It came and went, capriciously; sometimes overwhelming you with a sudden fierceness sweeping aside all thought of resistance, and again, though invited and welcomed by you, approaching timidly and cautiously, now advancing now receding, hiding in the corners of your fancy, mistrustful and shy of capture.
It would rarely come more than once in a day or night, though there were times—for instance, that evening after Erma came to New York. That was startlingly vivid, twice, though it’s hard to see how it could have had anything to do with Erma, unless it was that she reminded you of the old days in Cleveland when you experienced it so often that it was like lacing up your shoes or buttoning your trousers.
Erma would have loved being told that the first effect of her return was to sharpen your memory of little Millicent!
At that she wouldn’t care a hang. It would amuse her. Has there ever been anyone about whom she cared that way? Lord no. You never saw Pierre, but you’ve heard her talk about him. She would yawn and say something clever about a psychical intrusion, as she did the time she found that violinist wearing rose petals in a silk belt around his waist under his shirt, the damn fool. It was like her to tell you about that, with no apology except to say that it was too good to keep.
If you had known her as well as you do now, what would you have done that morning when she informed you the time had come? It is difficult to remember how much you did then know. Probably it wouldn’t have mattered, for you were ready to grab at anything; if she had happened to postpone her decision another week or two you might have followed Larry to France and got your head shot off.
Jane had been married nearly a year; you had decided to tolerate Victor, but you saw them infrequently, partly because you felt that Margaret and Rose were trying to use you for a good thing and you didn’t intend to stand for it. Especially Rose. Jane, trying to manage a baby and a job at the same time, was too busy to notice it.
You sat there that night in Erma’s elaborate bedroom, wondering what was up. It was her first big dinner and dance at the house on Riverside Drive, and had been marvelously successful; she could do that sort of thing so easily, almost without thought. You supposed that she would tire of it in a year, or at least as soon as the war was over; she would probably return to Europe. Why had she asked you to stay after the mob had left? If she wanted to see you alone why couldn’t she have made it last night or tomorrow? What did she want anyway?
The door from her dressing-room opened, and she entered, fresh and charming with no trace of the night’s fatigue, wearing a soft yellow negligee, just the color of her hair, and slippers the same, with her white ankles showing beneath the hem as she crossed to you. As if she had done it a thousand times before, she seated herself on your lap, looked directly at you, her eyes bright and soft and intense, and stroked your cheek with her hand.
“Poor Bill, you’re tired,” she said.
You were somewhat disconcerted. During the four months that had passed since her return she had been most friendly, but had given no indication of an ungovernable longing for your person. She had once or twice observed casually that she must some time have a long business talk with you, but her present costume and position seemed ill-adapted to that purpose. Through the stuff of your trousers you could feel plainly that the negligee was all.
“Not so very,” you said.
“Neither am I,” she replied, “put your arm around me.” You held her close, at first mechanically, like a conscientious proxy; then, approaching excitement, on your own account.
“Kiss me,” she whispered, “your arms are so good!” You could feel her hand at the back of your head, the spread fingers pressed hard against you, beneath the hair.
Where the deuce did she get those pajamas? Had they been Pierre’s? They were right there in her dressing-room, though she had moved to that house only a week before—and seemed new. A marvelous soft white thick silk. She declared she had bought them that very day, and it is quite possible. At any rate you almost felt tender toward her for that whiteness, having always detested colored pajamas.
A strange night that was. Like watching yourself from the top of a mountain, too far away to see clearly.…
In the morning it astonished you that she arose when you did and insisted that you have fruit and coffee with her; and there, at the breakfast table, she announced her opinion that it would be a good idea to get married. You were already so confused by the sudden shift in status, and so tired and sleepy, that at first you regarded this idea as an additional and unnecessary complication.
“Since we’ve known each other over twelve years,” you said, “that suggestion, at this precise moment, is open to a highly vulgar construction.”
“Not unflattering to you,” she replied. Her eyes and voice were clear; she looked thoroughly rested and refreshed.
“I can’t think why you propose it.” You drew yourself another cup of coffee from the enormous silver percolator. “Already I’m completely your slave and likely to be so forever. I don’t forget that a long time ago, before I knew you very well, I made the mistake of believing that you were in love with me.”
“How funny for you and me to be talking of love,” she observed.
“After the derision we’ve heaped on it. Yes.”
“That was just conversation. I mean it’s so unnecessary, it won’t get us anywhere. We already know everything that counts between us, we know a lot more than we’d be willing to admit. We understand each other.”
“I’m damned if I understand why you want to marry me.”
“Oh. Well. Ask the flower why it opens to the bee, or if you prefer, the lady-salmon why she swims a thousand miles to that particular creek. If she’s properly brought up she’ll tell you, but it won’t be true.”
“More conversation,” you said drily. “Ordinarily I’m ready to play, but you seem to be making all the rules. What do you want me around for? As your trusted adviser it looks to me as if you’re making a bad bargain.”
“Council of perfection.” She lit a cigarette and was lost in smoke. “Show me a better one. I’m tired of being Veuve Basset. I want to invest in a husband.”
“By god you’re frank about it.”
“You ask why, and you insist. Perhaps I’m still curious about you, which would be a triumph. I watched you once fastidiously refuse a prize that most men would have given an eye for. Or, maybe, I merely want a screen inside my bedroom door, in case the wind blows it open.…Heavens, there is no why. What if tonight at dinner the oyster on your fork suddenly twists itself upright to glare at you and demand, why am I selected for this honor?”
You lifted your coffee cup, whipped into silence by her smiling brutality; and doubtless you looked whipped, for she pushed back her chair and came around the table and kissed you on top of the head.
“Bill dear, I do want to be your wife,” she said.
All day long at the office, and the night and day following, you pretended to consider what you were going to do, knowing all the time that it was already decided.
You had supposed that she would want a starched and gaudy wedding, now that she had entered for the big show in the metropolis, and were relieved when she said it was too much bother, that was for peasants and titled sheep. On a fine October morning, less than a month after the breakfast betrothal, in a dark little parsonage parlor somewhere in South Jersey, with its funny curtained window overlooking a white church across a bit of green lawn, with Dick and Nina Endicott as witnesses, Erma made her marital investment. You and she went on with the car and chauffeur into Virginia, and later clear to the gulf, while Dick and Nina returned to New York by train.
Unquestionably there is something in you that has always kept Erma just this side of satiety; of satisfaction too, but that is something her restless appetite will find nowhere unless in the grave. A dozen times you have been convinced that at last she had cut loose, that finally she had done with poking around inside you and had abandoned you to fate and the weather, only to find her back and at it again, after a more or less prolonged interval, like a pertinacious terrier suspecting one more rat in that exasperating hole. Piqued, she enjoys her defeat and proclaims it to you, a trick which at first caused you some uneasiness, for she is clever enough to know that the words you do not pronounce are the ones to listen for. You too have pretended to listen for them, but that’s a little joke everyone plays on himself. Never fear, they’ll stay where they belong, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.
The first interval, at least the first you were aware of, came soon after the end of the war—the spring following the armistice, when New York was still full of returned captains and colonels being painfully and violently deflated. That fellow who worked for months sorting out reports and making summaries for you had commanded a regiment at Chateau-Thierry. He was a nice chap, but so dumb you had to send him back to Nicholson for replacement. Later he went out to Carrton, with Larry; only Larry came back before long and began to surprise all of you.
It was Larry who introduced Major Barth to you and Erma; brought him out one evening for bridge. There was nothing impressive about him, except his size—almost massive, well-proportioned, with a little blond moustache that looked like a pair of tiny pale commas pasted couchant, pointing outwards, against his youthful pink skin. You would not have noticed him at all, among the crowd, but for the subsequent comedy.
The big handsome major began to be much in evidence, but still you took no notice; Erma’s volatile and brief fancies in the matter of dinner guests and dancing partners were an old story to you. It was a departure when she phoned you one afternoon to ask you to dine at the club; and when the request was repeated several times in a week you wondered mildly whether the cook had broken his leg or was merely off on a spree. Then, returning home one evening at nearly midnight, on mounting to your rooms on the third floor you saw light through the keyhole as you passed Erma’s room on the floor below, though John had told you that she was out and would not return until late. Perhaps it was her maid—you started to knock—perhaps it wasn’t—you shrugged your shoulders and went up to bed.
In the morning you arose rather later than usual, and you were in the breakfast room with your emptied coffee cup before you, just ready to fold up the Times and throw it aside when you heard footsteps at the door and looked up to see Major Barth enter, twinkling and ruddy. His hesitation at sight of you was so momentary that it was scarcely perceptible.
“Good morning,” he said pleasantly; and added something about supposing you had gone to the office and wishing he had one to go to, as he passed behind your chair to reach the bell button. Stupidly disconcerted, you mumbled that you had slept poorly and must now hurry off; John appeared; with desperate politeness you pushed the Times across the table to your guest and hastily departed, hearing behind you enthusiastic references to orange juice, bacon and eggs, fried potatoes, apple jelly.…
It so happened that that evening you and Erma were dining out, somewhere the other side of the park, As usual she came to your room and tied your cravat; she still does, now and then; that’s one of her thousand unlikely gestures that there’s no accounting for. She hummed the air of una furtiva lagrima as she stood close in front of you neatly arranging the ends of the bow.
“We’ll hear Caruso do that tonight,” she said, “provided they don’t go to sleep over the coffee.”
“Yes.” You turned and picked up your vest. “Will the major be along?”
She sat on the arm of your reading chair and looked at you, appreciatively, and at your question there was a flicker in her eyes, not amusement, just that flicker of nervous life without any human meaning. Then she smiled.
“Tim interrupted your breakfast, didn’t he?”
“No! Not Tim! Don’t tell me that rhinoceros is named Tim!”
“Timothy,” she declared. “I’m sorry he walked in on you like an unexpected mountain—I should have told you.”
In front of the mirror, with your back to her, you arranged your coat.
“And is he—that is—are we adopting him?” you inquired.
She was silent. Then she said:
“Sometimes you frighten me, Bill. You feel things too well, much too well for a man. How long have we been married, a year and a half? Yes, eighteen months. We’ve had dozens of house guests, some under rather peculiar circumstances, like the Hungarian boy last winter, and you’ve never lifted an eyelid. But you feel Tim at once; you’re much too clever.”
You were now dressed, and stood by the chair looking down at her, your hands in your pockets.
“He slept with you last night,” you said.
“Yes,” she replied.
“And I am supposed to breakfast with him and discuss yesterday’s market? My god, Erma, after all we’re not caterpillars. I think I know the kind of bargain we’ve made; I’m not likely to try sermons about chastity and fidelity on you. This is a made-up speech; I thought it out at the office this afternoon. That’s how close you and I are to things like that. I slept like a top last night. I’m not pretending any personal torment, but when that jackass walked in on me this morning I felt like an embarrassed worm. What do you want me to do? Shall I go and live at the club? Do you want a divorce?”
“Come on,” said Erma, “we’ll be late.”
It petered out to no conclusion as you sat side by side on the soft limousine cushions, rolling down the Drive, crosstown and through the park. Certainly, she said, she did not want a divorce; and what earthly reason was there for you to move to the club or anywhere else? These problems obviously arose from feelings within you which were entirely foreign to her repertory, she added. She had not sufficiently realized that your rare perception would find in the major’s breakfast presence any greater significance than in that of any other overnight guest. As a matter of fact, she had not much cared for so emphatic an intimacy with him; it had been unavoidable because he was at present so poor that he was living in a dingy little furnished room down on Seventh Avenue. He had hinted that a position with the Carr Corporation would be acceptable, but really it was impossible; he was much too dumb to wish off on you and Dick.
Something like that it went. The central question, were you to be expected to share the morning Times with gentlemen who had spent the night in your wife’s bedroom, remained unanswered. Your mind was already using the plural, gentlemen, for you saw clearly that the major was but the inconsequential founder of an amorous dynasty.
As the years have passed Erma has become progressively more callous to your rare perception.…
At that she knows you better than anyone except Jane. She knows profoundly what she can count on with you, she always has; it was amazing how sure she was when Dick and the whole Board, the whole bunch except Schwartz, were ready to throw you out on your head. For that matter the entire affair was amazing, like a Fourteenth Street melodrama in tails; and but for Erma, Jackson would have got away with it and you would have been the conquered villain.
How Jackson got that dope from the Adams National, and how he worked through Mrs. Halloway to get the inside agreement with the Bethlehem crowd into the papers without any of the usual wire-pulling came out later, but you knew none of that then and had no way of getting at it. You couldn’t blame Dick, nor any of them, for it was strictly up to you. There were no other copies in New York, no one else had access to it, you were known to be on friendly terms with Halloway. No wonder Jackson grinned at you that morning in the elevator.
You decided that you must tell Erma all about it, give her all the facts, carefully and completely, and went home early that afternoon, hoping that she would have returned since your telephone message. Larry came into your office just before you left.
“We’re hearing a thousand crazy rumors down on the twentieth floor,” he said. “A lot of bunk. Jackson comes through looking like a hyena that’s just found a whole graveyard, the big stiff. It’s none of my business, but I just wanted you to know we’re for you—”
You thanked him and reassured him, not very successfully, thinking that perhaps you were leaving that office for the last time, that pleasant luxurious room with your name in dignified gold letters on the door.
At home, in the hall, a servant told you that Erma was in her room and wanted to see you at once.
When you knocked and entered she was there curled up in the purple chair, her bare feet (which you had once thought an affectation) on the velvet cushion, perfect and white-glowing in the dim light, the smoke a blue spiral from the cigarette between her fingers; she did not move as you came in, except her eyes. On another chair, facing her, nearer the window, with a teacup in his hand, sat Dick.
“Hello,” said Erma. “From what Dick tells me I should have thought you’d be on a boat for Africa by now, armed to the teeth.”
Dick muttered something about “unexpected” and “unpleasant” and put his teacup down, and then turned to you and demanded to know how you had learned he was there.
“I didn’t,” you said. “If I had I’d have waited for you to leave.” You turned towards the door.
“No,” said Erma, “don’t run away. Sit down and have a cup of tea and hear Dick’s funny story. I haven’t been so thrilled in years.” She flung at him one of those sharp little smiles which, turned on you, always made you feel like pinching her. “After all, Bill lives here, you know. This is his home.”
“All right, we’ve had it out, I’m not here to prove to him what he already knows. I’ve told you just how it stands, he denies it, just denies it like a damn fool, though it’s as plain as the nose on his face. I’m telling you he’s disloyal and crooked and he’s got to get out. Why waste time beefing about it?”
“Goodness, how positive you are,” said Erma. “And how moral.”
“Moral, hell. I don’t reproach him, I think he’s crazy, unless he got a million for it. I’ve told you I didn’t want to believe it, I didn’t believe it, until it was impossible not to. Anyway I didn’t come here to argue about it, I came to tell you what has to be done. We could have gone ahead at the meeting yesterday, they were all for it, but I thought it was only decent to tell you about it first.”
“Thanks.” Erma had poured you a cup of tea and broken a lump of sugar in two so as to give you one and a half. You took it and sat down again, feeling a detached admiration for the vigor of Dick’s assault. Until this morning he had remained unconvinced; now, having decided, with characteristic energy he struck at once. You were through with worrying about it; the whole outfit could go to hell; as for Jackson, who had certainly framed it, he was too clever for you. In another month you would have had the goods on him—how had he found out?
“This is really sad,” Erma drawled, “but so piquant and exciting. Bill has some kind of a paper in a private safe about a secret agreement on a government contract, and he goes to your bitterest enemies and offers to have it printed in a newspaper so the government will have to repudiate it and give the contract—now come, Dick, you don’t really believe that.”
“I’ve told you, the proofs—”
“Oh your proofs! Some day some man is going to prove that drowning is good for a headache and you’ll all run and jump in the ocean. Good heavens, don’t you think I know whether I’m married to a treacherous little rat? Of course he might have been drunk—or trying to prove something. Were you, Bill? Did you? You don’t need to answer, I see it in your face. Dick darling, the next time you want to get dramatic and unearth a dark and malignant plot select your villain with some regard to plausibility; don’t pick on poor Bill.”
“I’m not picking on him. You’re so damn clever.” Dick plainly restrained himself with difficulty. “There’s no use arguing about it.” He turned savagely to you. “Are you going to resign and get out, or not?”
“He is not,” said Erma.
“Then we’ll kick him out.”
“No you won’t.”
“The hell we won’t. He goes tomorrow. Come down and try arguing with the Board about it and see how far you get.”
“I don’t intend to argue; I’m not interested in Boards. I’m quite ignorant about them, but I know I own half of the company, and I know in a general way what that means, and Bill isn’t going to resign and he won’t be kicked out. Or if he is I’ll find a new interest in life and we’ll see if I’m clever or not.”
Dick was on his feet, glaring at her, nearer explosion than you had ever seen him. You watched him, fascinated; if he really did blow up Vesuvius would be nowhere.
“I’m really sorry for you, Dick,” said Erma coolly, “I don’t enjoy putting a ring in your nose, it’s rather painful.”
As she said it he charged at the door; as he opened it, he flung the words at her, “You goddam little fool!” and was gone. The door remained open after him; you crossed over and closed it and then came back and stood in front of your wife.
“The most amusing part of it,” you observed, “is that neither of you cares a hang about the bone you’re picking. Nevertheless I’m grateful to you, really grateful, for the whole thing is a frame-up and this gives me a chance to prove it.”
“Not Dick?”
“Lord no. A buzzard named Jackson. Now I’ll get him.”
You hoped she would ask for details, but she wasn’t interested. With Dick’s nose ringed the rest bored her.
The Jackson business left a bad taste in your mouth; even at the moment of triumph it was repugnant to you, and probably you would never have gone through with it but for the necessity of justifying Erma and yourself. When the exposure finally came you felt no glory in it, though you were praised and congratulated on all sides; the Board pompously voted a formal apology and commendation; Dick was completely got, the only time you have ever seen him with all banners down. He sent Erma a carload of orchids, with a note, “You are damn clever—so is Bill,” and he carried you off to dinner and insisted that you tell the whole story from the beginning, since the Cleveland episode ten years before; how you had suspected Jackson on sight, how with Schwartz’s help you had first connected him with the Pittsburgh crowd, but without any proof to offer, how you had gradually hemmed him in until he was left almost powerless, and how at the end, finding that the trap was about ready to spring, he had desperately got the Bethlehem copy through Mrs. Halloway, and tried to get you out of the way and put himself right with Farrell at the same time.
Dick looked at you speculatively:
“So you knew from the first he was double-crossing us.”
“Well—I felt it.”
“Damned uncomfortable faculty. I expect what you feel about me wouldn’t look well in the annual report.”
“We’d have a new president in twenty-four hours,” you grinned.
“Which reminds me,” said Dick, “how would you like to be vice? Next to old Powell, we’ll have to leave him First. You must be fed up with that nineteenth floor; we can put Lawson in as Treasurer.”
You shook your head. “Unless you want the place for Lawson.”
“Hell no. I’m talking straight.”
“All right; I don’t want it. I’m already plenty close enough; I’m talking straight too.”
The phrase came back to you a year later, one evening as you were strolling idly, alone, down the avenue. Yes, you were close enough, too close, to everything; you were almost suffocated by the embrace of alien things and people. Jane, with her husband and four-year-old son and the new baby—what was that house to you? Why did you ever go there? And why did you bury yourself every day in that damn office—all those monkeys running around yelling at each other about nothing—all those senseless endless rows of figures, eight million four hundred and sixteen thousand nine hundred and twelve last year it was seven million sixty-three thousand five hundred eighty-four—absolute insanity. They called that the world of action, building bridges across rivers so that people could hopefully exchange the boredom of one side for the inanity of the other. Worst of all was your own home, rather your wife’s, where nothing belonged to you and there was no friendliness; where Erma’s cold soul penetrated into every room and every corner, and even the servants, perfectly trained, were also perfectly insulated.
Yes, it was all insufferably close, and you could see no escape. Larry had left that afternoon; chucked the whole thing overboard and gone west; perhaps just another young hopeful crossing one of their bridges. Why not follow him? It couldn’t be any worse than this.
You had crossed over to Broadway, and were wandering around looking at the theatre signs, thinking you might try a show, when you suddenly remembered that you were expected at home for dancing; you hailed a taxi.…
It was a year after that, a little more than a year, for it was the second autumn after Larry went to Idaho, that you moved to Park Avenue. You had been married five years!
“I’ve never lived in anything between a hotel room and a house,” said Erma. “The word apartment has always sounded stuffy to me. If we don’t like it we can probably sell without much loss.”
“I think we may scrape along somehow,” you remarked drily, “with nineteen rooms and eight baths.”
The arrangement was ideal, with your rooms on the upper floor, at the rear; and the night you first slept there you complacently accepted Erma’s suggestion that all the knocking should be at your door. It had already been so, in effect, for two years; this merely formalized it. If it was an indignity there was nothing personal in it and you had long since ceased to feel it. Rather you were relieved that it was possible to make such easy terms with her.
She must have spent close to half a million furnishing that apartment. More than ten years of your salary. You figured it up with her once, but that was before the hangings had come over from Italy and the pictures and stuff she bought later in London. My god what for? She hadn’t gone in for the big show after all; there were too many rules to suit her. You never knew who you might find when you went home to dinner—anybody from that French duke with his cross-eyed wife down to some bolshevik professor. A whole tableful. Then for a month at a stretch you’d dine at the club, preferring that to a solitaire meal at home, while she would be off god knows where, chasing restlessly after something which she never found.
Nor did you; you weren’t even looking for anything. Though you did one evening see something that stopped you and set you staring, standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, with your eyes blinking in the whirling snow. After a too ample dinner at the club you had gone out for a brisk walk in the winter night and, striding along Fifty-seventh Street, suddenly in front of Carnegie Hall a name on a poster caught your eye: Lucy Crofts. It was a large poster, and her name was in enormous black letters. You approached, and read it through, twice—eminent pianist, European triumphs, first American recital.…
The date was in the following week.
Twelve years ago, you thought, it seems incredible. She’s nearly thirty. Over thirty. Those braids of hair, that loose torrent of hair all around her. She’s had lovers, she has kissed men and held them in her arms, men have got up from her and yawned and said my god I’m hungry.…
Lucy, Lucy.
Yes, call her now. If you could get her back as she was—you don’t want much, do you? Let her come in now and run up the stairs to you, and you can take her up and introduce her, politely—Lucy, this is—