond, and went with a pounding rush up a sharp incline. He followed, but more conservatively; and, at the solid fence she next took, he shouted that she'd have to continue on that gait alone.
"Don't be so careful," she answered mockingly, trotting back; "take a chance; feel the wind streaming in your face; you'll reach Fanny safely."
What, exasperated, he muttered was, "Damn Fanny!" He had jumped a fence as high and wide as respectability; and he enormously preferred Savina's sort of courage to this mad galloping over the country. What Claire and Peyton and Mina Raff talked about, longed for, Savina took. He involuntarily shut his eyes, and, rocking to the motion of his horse, heard, in the darkness, a soft settling fall, he saw an indefinite trace of whiteness which swelled into an incandescence that consumed him. They had turned toward home and, on an unavoidable reach of concrete road, were walking. The horses' hoofs made a rhythmic hollow clatter. Claire, with the prospect of losing her love, had hinted at the possibilities of an inherited recklessness; but here was a new and unexpected cause of disturbance.
Lee would never have supposed that such ideas were at the back of Claire's head. He gazed at her, in spite of the fact that she had ruffled his temper, even with an increased interest. In her direct way she had put into words many of the vague pressures floating, like water under night, through his brain. He would act differently; Claire wasn't practical--all that she indicated couldn't be followed. It was spun of nothing more substantial than the bright visions of youth; but the world, he, Lee Randon, was the poorer for that. His was the wise course. It took a marked degree of strength; no weak determination could hope for success in the conduct he had planned for himself; and that gave him material for satisfaction.
He turned to the left, at the road leading past his driveway, and Claire went up the hill into Eastlake alone. She had thought he was describing Savina for her benefit! The truth was that he had been possessed by a tyrannical necessity to talk about Savina Grove, to hear the sound of her praise if it were only on his own voice. It assisted his memory, created, like the faintly heard echo of a thrilling voice, a similitude not without its power to stir him. The secret realms of thought, of fancy and remembrance, he felt, were his to linger in, to indulge, as he chose. Lee had a doubt of the advisability of this; but his question was disposed of by the realization that he had nothing to say; his mind turned back and back to Savina.
He wondered when, or, rather, by what means, he should hear from her again; perhaps--although it required no reply--in response to the letter he had written to the Groves acknowledging their kindness and thanking them for it. To Lee, William Loyd Grove was more immaterial than a final shred of mist lifting from the sunken road across the golf course; even his appreciation of the other's good qualities had vanished, leaving nothing at all. He was confused by the ease with which the real, the solid, became the nebulous and unreal, as though the only standard of values, of weights and measures, lay absurdly in his own inconsequential attitude.
* * * * *
The Randons had no formal meal on Sunday night; but there were sandwiches, a bowl of salad, coffee, and what else were referred to generally as drinks; and a number of people never failed to appear. It was always an occasion of mingled conversations, bursts of popular song at the piano, and impromptu dancing through the length of the lower floor. The benches at either side of the fire-place were invariably crowded; and, from her place on the over-mantel, Cytherea's gaze rested on the vivacious or subdued current of life. Lee Randon often gazed up at her, and tonight, sunk in a corner with scarcely room to move the hand which held a cigarette, this lifted interrogation was prolonged.
Mrs. Craddock, whom he had not seen since the dinner-dance at the club, sat beside him in a vivid green dress with large black beads strung from her left shoulder. She looked very well, he reflected; that was a becoming dimple in her cheek. He had had the beginning of an interest in her--new to Eastlake, and her husband dead, she had taken a house there for the winter--but that had vanished now. He was deep in thought when she said:
"Didn't I hear that you were infatuated with that doll?"
Who, he demanded, had told her such a strange story? "But she does attract me," he admitted; "or, rather, she raises a great many questions, natural in a person named Cytherea. The pair of castanets on a nail--Claire used them in an Andalusian dance--might almost be an offering, like the crutches of Lourdes, left before her by a grateful child of the ballet."
"I can't see what you do, of course; but she reminds me of quantities of women--fascinating on the outside and nothing within. Men are always being fooled by that: they see a face or hear a voice that starts something or other going in them, and they supply a complete personality just as they prefer it, like the filling of a paté case. That is what you have done with this doll--imagined a lot of things that don't exist."
"If they do in me, that's enough, isn't it?" he demanded. "You're partly wrong, at any rate--Cytherea is the originator and I'm the paté. But where, certainly, you are right is that she is only a representation; and it is what she may represent which holds me. Cytherea, if she would, could answer the most important question of my life."
"How tragic that she can't speak."
"Yet that isn't necessary; she might be a guide, like a pointing finger-post. I met a woman lately, as charming as possible, who resembled her; and I'm sure that if I had them together--" he left the end of his sentence in air. Then he began again, "But that could not be managed; not much can, with advantage, in this world." From beyond the hall, to the accompaniment of the piano, came the words, "She might have been a mother if she hadn't looped the loop." Lee made a disdainful gesture. "That is the tone of the present--anything is acceptable if it is trivial; you may kiss wherever you like if you mean nothing by it. But if it's important, say like--like sympathy, it's made impossible for you."
"If you were someone else," Mrs. Craddock observed, "I'd think you were in love. You have a great many of the symptoms--the wandering eye and wild speech."
"I am, with Fanny," he declaimed, struggling out of the bench corner. No one should discover the memory he carried everywhere with him. The lights had been switched off in the living-room, but the piano continued, and glowing cigarettes, like red and erratically waving signals, were visible. Returning, going into the dining-room, he saw that the whiskey had been plentifully spilled over the table. In the morning the varnish would be marred by white stains. The stairs were occupied, the angle in the hall behind which a door gave to the cellar steps, was filled; a sound, not culinary, came from the kitchen pantry. Even Fanny, with her hair in disorder, was dancing an eccentric step with Borden Rodman. All this vibrating emotion created in him, sudden and piercing, a desire for Savina.
He wanted her, the touch of her magnetic hands, her clinging body, her passionate abandon, with every sense. It was unbearable that she, too, wasn't here, waiting for him in the convenient darkness. He had to have her, he muttered. At the same time he was appalled by the force of his feeling: it shook him like a chill and gripped his heart with an acute pain. His entire being was saturated with a longing that was at once a mental and physical disturbance. Nothing in his life, no throe of passion or gratification, had been like this. Lee hastily poured out a drink and swallowed it. He was burning up, he thought; it felt as though a furnace were open at his back; and he went out to the silence, the coldness, of the terrace flagging on the lawn. The lower window shades had been pulled down, but, except in the dining-room, they showed no blur of brightness. Through the walls the chords of the piano were just audible, and the volume of voices was reduced to a formless humming.
It had cleared, the sky was glittering with constellations of stars; against them Lee could trace the course of his telephone wire. But for that his house, taking an added dignity of mass from the night, might have been the reality of which it was no more than an admirable replica. There was little here, outside, to suggest or recall the passage of a century and over. In the lapse of that time, Lee thought, more had been lost than gained; the simplicity had vanished, but wisdom had not been the price of its going.
Of all the people at present in his dwelling, Fanny was the best in the sense of old solid things; he could see her, with no change, at the board of an early household. Compared to her the others seemed like figures in a fever; yet he was, unhappily, with them rather than with Fanny. God knew there was fever enough in his brain! But the winter night was cooling it--a minor image of the final office of death; the choking hunger for Savina was dwindling. He hoped that it wouldn't be repeated. He couldn't answer for himself through many such attacks. Yes, his first love, though just as imperative, had been more ecstatic; the reaching for an ideal rather than the body of a woman.
His allegiance to Cytherea, though, was in part to the former, to youth; now it seemed to him he had preserved that through all his life. But the latter, at least in its devastating power, was new. Lee recognized it as passion, but passion to a degree beyond all former experience and comprehension. Why had it been quiescent so long to overwhelm him now? Or what had he done to open himself to such an invasion? A numbing poison couldn't have been very different. Then, contrarily, he was exhilarated by the knowledge of the vitality of his emotion; Lee reconsidered it with an amazement which resembled pride.
The penny kisses here--he was letting himself into the house--were like the candies Fanny had in a crystal dish on the sideboard, flavors of cinnamon and rose and sugary chocolate. They were hardly more than the fumes of alcohol. But the party showed no signs of ending, the piano continued to be played without a break; one sentimental song had been repeated, without the omission of a line, a held note, ten times, Lee was sure. Fanny paused breathlessly, with a hand on his arm:
"They are all having such a good time; it is absolutely successful. Isn't Borden sweet to bother teaching me that heel tap. Go in and talk to Mrs. Craddock again; I thought you liked her."
In the hall the victrola had been started in opposition to the piano beyond, and the result was a pandemonium of mechanical sound and hysterical laughter. Cytherea was unmoved, enigmatic, fascinating; the gilt of her headdress shone in minute sparkles--Lee had turned on the lights by the mantel. "You always come back to her," Mrs. Craddock said. When he replied that this time he had returned to her, she shook her head sceptically. "But I suppose you have to say it." He dropped back into a corner of one of the benches; they were a jumble of skirts and reclining heads and elevated pumps. The victrola, at the end of a record and unattended, ran on with a shrill scratch. Cytherea had the appearance of floating in the restrained light; her smile was not now so mocking as it was satirical; from her detached attention she might have been regarding an extraordinary and unpredictable spectacle which she had indifferently brought about. It was evident that among what virtues she might possess charity was not present.
* * * * *
After the last automobile leaving--shifted through the diminishing clamor of its gears--had carried its illumination into the farther obscurity of the road, Fanny, uncomfortable in the presence of disorder, quickly obliterated the remaining traces of their party: she emptied the widely scattered ash trays into a brass bowl, gathered the tall whiskey glasses and the glasses with fragile stems and brilliantly enamelled belligerent roosters, the empty charged water bottles, on the dresser in the pantry, and returned chairs and flowers to their recognized places, while Lee locked up the decanters of whiskey. Fanny was tired but enthusiastic, and, as she went deftly about, rearranging her house with an unfailing surety of touch, she hummed fragments of the evening's songs.
Lee Randon was weary without any qualification; the past day, tomorrow --but it was already today--offered him no more than a burden, so many heavy hours, to be supported. The last particle of interest had silently gone from his existence. His condition was entirely different from the mental disquiet of a month ago; no philosophical considerations nor abstract ideas absorbed him now--it was a weariness not of the mind but of the spirit, a complete sterility of imagination and incentive, as though an announced and coveted prize had been arbitrarily withdrawn during the struggle it was to have rewarded. There was no reason Lee could think of for keeping up his diverse efforts. He sat laxly in his customary corner of the living room-- Fanny, he felt, had disposed of him there as she had the other surrounding objects--his legs thrust out before him, too negative to smoke.
His wife leaned over and kissed him; she was, she had suddenly discovered, dead with fatigue. The kiss was no more than the contact of her lips on his. The clear realization of this startled him; now not an emotion, not even tenderness, responded to her gestures of love. His indifference had been absolute! There had been periods of short duration when, exasperated with Fanny, he had lost the consciousness of his affection for her; but then he had been filled with other stirred emotions; and now he was coldly empty of feeling. It was this vacancy that specially disturbed him: it had an appearance, new to all his processes, of permanence.
Outside his will the fact was pronounced for him that--for a long or short period--he had ceased to love his wife. There was something so intimately and conventionally discourteous in his realization that he avoided it even in his thoughts. But it would not be ignored; it was too robust a truth to be suppressed by weakened instincts. He didn't love Fanny and Fanny did love him ... a condition, he felt indignantly, which should be automatically provided against; none of the ethics of decency or conduct provided for that. It wasn't for a second, without the single, the familiar and ancient, cause, allowed. Fanny, least of any imaginable woman, had given him a pretext for complaint. Yet, with everyone acknowledging her to be the perfect wife, and he at the fore of such praise, he had incontestably stopped caring for her. It was a detestable situation.
In the whole body of preconceived thought and action there wasn't a word, a possible movement, left for him. He was, simply, a hyena; that description, not innocent of humor, was still strikingly close to what he would generally hear if the state of his mind were known. It was paralyzing, but absolutely no provision had been made for men, decent enough, who had stopped loving decent wives. Lee was not, here, considering the part of his life involved with Savina Grove: Savina had nothing to do with his attitude toward Fanny. This didn't hang on the affection he might have for one at the superficial expense of the other: Savina--while it was undeniable that she had done exactly this in the vulgar physical sense--hadn't essentially taken him away from Fanny. He had gone self-directed, or, rather, in the blind manner of an object obeying the law of gravity. He couldn't argue that he had been swept away.
It wasn't, either, that he overwhelmingly wanted to go to Savina Grove, he overwhelmingly didn't; and the strangling emotion, the desire, that had possessed him earlier in the evening had been sufficiently unwelcome. His only reaction to that was the vigorous hope that it wouldn't come back. No, he had, mentally, settled the affair with Savina in the best possible manner; now he was strictly concerned with the bond between his wife and himself. The most reliable advice, self- administered or obtained from without, he could hope for would demand that he devote the rest of his life, delicately considerate, to Fanny. She must never know the truth. This was the crown of a present conception of necessity and unassailable conduct, of nobility. But, against this, Lee Randon was obliged to admit that he was not a particle noble; he wasn't certain that he wanted to be; he suspected it. Putting aside, for the moment, the doubtfulness of his being able to maintain successfully, through years, such an imposition, there was something dark, equally dubious, in its performance. He might manage it publicly, even superficially in private, and as a father; but marriage wasn't primarily a superficial relationship. It was very much the reverse. Its fundamental condition was the profoundest instinct that controlled living; there no merely admirable conduct could manage to be more than a false and degrading, a temporary, lie. How could he with a pandering smugness meet Fanny's purity of feeling? Yet, it seemed, exactly this was being done by countless other applauded men. But, probably, the difference between them and himself was that they had no objective consciousness of their course; happily they never stopped to think. It was thought, he began to see, and not feeling that created nearly all his difficulties.
In a flash of perception he grasped that formal thought, in its aspect of right conduct, was utterly opposed to feeling. While the former condemned the surrender of Savina and himself to passion, the latter, making it imperative, had brushed aside the barriers of recognized morals. It had been a tragic, it might well be a fatal, error to oppose religion--as it affected both this world and the impossible next--to nature.
Yet men could no longer exist as animals; he saw that plainly. They had surrendered the natural in favor of an artificial purity. In a land where sea shells were the standard of value, rubies and soft gold were worthless. Lee was opposed to his entire world; he had nothing but his questioning, his infinitesimal entity, for his assistance. Literally there wasn't a man to whom he could turn whose answer and advice weren't as predictable as useless. There was nothing for him but to accept his position and, discharging it where he was able, fail where he must.
There was, however, no need for that failure to be absolute; and the underlying responsibility he had fully considered, subject to its own attained code, would have to do service as best it could. Here he paused to realize that the improved manners he had determined on were no more than the expression of his growing, his grown, indifference. It should be easy to be restrained in a situation that had small meaning or importance. What struck him again was the fact that his connection with Fanny was of far greater moment than that with Helena and Gregory. His responsibility to them was a minor affair compared to the weight increasingly laid upon their elders. Somehow, they didn't seem to need him as sharply as Fanny did. Materially they were all three more than sufficiently provided for, and spiritually, as he had so often reflected, he had little or no part in his children's well-being. Perhaps this, he had told himself, could be changed; certainly he was solely to blame if he had stood aside from their education.
He would see more of them--four days a week were now plenty for the conducting of his successful enterprises in the city--and give them what benefits his affection and experience held. In this he mustn't contradict the influence of their mother; that, so late, would only be followed by chaos; he'd merely be more with them. Helena was old enough for a small tractable horse and Gregory must have a pony. All four, Fanny and he and the children, would jog out in the spring together. From that mental picture he got a measure of reassurance; a condition resembling peace of mind again returned. As much as possible, against the elements of danger, was in his favor. He might have had a wife who, on the prevalent tide of gin and orange juice, of inordinate luxuriousness, degraded him with small betrayals. Or he might have been any one of a hundred unfortunate things. He took life too seriously, that was evident; a larger degree of mental irresponsibility would be followed by a more responsible accomplishment of the realities which bore no more heavily on him than on other men; and in this the cocktails had their office.
* * * * *
Lee agreed readily, therefore, when, on Friday afternoon, Fanny asked him to bring Helena and Gregory from dancing-school. This was held in the Armory; and, past five o'clock, mounting the wide stone steps in the early gloom and going through the bare echoing hall, he joined the complacent mothers ranged in chairs pushed against the wall in a spirit of interested attention. The Armory, following the general literal interpretation of the sternness of military usage, was gaunt, with a wide yellow floor and walls of unconcealed brick. In a far corner, on a temporary and unpainted platform, the pianist sat with her hands raised, her wrists rigid, preparatory to the next demand upon her strongly accentuated playing. Lee was surprised at the large number of children ranged in an irregular ring about the erect brittle presence and insistent voice of the instructor.
What scant hair he possessed, carefully disposed to cover its meagreness, was grey, and its color permeated, suggested, the tone of his thin face. Surrounded by the cruel exuberance of the children, he seemed incalculably worn, permanently weary, although he was surprisingly sharp-eyed and adequate. It was, Lee thought unsympathetically, a curiously negative occupation for a man; the small graces of the dancing teacher, the bows gravely exchanged with childish bows, the bent dancing with diminutive slips, the occasional fretful tone of his voice, further alienated Lee Randon. But the children were a source of entertainment and speculation.
He saw Gregory at once, short and sturdy-legged, in a belted jacket and white breeches; his son was standing peaceably, attentive, clasping the hand of a girl smaller than himself with obstinate bobbed hair. This, the high pointed voice in the center of the floor continued, was an Irish folk dance; they would try it again; and the reiterated details were followed by the sounding of a whistle and music. Lee had no idea of the exact number of children engaged, but he was certain that there were just as many totally different executions of the steps before them. Not one had grasped an essential of the carefully illustrated instruction; he could see nowhere an evidence of grace or rhythm. But, with a few notable exceptions, all boys, there was an entire solemnity of effort; the swinging of bare short legs, the rapid awkward bobs, were undertaken with a deep sense of their importance.
The Irish folk dance was attempted for a third time, and then relinquished in favor of a waltz. Miniature couples circled and staggered, the girls again prim, the boys stolid or with working mouths, or as smooth and vacuous as chestnuts, little sailors and apparitions in white, obviously enjoying their employment. During this not a word was exchanged; except for the shuffling feet, the piano, an occasional phrase of encouragement from the instructor, himself gliding with a dab of fat in exaggerated ribbons, there wasn't a sound. To Lee it had the appearance of the negation of pleasure; it was, in its way, as bad as the determined dancing of adults; it had the look of a travesty of that. Helena conducted a restive partner, trying vainly to create the impression that he was leading, wherever she considered it advantageous for him to go. The thick flood of her gold hair shimmered about her uncompromising shoulders, her embroidered skirt fluttered over the firmness of her body.
She was as personable a little girl as any present; and, while she hadn't Gregory's earnestness in what he attempted, she got on smoothly enough. Seeing Lee, she smiled and waved a hand almost negligently; but Gregory, at his presence, grew visibly embarrassed; he almost stopped. Lee Randon nodded for him to go ahead. There were various minor cataclysms--Helena flatly refused to dance with a boy who pursued her with an urging hand. At this conspicuous reverse he sat on a chair until the teacher brought him forcibly out and precipitated him into the willing arms of a girl larger and, if possible, more inelastic than the others. The ring was again assembled, and the complicated process of alternating a boy with a girl was accomplished.
"Never mind what he does," the instructor directed sharply; "always be sure you are right." A shift was made further around in the line, and the elder wisdom was vindicated. "Now, the chain." The whistle blew. "Left and right, left and right." In spite of this there was an equal engagement of rights with lefts. The assumption of gravity acutely bothered Lee Randon: they had no business, he thought, to be already such social animals. Their training in set forms, mechanical gestures and ideas, was too soon hardening their mobility and instinctive independence. Yes, they were a caricature of what they were to become. He hadn't more sympathy with what he had resolved to encourage, applaud, but less. The task of making any headway against that schooling was beyond him.
The dancing reached a pause, and, with it, the silence: a confusion of clear undiversified voices rose: the face of an infant with long belled trousers and solidified hair took on a gleam of impish humor; older and more robust boys scuffled together with half-subdued hails and large pretentions; groups of girls settled their skirts and brushed, with instinctive pats, their braids into order; and there was a murmur of exchanged approbation from the supporting, white-gloved mothers. Gregory appeared at Lee's side; his cheeks were crimson with health, his serious eyes glowed:
"Well, do you like it?"
"Yes," Gregory answered shyly. He lingered while Lee Randon tried to think of something else appropriate to say, and then he ran abruptly off. His children were affectionate enough, but they took him absolutely for granted; they regarded him very much as they did their cat; except for the conventional obeisance they made him, not so voluntary as it was trained into them, they were far more involved with Martha, their black nurse. Everywhere, Lee felt, they repelled him. Was he, then, lacking in the qualities, the warmth, of paternity? Again, as he was helpless where Fanny lately was concerned, he was unable to be other.
It was increasingly evident that he had not been absorbed, obliterated, in marriage; an institution which, from the beginning, had tried--like religion--to hold within its narrow walls the unconfinable instincts of creation. It hadn't, among other things, considered the fascination of Cytherea; a name, a tag, as intelligible as any for all his dissent. But cases like his were growing more prevalent; however, usually, in women. Men were the last stronghold of sentimentality. His thoughts were interrupted by a dramatic rift in the discipline of the class: a boy, stubbornly seated, swollen, crimson, with wrath and heroically withheld tears, was being vainly argued with by the dancing master. He wouldn't stir, he wouldn't dance. The man, grasping a shoulder, shook him in a short violence, and then issued a final uncompromising order. _