THE LOVER
• • •
And yet, someone was still lacking.
“Long, long into the night I lay,” thought Mrs. Jack. “Thinking about you all the time.”
For someone was still absent and she kept thinking of him—well, almost all the time. At least, so she would phrase it next day in her mind with that kind of temporal infatuation which a woman feels when she is thinking of her lover: “I keep thinking of you all the time. I do nothing but think of you all the time. When I wake up in the morning the first thing I think about is you. And then I think about my little Alma: the two people that I love the best in all the world. Did you ever try to tell a story? Once when I was a child I felt sure I had to tell a story. It kept growing in me, it was like an immense and golden dream. I thought it was the most wonderful story that anyone had ever told. I was sure that it would make me rich and famous. I felt I had the whole thing in me, it kept swelling up in me and seemed to fill me, soak me through and through with all its gold. And yet, when I began it all that I could think of was ‘Long, long into the night I lay thinking of how to tell my story.’ Wasn’t that wonderful? It seemed to me to be the most beautiful and perfect way to begin a story—but I could go no further. And now I know the end. ‘Long, long into the night I lay—thinking of you.’ I think about you all the time. You fill my life, my heart, my spirit and my being. I have an image that I go around with you inside me—here. I have you inside of me—and I keep thinking of you all the time. And that’s the story, ‘Long, long into the night I lay—thinking about you all the time.’ And that’s the story. Ah, dearest, that’s the story.”
And so this lovely and successful woman really felt—or thought she felt. Really, when she thought of him, she kept thinking she was “thinking of him all the time.” And on this crowded and this brilliant evening, he kept flashing through her mind. Or maybe he was really there, as someone we have known and loved is there—and really can’t be lost, no matter what we’re doing, what we’re thinking of—and so, in such a wise, we keep “thinking of them all the time.”
“I wonder where he is,” she thought. “Why doesn’t he come? If only he hasn’t been—” she looked quickly over the brilliant gathering with a troubled eye and thought impatiently—“If only he liked parties more! If only he enjoyed meeting people—going out in the evening—Oh well! He’s the way he is. It’s no use to change him. I wouldn’t have him any different. I think about him all the time!”
And then he arrived; a hurried but relieved survey told her that he was “all right.” He was a little too quick and a trifle more feverish than was his wont. Just the same, he was, as Esther had phrased it to herself, “all right.”
“If only my people—my friends—everyone I know—didn’t affect him so,” she thought. “Why is it, I wonder. Last night when he telephoned me he talked so strange! Nothing he said made any sense! What could have been wrong with him? Oh, well—it doesn’t matter now. He’s here. I love him!”
Her face warmed and softened, her pulse beat quicker, and she went to meet him. He greeted her half fondly and half truculently, with a mixture of diffidence and pugnacity, of arrogance and humility, of pride, of hope, of love, of suspicion, of eagerness, of doubt.
“Oh, hello, darling,” she said fondly. “I’m so glad you’re here at last. I was beginning to be afraid you were going to fail me after all.”
He had not really wanted to come to the party. From the moment she had first invited him he had objected. They had argued it back and forth for days, and at last she had beaten down his reasons and had exacted his promise. But last night he had paced the floor for hours in an agony of self-recrimination and indecision, and at last with desperate resolve he had telephoned her and had blunderingly awakened the whole household before he got her. But he had told her then that he had decided not to come and had repeated all his reasons. He only half-understood them himself, but they had to do with her world and his world, and his belief, which was more a matter of feeling than of clear thought, that he must keep his independence of the world she belonged to if he was to do his work. He was almost desperate as he tried to explain it all to her, because he couldn’t make her understand what he was driving at. She became a little desperate, too, in the end. First she was annoyed and told him for God’s sake to stop being such a fool about things that didn’t matter. Then she became hurt and angry, and reminded him of his promise.
“We’ve been over all of this a dozen times!” she said angrily, and there was also a tearful note in her voice. “You promised, George! And now everything’s arranged. It’s too late to change anything now. You can’t let me down like this!”
This appeal was too much for him. He knew, of course, that the party had not been planned for him and that no arrangements would be upset if he failed to appear. No one but Esther would even be aware of his absence. But he had given his promise to come, however reluctantly, and he saw that the only issue his arguments had raised in Esther’s mind was the simple one of whether he would keep his word. So once more, and finally, he had yielded. And now he was here, full of confusion, and wishing with all his heart that he was somewhere else—anywhere but here.
“I’m sure you’re going to have a good time,” Esther was saying to him in her eager way. “You’ll see!”—and she squeezed his hand. “There are lots of people I want you to meet. But you must be hungry. Better get yourself something to eat first. You’ll find lots of things you like. I planned them especially for you. Go in the dining room and help yourself. I’ll have to stay here a little while to welcome all these people.”
Mrs. Jack looked happily about her. Now they were all together—even to the one she loved.
George stood for a moment, scowling a little as he glanced about the room at the brilliant assemblage. In that attitude he cut a rather grotesque figure. The low brow with its frame of short black hair, the burning eyes, the small, packed features, the long arms dangling to the knees, and the curved paws gave him an appearance more simian than usual in his not-too-well-fitting dinner jacket. People looked at him and stared, then turned away indifferently and resumed their conversations.
“So,” he thought with somewhat truculent self-consciousness, “these are her fine friends that she’s been telling me about! I might have known it!” he muttered to himself, without knowing at all what it was he might have known. The very poise and assurance of all these sleek and wealthy faces made him fear a fancied slight where none was offered or intended. “Well, here they are! I’ll show them!” he growled,—but God knows what he meant by that.
It was, he knew, a distinguished gathering. It included brilliant men and beautiful women. But as he looked them over, he saw unmistakably that it also included some who wore another hue. That fellow there, for instance, with his pasty face and rolling eyes and mincing ways and hips that he wiggled as he walked—could there be any doubt at all that he was a member of nature’s other sex? And that woman, with her mannish haircut and angular lines and hard enameled face, holding hands over there in the corner with that rather pretty young girl—a nymphomaniac, surely. His eye took in Krock, standing a little apart there with his wife and his mistress. He saw Mr. Jack moving among his guests, and suddenly with a rush of shame he thought of himself. Who was he to feel so superior to these others? Did they not all know who he was and why he was here?
Yes, all these people looked at one another with untelling eyes. Their speech was casual, quick, and witty. But they did not say the things they knew. And they knew everything. They had seen everything. They had accepted everything. And they received every new intelligence now with a cynical and amused look in their untelling eyes. Nothing shocked them any more. It was the way things were. It was what they had come to expect of life.
Just the same, they were an honored group. They had stolen no man’s ox or ass. Their gifts were valuable and many, and had won for them the world’s grateful applause.
Was not the great captain of finance and industry, Lawrence Hirsch, a patron of the arts as well, and a leader and advanced supporter of The Federalist, the nation’s leading “journal of ideas,” the leader everywhere of advanced—nay! radical opinion? And this gentlemen’s own opinions on child labor, share cropping, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, and other questions that had stirred the indignation of the intellectual world—were they not well known everywhere, and was there any flaw in them? Were they not celebrated for their liberality, the advanced and leftward trend of their enlightenment?
Of what then to utter the blunt truth?—which was that Lawrence Hirsch derived a portion of his enormous income from the work of children in the textile factories of the South?—that another part of it was derived from the labor of share-croppers in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?—that another came from steel mills in the Middle West where armed thugs had been employed and used to shoot into the ranks of striking workers?—and that this man’s enormous combining and financing and directing cunning was being called into use everywhere by great corporations of which he was a member, to betray the rights of labor, and to protect the powers of wealth?
Of what use, then, to criticize in ways like these? What useful purpose could it serve? Had Mr. Hirsch’s life and work, the sources of his mighty wealth, been seriously called to an accounting, there was scarcely a skilled young liberal—hardly a well trained revolutionary on the staff of Mr. Hirsch’s Federalist—who could not have leaped to the defense of his employer, who could not have pointed out at once that criticism of this sort was childish—elementary, Watson! Elementary!—That the sources of Mr. Hirsch’s wealth and power and income were quite accidental and beside the point—and that his position as an enlightened liberal, “a friend of Russia,” a leader in advanced social thought, a scathing critic of—God save the mark!—the Capitalist class!—was so well known as to place him in the very brain and forehead of enlightened thought, secure beyond the reach of envious and incondite carping of this sort.
And, as for the others of that brilliant and that celebrated company—did one cry “privilege?” Privilege? Which one of these had ever said, “Let them eat cake?” When the poor had starved, had these not suffered? When the children toiled, had these not bled? When the oppressed, the weak, the stricken and betrayed of men had been falsely accused and put to death, had these tongues not lifted in indignant protest—if only the issue had been fashionable? Had these not written letters to the press? Carried placards upon Beacon Hill? Joined parades, made contributions, gave the prestige of their names to form committees of defense?
Had they not done all these things? Were they not well known for these acts? Was their position in all questions that demanded an enlightened stand not known in advance? And were their names not known with honor everywhere among enlightened men?
Of what use then to say that such as these might lift their voices and parade their placards to the crack of doom, but in the secret and entrenched resources of their life they had all battened on the blood of common man, and wrung their profits from the sweat of slaves, like any common overseer of money and of privilege that ever lived.
Of what use to point out that the whole issue of these princely lives, the dense and costly web of all these lesbic, all these pederastic loves, and these adulterous intrigues, the perverse and evil pattern of this magic fabric, hung there athwart the beetling ramparts of the city, and spun like gossamer across the sky-flung faery of the night, had been spun from man’s common dust of sweating clay, derived out of the exploitation of his life, and sustained in midair now, floating on the face of night like a starred veil, had, none the less, been unwound out of the entrails of man’s agony.
Such thoughts as these came from the baffled and inchoate bitterness of youth. And youth? A thorny paradox, to be so stretched out on the rack of this tough world and here to ache with so much beauty, so much pain. To see the starred face of the night with a high soul of exaltation and of noble aspiration, to dream great dreams, to think great thoughts. And in that instant have the selfless grandeur turn to dust, and to see great night itself, a reptile coiled and waiting in the nocturnal blood of life.
And these! And these! Great God! To know such love, such longing, and such hatred all together—and to find no ear or utterance anywhere for all the blazing baffled certitudes of youth! To find man’s faith betrayed and his betrayers throned in honor, themselves the idols of his bartered faith. To find truth false and falsehood truth, good evil, evil good, and the swarming web of life so changing, so mercurial. To find even love suspect of whoredom, even whoredom touched with love!
A thorny paradox, to find it all so changing, so unfixed, so baffling to our certain judgments and our hard necessity for certitude; so different from the way we thought that it would be. Was there no other end than this hard road, for all the anguish, sorrow, disappointment of man’s baffled innocence then the resigned dejection of the Russian’s summing up: “Prince Andrey turned away—His heart was heavy and full of melancholy. It was all so strange, so different than what he had anticipated.”
Well, there they were then, anyway. And, paradox or not, it would be hard to find another group of people comparable to this one in achievement, beauty, or in talent, in any other place save here, where it had assembled to such brilliant consummation as it had to-night—at Jack’s.
The party was now moving in a magic inter-flux. Lawrence Hirsch, having made his greetings to his hostess, now turned away and took his place among the crowd. Polished, imperturbable, his face just like his moustache and his hair, close cropped and packed and perfectly contained, a little worn but assured, vested with huge authorities of wealth, in its unconscious arrogance, it was a perfect visage of great Croesus and Maecenas, both conjoined with all the complex fusions of the modern world. He moved, this weary, able son of man, among the crowd and took his place assuming, without knowing he assumed, his full authorities.
Meanwhile, Lily Mandell, who had gone away to take off her wraps, returned to the big room. The tall smouldering beauty swung sensually along the hall and entering wove her way along towards Mrs. Jack with a languid naked undulance.
The heir of Midas wealth, child of a merchant emperor and a hoard amassed by nameless myriads of slave sweat, this voluptuous absentee of bargain basements in huge department stores which she had never visited, was a voluptuary of esthetics arts as well. She was an adept of obscurities, William Beckford’s Vathek, T. S. Eliot, and the works of Marcel Proust.
She was a tall, dark beauty, shockingly arrayed, a woman of great height and of sensual and yet delicate massivity. She had a shock of wild dark hair, a face too eloquent in its sleepy arrogance, and heavy lidded eyes whose most naked living qualities were the qualities of her insolence and pride.
Everything about this tall and stunning woman was sensational and startling. In the sleepy insolence of her dark smouldering face, in the languorous arrogance of her rich and throaty voice, even in the lazy undulance of her voluptuous figure there was a quality of naked indifference and contempt for life that barely escaped brutality.
Moreover, in the sensational way in which she exhibited and displayed herself there was an insolent immodesty that was so shameless that it left people dazed and gasping. The dress she wore was a magnificent gown made from a single piece of some dull old golden cloth. But that gown had been so made and so contrived to display her charms that her tall voluptuous figure seemed literally to have been poured into it. It was a miracle of sheer carnality, a masterpiece of insolent sensuality. If she had walked into that room stark naked the impact of her sex, the deliberate emphasis of physical allure could not have been so arrogantly and shamelessly signified as it was now as she wove her way through the crowd with sleepy undulance, bent over the smaller figure of her hostess, kissed her and in a yolky voice in which affection and arrogance were curiously commingled, said: “Darling, how are you?”
The guests were now moving freely around, greeting one another and talking together. Groups were already forming here and there. Stephen Hook had come in with his sister Mary, and greeted his hostess by holding out to her a frail limp hand. At the same time he turned half away from her with an air of exaggerated boredom and indifference, an almost weary disdain, as he murmured: “Oh, hello, Esther. … Look—” he half turned toward her again, almost as if this were an after thought—“I brought this to you.” He handed her a book and turned away again. “I thought it was rather interesting,” he said in a bored tone. “You might like to look at it.”
What he had given her was a magnificent book of Peter Brueghel’s drawings—a book that she knew well of, whose costliness had frightened even her. She looked quickly at the flyleaf and saw that in his fine hand, he had written there primly: “For Esther—from Stephen Hook.” And suddenly she remembered that she had mentioned to him casually, a week or two before, her interest in this book, and she understood now that this act, which in a characteristic way he was trying to conceal under a mask of labored boredom and indifference, had come swift and shining as a beam of light out of the depths of the man’s fine and generous spirit. Her little face turned crimson, something choked her in the throat, and for a moment, she could not say why, her eyes were hot with tears.
“Oh, Steve!” she gasped—“This is simply the most beautiful—the most wonderful—”
He seemed fairly to shrink away from her in horror, fairly to shrink away into the fat envelope of his unhealthy body. His white, flabby face took on a gesture of disdainful boredom and aloof indifference that was so exaggerated it would have seemed comical if it had not been for the look of naked pleading terror in his hazel eyes—a look swift, frightened, lacerated-the look of a proud, noble, strangely twisted and tormented man—the look really almost of a frightened child, which, even while it shrank away from the life, the companionship, the security, it so desperately needed and wanted, was also pleading pitifully for help—which almost said: “For God’s sake—help me if you can! I am afraid!”
She saw that look of naked pleading terror in his eyes as he turned pompously away from her with a look of such exaggerated boredom on his pursed face as would have made Pooh Bah look like an exuberant sophomore by the comparison. And the look went through her like a knife and in a moment’s flash of stabbing pity she felt also the wonder, the strangeness and the miracle of living. “Oh, you poor tormented creature,” she was thinking—“What is wrong with you? What are you afraid of? What’s eating on you anyway? What a strange man he is,” she thought more tranquilly. “And How fine and good and high.”
At this moment, as if reading her own thoughts, her daughter, Alma, came to the rescue. Cool, poised, lovely, perfectly chiseled and rather cold, the girl came across the room, moved up to Hook, and said coolly:
“Oh, Hello, Steve. Can I get you a drink?”
The question was a godsend. He was extremely fond of the girl—He liked her polished style, her faultless elegance, her cool, hard, friendly, yet perfectly impenetrable manner. It gave him just the foil, the kind of protection that he so desperately needed. He answered her at once hiding his enormous relief in turning away from her disdainfully with an air of elaborately mannered boredom. “You,” he said. “What you have to say quite fascinates me—” he murmured in a bored tone and moved over to the mantle, where he leaned as spectator and turned his face three-quarters away from the room as if the sight of so many appallingly dull and stupid people was something more than he could endure.
All this was not only completely characteristic of Hook, it was really almost the man’s whole history. Even the elaborately mannered indirection of his answer when the girl had asked him if he wanted a drink was completely characteristic of Stephen Hook, and provided a key to his literary style. “What you have to say really fascinates me”—contained the kernel of Hook’s literary style and the books he wrote. He was the author of a great many stories which he sold mostly to magazines and from which he derived the income with which he supported himself and his family. And in addition he was the author of two or three very fine distinguished books on which his considerable reputation had been established but which had had almost no sale. And yet he was famous not for his stories but for these books: As he himself had ironically pointed out, almost everyone, apparently, had read his books and no one had bought them. In these books, also the curious complex of Hook’s strange, frightened, desperately shy personality were fully revealed. And here also, in these books he tried to mask this shyness and timidity by an air of boredom and disdain, by the intricate artifice and circumlocution of an elaborately mannered style. In other words, what Hook was always saying in his books when someone asked him if he’d have a drink was half turning away and looking passionately bored—“What you have to say quite fascinates me.”
Mrs. Jack, after staring rather helplessly at this paunchy image of disdain turned to his sister, a red-haired spinsteress with twinkling eyes and an infectious laugh who shared her brother’s charm, but lacked his tormented spirit, and whispered: “What’s wrong with Steve tonight, anyway? He looks as if he’s been seeing ghosts.”
“No—just another monster,” Mary Hook replied, and laughed. “He had a pimple on his nose last week and he stared at it so much in the mirror that he became convinced it was a tumor. Mother was almost crazy. He locked himself in his room and refused to come out or talk to anyone for days and days. Four days ago he sent her a note leaving minute instructions for his funeral and burial: he has a horror of being cremated. Three days ago he came out in his pajamas and said good-bye to all of us. He said life was over—all was ended. Tonight he thought better of it and decided to dress and come to your party.”
Then laughing, with the twinkle of wise infectious humor in her blue eyes, Mary Hook glanced shrewdly in the direction of her brother, whose paunchy figure was now leaning on the mantle, turned indifferently away, like some plump Mandarin, with a pursy and disdainful face, and answered Mrs. Jack’s perturbed glance with a humorous shrug of the shoulders. Mrs. Jack’s rosy face colored richly, and suddenly she laughed an involuntary and astounded laugh, crying:
“God! Isn’t it the most!—” while she continued to stare helplessly at Mary Hook. Mary Hook, laughing good naturedly with a humorous shrug and a shake of her head, moved away into the crowd. And Mrs. Jack, still with an earnest and rather troubled little face, turned to talk to old Jake Abramson, who had been holding her hand and gently stroking it during this whole puzzled interlude.
The mark of the fleshpots was plain upon Jake Abramson. He was an old, subtle, sensual, weary Jew and he had the face of a vulture. Curiously enough, for all its vulturesque quality, his face was a strangely attractive one. It had so much weariness and patience, and a kind of wise cynicism, and a weary humor. There was something kind and understanding about him. Even his evening clothes sat on him with a kind of casual weariness as if he were a kind of immensely old and tired ambassador of life who had lived so long, who had seen so much, who had been so many places, and who had worn evening clothes so many times that the garments themselves were as habitual as his breath and hung on him with a kind of weary and accustomed grace as if he had been born in them.
He had taken off his heavy coat and his silk hat and given them to the maid, and then had come wearily into the room and greeted Mrs. Jack. He was evidently very fond of her. While she had been talking to Mary Hook he remained silent and he brooded above her like a benevolent vulture. He smiled beneath his great nose and kept his eyes intently on her face; then he took her small strong hand in his weary old clasp and, as he continued to gaze at her intently, and to talk, he stroked her smooth arm. It was a gesture frankly old and sensual, jaded, and yet strangely fatherly and gentle. It was the gesture of a man who had known and possessed many pretty women and who still knew how to admire and appreciate them, but whose strong lust had passed over into a kind of paternal benevolence.
And in the same way he now spoke to her, continuing to talk to her all the time with a weary, coarse, old humor which also had in it a quality that was fatherly and kind.
“Momma,” he said as he kept stroking her arm with his old hand and looking intently at her with his weary eyes—
“You’re looking nice! You’re looking pretty!” He kept smiling vulturesquely at her and stroking her arm—“Just like a rose she is!” the old man said, and never took his old, beady stare from her.
“Oh! Jake!” she cried excitedly and in a surprised tone, as if she had not known before that he was there. “How nice of you to come! I never knew you were back! I thought you were still in Europe!—”
“Momma,” the old man said, still smiling fixedly at her and stroking her smooth arm,—“I’ve been and went. I’ve gone and come. I was away but now I’ve come back already yet,” he declared humorously.
“You’re looking awfully well, Jake,” she declared earnestly. “The trip did you lots of good. You’ve lost a lot of flesh. You took the cure at Carlsbad, didn’t you?”
“Momma,” the old man solemnly declared, “I didn’t take the cure. I took the diet—” Deliberately he mispronounced the word to “die-ett.” And instantly Mrs. Jack’s rosy face was suffused with crimson; her shoulders began to shake hysterically. At the same moment she turned to Roberta Heilprinn, seized her helplessly by the arm, and clung to her, and shrieked faintly: “Did you hear him? He’s been on a diet! God! I bet it almost killed him! The way he loves to eat!”
Miss Heilprinn chuckled fruitily and her oil-smooth features widened in a grin of such proportions that her eyes contracted to closed slits.
“Momma,” said old Jake solemnly as he continued gently to stroke the bare smooth arm of Mrs. Jack, “I’ve been die-et-ting—”
The way he said this with all the connotations it evoked drew from her shaking figure another hysterical little shriek.
“I’ve been die-etting ever since I went away”, said Jake. “I was sick when I went away—and I came back on an English boat,” the old man said with a kind of melancholy and significant leer that drew a scream of laughter from the two women.
“Oh, Jake!” cried Mrs. Jack hilariously. “How you must have suffered! I know what you used to think of English food!”
“Momma,” the old man said with a resigned sadness—
“I think the same as I always did—only ten times more!”
She faintly shrieked again, then gasped out, “Brussels sprouts?”
“They still got ‘em,” said old Jake solemnly. “They still got the same ones they had ten years ago. I saw Brussels sprouts this last trip that ought to be sent to the British Museum—And they still got that good fish—” he went on with a suggestive leer and Mrs. Jack shrieked faintly again and Roberta Heilprinn, her bland features grinning like a Buddha, gurgled fruitily: “The Dead Sea fruit?”
“No,” said old Jake sadly, “not the Dead Sea fruit—that ain’t dead enough. They got boiled flannel now,” said Jake, “and that good sauce, Momma, they used to make?”—He leered at Mrs. Jack with an air of such insinuation that she was again set off in a fit of shuddering hysteria:
“You mean that awful—tasteless—pasty—goo—about the color of a dead lemon?”
“You got it,” the old man nodded his wise and tired old head in weary agreement. “You got it—That’s it—They still make it. … So I’ve been die-etting all the way back!” For the first time his tired old voice showed a trace of energetic animation. “Carlsbad wasn’t in it compared to the die-etting I had to do on the English boat!” He paused, then with a glint of old cynic humor in his weary eyes, he said: “It was fit for nothing but a bunch of goys!”
This reference to unchosen tribes, with the complete evocation of the humorous contempt, now really snapped a connection between these three people that nothing else had done. And suddenly one saw these three able and resourceful people in a new way. The old man smiling thinly, vulturesquely, with a cynical intelligence, the two women shaken suddenly and utterly by a helpless paroxysm of understanding mirth. And now one saw they really were together, able, ancient, and immensely knowing, and outside the world, regardant, tribal, communitied in derision and contempt for the unhallowed, unsuspecting tribes of lesser men who were not party to their knowing, who were not folded to their seal. It passed—the instant showing of their ancient sign. The women smiled more quietly, they were citizens once again.
“But Jake! You poor fellow!” Mrs. Jack said sympathetically. “You must have hated it! But oh Jake!” she cried suddenly and enthusiastically as she remembered—“Isn’t Carlsbad just too beautiful? … Did you know that Bert and I were there one time?” she cried rapidly and eagerly with the animation that was characteristic of her when she was remembering something or telling someone a story—and as she uttered these words she slipped her hand affectionately through the arm of her blandly smiling friend, then went on vigorously, with a jolly laugh and a merry face: “Didn’t I ever tell you about that time?—Really, it was the most wonderful experience!—But God!” she laughed suddenly and almost explosively and her face flushed almost crimson—“Will you ever forget the first three or four days, Bert?” she appealed rosily to her smiling friend—“Do you remember how hungry we got? How we thought we couldn’t possibly hold out?—Wasn’t it dreadful?” she said frankly and then went on with a serious rather puzzled air as she tried to explain it:—“But then—I don’t know—it’s funny—but somehow you get used to it, don’t you, Bert? The first few days are pretty awful, but after that you didn’t seem to mind. I don’t know.” Again her low brow furrowed with a puzzled air, and she spoke with a shade of difficulty—“I guess you get too weak, or something—I know Bert and I stayed in bed three weeks—and really it wasn’t bad after the first few days.” She laughed suddenly, richly. “We used to try to torture each other by making up enormous menus of the most delicious food we could think of—We had it all planned out to go to a swell restaurant the moment our cure was over and order the biggest meal we could think of!—Well!” she laughed. “Would you believe it—the day the cure was finished and the doctor told us it would be all right for us to get up and eat—I know we both lay there for hours thinking of all the things we were going to have. It was simply wonderful!” she said, flushing with laughter and making a fine little movement with her finger and her thumb to indicate great delicacy, her voice squeaking like a child’s and her eyes wrinkling up to dancing points—“In all your life you never heard of such delicious food as Bert and I were going to devour. We resolved to do everything in the greatest style!—Well, all I can tell you is,” she went on humorously, “the very best of everything was just about half good enough for us—that’s the way we felt! … Well, at last we got up and dressed. And God!” she cried with her jolly crimson face and twinkling eyes, “you’d have thought we’d been invited to meet the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace. We were so weak we could hardly stand up but we wore the prettiest clothes we had and we had chartered a Rolls Royce for the occasion and a chauffeur in livery.—In all your days,” she cried with her twinkling little face,—“you’ve never seen such swank. We got into the car and were driven away like a couple of queens. We told the man to drive us to the swellest, most expensive restaurant he knew. He drove us to a beautiful place outside of town. It looked like a chateau!”—she beamed rosily around her—“and when they saw us coming they must have thought that we were royalty from the way they acted. The flunkies were lined up, bowing and scraping for half a block—Oh, it was thrilling! Everything we’d gone through and endured in taking the cure seemed worth it—Well!” she looked around her and the breath left her body audibly in a sigh of complete frustration—“would you believe it? When we got in there and tried to eat we could hardly swallow a bite! We had looked forward to it so long—we had planned it all so carefully—and well! all I can say is, it was a bitter disappointment—” she said humorously. “Would you believe it—all we could eat was a soft boiled egg—and we couldn’t even finish that! It filled us up right to here—” she put a small hand level with her chin—“It was so tragic that we almost wept!—I don’t know,” she went on turning her eyes away in a glance of serious and rather puzzled reflection—“but isn’t it a strange thing? I guess it must be that your stomach shrinks up and gets little while you’re on the diet. You lie there day after day and think of the enormous meal you are going to devour just as soon as you get up—and then when you try it you’re not even able to finish a soft boiled egg—but is that life, or isn’t it? I ask you—” She shrugged her shoulders, and lifted her hands questioningly, with such a comical look on her face that everybody laughed.
Even the weary jaded old man, Jake Abramson, who had been regarding her fixedly with a vulpine smile during the whole course of her animated monologue, now smiled a little more warmly as he turned away to speak to other friends. He had really paid no attention to what she was saying, but Mrs. Jack’s way of telling a story was so pleasant, her rosy face and twinkling eyes were so full of life and eagerness, she spoke with such excitement, with such gusto, with such ready humor, that everything she said was interesting. And, in a tired and jaded world, people could just look at her animated little face and figure, her eager and excited voice for hours at a time, without growing tired.
The two women—Miss Heilprinn and Mrs. Jack who were now left standing together in the centre of the big room, offered a remarkable and instructive comparison in the capacities of their sex. Miss Heilprinn was in appearance as in face a very distinguished woman. The thing that one noticed about her immediately was her bland and smiling pallor. She suggested oil—smooth oil, oil of tremendous driving power and generating force. And although no one would ever have called her a beautiful woman, no discerning eye could fail to see instantly that she was a very handsome one.
She was a woman perhaps of middling height, perhaps a little under it: at any rate she was a little taller than Mrs. Jack. Her smooth and smiling face, her plump figure, hips and ankles, were inclined to heaviness and corpulence. Her face was almost impossibly bland. It was a blandness without unction, a blandness without hypocrisy. On first sight the smooth, plump, smiling features had a look of almost Buddhistic quality and the fruity tones, the infectious chuckle, the eyes that narrowed into jolly slits whenever the lady laughed or even smiled, contributed to a first impression of imperturbable and unquenchable good nature.
But let the ingenuous spirit be not too easily deceived: a closer examination of this lady would have revealed a pair of twinkling eyes that missed nothing and that were as hard as agate. Her distinguished looking grey hair was combed back in a pompadour and she was splendidly gowned with a suavity that was perfectly adapted to the bland and imperturbable assurance of her worldliness. She would, and could, if occasion or necessity had demanded it, have taken the gold fillings out of her best friend’s teeth and never for a moment lost the oily blandness of her smiling face, the infectious chuckle of her throaty voice, as she did so.
To say merely that she was “as hard as nails” would be to put an unfair strain upon the durability of common iron. In the theatrical profession, and along Broadway, where she had reigned for years as the governing brain and directive force behind a celebrated art theatre she was known familiarly as “the Duchess.” And the business acuity which had wrung this homage from the hard lips of that milling street was fully deserving of all the tributes, all the oaths, that had been heaped upon it.
As the two ladies, both of whom were warm old friends, stood looking at each other affectionately in the act of greeting, a very instructive performance in worldly shrewdness was being quietly unfolded between them for the enlightenment or amusement of one privileged to see. Each woman was perfectly cast in her own role. Each had found the perfect adaptive means by which she could utilize her full talents with the least waste and friction and with the greatest smooth persuasiveness.
Miss Heilprinn’s role in life had been essentially a practical and not a romantic one. It had been her function to promote, to direct, to govern, and in the tenuous and uncertain speculations of the theatre to take care not to be fleeced by the wolves of Broadway. The brilliance of her success, the power of her will, and the superior quality of her mettle, was written plain upon her. It took no very experienced observer to see instantly that in the unequal contest between the Duchess and the wolves of Broadway it had been the wolves who had been fleeced. Lucky, indeed, was the wolf who could escape an encounter with the Duchess with a portion of his native hide intact.
And in that savage unremitting warfare, when bitter passions had been aroused, when undying hatreds had been awakened, when eyes had been jaundiced and when lips had been so bitterly twisted that they had never regained their rosy pristine innocence and now lay written on haggard faces like a yellowed scar, had the face of the Duchess grown hard and bitter? Had her mouth contracted to a grim and bitter line? Had her jaw out-jutted like a granite crag? Were the marks of the wars visible anywhere upon her? By no means.
The more murderous the fight, the blander her face. The more treacherous and guileful the strategy in its snaky intrigues, the more cheerful and good-natured the fruity lilt of her good-humored chuckle. She had actually thriven on it. She seemed to blossom like a flower beneath the dead and barren glare of Broadway lights. And she never seemed to be so happily and unconsciously herself as when playing about ingenuously in a nest of rattlesnakes.
The other lady presented a tactical problem of quite another sort. Mrs. Jack’s career had been romantic rather than executive. Yet, in a strange, hard way, each woman was completely worldly, each woman was wholly practical, each woman was fundamentally concerned with her own interests, her own success.
In a curious way, Mrs. Jack’s strategy was more guileful and complex than that of her smooth companion. Mrs. Jack’s strategy was that of the child: she had early learned the advantages of possessing the rosy, jolly little face of flowerlike loveliness. She had early learned the advantages of a manner of slightly bewildered surprise, naive innocence, of smiling doubtfully and inquiringly yet good-naturedly at her laughing friends, as if to say: “Now, I know you’re laughing at me, aren’t you? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what I’ve done or said now. Of course, I know I’m not clever the way you are—all of you are so frightfully smart—but anyway I have a good time, and I like you all—Hah?”
She had even learned in recent years that deafness itself might have its compensations in furthering this illusion of her happy, somewhat bewildered innocence. She had early learned as well the value of tears in a woman’s life and what an effective weapon tears may be. She had learned the supreme value of romantic emotion as a triumphant answer-all to reasoned thought or to the objections of fair play and a sense of justice. She knew better than most women that if any act of hers was ever called in question, if any act of hers which she was trying to conceal was ever discovered, and she was confronted with it, there was no answer so effective, so annihilating as tempestuous tears—romantic and irrational declaration:
“All right. All right—I’m through!—She’s finished!—She’s no good anymore!—Throw her out—Let her go!—She’s tried to do the best she could but you’ve thrown her out now—You’ve told her she wasn’t any good anymore—All right, then—” Here she would smile a pathetic twisted smile as she squeaked these touching little words, move aimlessly toward the door in a pathetic gesture of departure, smile a pathetic twisted little smile again and wave her hand childishly in farewell as she squeaked pathetically—“All over—Finished—Done for—She’s no good—Goodbye, Goodbye—” After which, of course, there was nothing but embarrassed, half amused, half angry, half disgusted surrender.
She had her faults, no doubt—she was “romantic.” Most people, even those who knew her well considered her affectionately to be a “most romantic person—” “a very romantic woman.” For this reason she had triumphantly escaped censure for many acts that would have brought down upon many another less privileged, less gifted and less favored person a heavy punishment. She was essentially not less shrewd, not less accomplished, not less subtle and not less hardly determined to have her own way, to secure her own ends in the hard world than was the blandly, suavely smiling Roberta Heilprinn—But oh! As her friends said she was “so beautiful,” she was “such a child,” she was so “good”—and everybody loved her!
Not everyone, however, was so easily deceived by Mrs. Jack’s deceptive innocence. The bland lady who now confronted her in greeting was one of these: hence the instructive quality of the moment. Miss Roberta Heilprinn’s hard and merry eye, indeed, missed no artifice of that rosy, innocently surprised, small person. And hence perhaps the twinkle in her eye as she greeted her old friend was a little harder, brighter and more lively than it usually was, the bland, Buddhistic smile, a little smoother in its oily suavity, and the fruity tones, the engaging yolky chuckle, a trifle more infectious, and on all of these accounts, perhaps more full of genuine affection as she bent and kissed the rosy, glowing little cheek.
And she, the blooming object of this affectionate caress, although she never changed the expression of surprised delighted innocence on her rosy face, knew full well all that was going on in the other woman’s mind. For a moment, so quickly imperceptibly, that no one save Olympian Mercury could have followed that swift glance, the eyes of the two women, stripped bare of all concealing artifice, met each other nakedly. And in that moment there was matter for Olympian laughter. But no one of these gifted worldlings saw it.
* * * * *
“I mean!—You know!—” At the words, eager, rapid, uttered in a rather hoarse, yet strangely seductive tone of voice, Mrs. Jack smiled and turned: “There’s Amy!”
Then, as she saw the angelic head, with its unbelievable harvest of golden curls, the snub nose and the little freckles, and the lovely face so radiant with an almost boyish quality of eagerness, of animation, of enthusiasm, she thought; “Isn’t she beautiful! And—and—there is something so sweet, so lovely, so—so good about her!”
She did not know why or how this was true. Indeed, as she well knew, from any worldly point of view it would have been hard to prove. If Amy Van Leer was not “a notorious woman” the reason was that she had surpassed the ultimate limit of notoriety, even for New York, years before. She had a reputation that stank even in the more decadent groups of the great capitols on the Continent.
By the time she was nineteen years old she had been married and divorced and had a child. And even at that time her conduct had been so scandalous that her first husband, a member of one of the most powerful of the American plutocracies, had had no difficulty in getting a divorce and in demonstrating her unfitness for the custody of her own child. There had been a sensational case which fairly reeked. Since that time, seven years before, it would have been impossible to define or chronicle her career in any terms measurable to time or to chronology. Although the girl was now only twenty-six years old, her life seemed to go back through aeons of iniquity, through centuries of vice and dissipation, through a Sargassic seadepth of depravity.
Thus, one might remember one of the innumerable scandals connected to her name and that it had happened only three short years before, and then check oneself suddenly with a feeling of stunned disbelief, a feeling that time had suddenly turned phantom, that one had dreamed it all, that it had happened in a kind of outrageous night-mare. “Oh no! It can’t be!—That happened only three short years ago and since then she’s—why she’s—”
And one would turn to stare in stupefaction at that angelic head, that snub nose, that boyish eager face—as one who, in this bewildering guise, might know that he was looking at the dread Medusa, or that, couched here in this pleasant counterfeit of youthful eagerness and naiveté, he was really looking at some ageless creature, some enchantress of Circean cunning whose life was older than the ages and whose heart was old as Hell.
What was the truth of it or what the true image of that sun-headed, golden counterfeit of youth and joy no one could say. It baffled time, it turned reality to phantasmal shapes. One could, and had, as here and now, beheld this golden head, this tilted nose, this freckled, laughing, eager face, here at its very noon of happy innocence. And before ten days had made their round, one had come on it again in the corruptest gatherings of Paris, drugged fathoms deep in opium, foul bodied and filth spattered, cloying to the embraces of a gutter rat, so deeply rooted in the cesspool that it seemed its very life was nothing but a tainted plant, whose roots had grown out of sewage and who had never known any life but that.
And then one would remember the laughing boyish, eager, and hoarse-throated girl with the snub nose, the freckles and the golden head that one had seen four-thousand miles away just seven days before. And time would turn into a dusty ash, the whole substantial structure of the world would reel in witches’ dance, and melt away before one’s eyes like fumes of smoke.
And she?—the cause, or agent of this evil miracle—Medusa, Circe or unhappy child—whatever was the truth—to tell her story!—Oh, it was impossible! That story could be told no more than one could chronicle the wind, put halters on a hurricane, saddle Mercury, or harness with a breded skein of words the mapless raging of tempestuous seas.
Chronology?—Well, for birth, she had the golden spoon; she was a child of Pittsburgh steel, the heiress of enfabled wealth, of parentage half—perhaps the fatal half—of Irish blood; she had been born O’Neill.
And youth? It was the youth and childhood of a dollar princess, kept, costly, cabined, pruned, confined; a daughter of “Society”:—and of a woman, twice divorced and three times married. Her girlhood had been spent in travel and rich schools, in Europe, Newport, New York and Palm Beach. By eighteen she was “out”—a famous beauty; by nineteen she was married. And by twenty her name was tainted and divorced.
And, since then? There were not words to tell the story, and although there were warm apologists who tried to find the reason for it, or to make for it excuse, there was not enough logic in the Universe to find a reason or to shape a plan, to phrase an argument for that maelstrom of a life.
“The facts speak for themselves”? The very facts were unspeakable; could one have spoken them there would not be space enough for a full record, and no one credulous enough for their belief; one could not quote the simple and accepted truths, which were that she had been three times married and that one marriage had been annulled and had lasted only twenty hours; and that a third had ended tragically when her husband, a young French writer of great talent, but a hopeless addict of cocaine, had shot himself.
And before and after that, and in between, and in and out, and during it and later on, and now and then, and here and there, and at home and abroad, and on the seven seas, and across the length and breadth of the five continents, and yesterday and tomorrow and forever—could it be said of her that she had been “promiscuous”? No, that could not be said of her. For she had been as free as air, and one does not qualify the general atmosphere of the sidereal universe with such a paltry adjective as “promiscuous.”
She had just slept with everybody, with white, black, yellow, pink or green or purple—but she had never been promiscuous.
It was, in romantic letters, a period that celebrated the lady who was lost, the lovely creature in the green hat who was “never let off anything.” The story of this poor lady was a familiar one: she was the ill-starred heroine of fate, a kind of martyr to calamitous mischance, whose ruin had been brought about through tragic circumstance which she could not control, and for which she was not responsible.
Amy had her own apologists who tried to cast her in this martyred role. The stories told about her ruin—her “start upon the downward path” were numerous: there was even one touching conte which dated the beginning of the end from the moment when, an innocent, happy and fun-loving girl of nineteen years, she had, in a moment of desperation, in an effort to enliven the gloom, inject a flash of youth, of daring, or of happy spontaneity into the dismal scene, lighted a cigarette at a dinner party in Newport, attended by a large number of eminent Society Dowagers; the girl’s downfall, according to this moving tale, had been brought about by this thoughtless and harmless little act. From this moment on—so the story went—the verdict of the dowagers was “thumbs down” on the unhappy Amy: the evil tongues began to wag, scandal began to grow, her reputation was torn to shreds, then, in desperation, the unhappy child did go astray; she took to drink, from drink to lovers, from lovers to opium, from opium to—everything.
And all because a happy laughter-loving girl had smoked a cigarette! All because an innocent child had flaunted prejudice, defied convention! All because the evil tongues had wagged, because the old and evil minds had whispered! All of this of course, was just romantic foolishness. She was the ill-starred child of fate indeed, but the fate was in her, not outside of her. She was the victim of a tragic doom, but she herself had fashioned it: with her the fault, as with dear Brutus, lay not in her stars but in herself—for having been endowed with so many rare and precious things that most men lack—wealth, beauty, charm, intelligence and vital energy—she lacked the will to do, the toughness to resist, the power to shape her life to mastery: so, having almost all, she was the slave to her own wealth—an underling.
It is true, she was the child of her own time, the unhappy incarnation of a sickness of her time. She let her own time kill her. Her life expressed itself in terms of speed, sensational change and violent movement, in a feverish tempo that never drew from its own energies exhaustion or surcease, and that mounted constantly to insane excess. The only end of this could be destruction. Her life then was already sealed with doom. The mark of her destruction was already apparent upon her.
People had once said, “What on earth is Amy going to do next?” But now they said, “What on earth is there left for her to do?” And really if life is to be expressed solely in terms of velocity and sensation, it seemed that there was very little left for her to do. She had been everywhere, she had “seen everything” in the way in which such a person sees things, as one might see them from the windows of an express train traveling eighty miles an hour.
And having so quickly exhausted the conventional kaleidoscope of things to be seen in the usual itineraries of travel she had long since turned to an investigation of things much more bizarre and sinister and hidden, which her great wealth, her powerful connections, and her own driving energies opened to her, but which were closed to other people.
She had possessed for years an intimate and extensive acquaintance among the most sophisticated and decadent groups in society, in the great cities of the world. And this intimacy matured swiftly into familiarity with even more sinister border lines of life. She had an acquaintanceship among the underworld of New York, London, Paris and Berlin which the police might have envied and which few criminals achieve. It was rumored that she had taken part in a holdup “just for the fun of the thing.” And the police and some of her friends knew that she had been present at a drinking party at which one of the chieftains of the underworld had been killed.
But even with the police her wealth and power had secured for her dangerous privileges. Although she was nearsighted—in fact her eye sight was myopic, seriously affected—she drove a yellow racing car through city traffic at murderous speed. This great yellow car was well known in the seething highways of Manhattan and always brought the courtesy of a police salute. In some way, known only to persons of wealth, privilege, or political influence she possessed a police card and was privileged to a reckless license in violation of the laws in the operation of her car. Although, a year or two before, she had demolished this car, and killed a young dramatist who had been driving with her, this privilege had never been revoked.
And it was the same everywhere she went. It seemed that her wealth and power and feverish energy could get her anything she wanted in any country in the world. And the answer to it all? Well, speed, change, violence and sensation was the only answer—and then more speed, more change, more violence, and more sensation—until the end. And the end? The end was already in sight; it was written in her eyes—in her tormented splintered, and exploded vision. She had sowed the wind and now there was nothing left for her to reap except the whirlwind.
People now said: “What on earth is there left for her to do?” Nothing. There was nothing. She had tried everything in life—except living. And she could never try that now because she had so long ago, so irrecoverably lost the way. And having tried everything in life save living, and having lost the way to live, there was nothing left for her to do except to die.
And yet that golden, that angelic head; the snubbed nose and the freckled face—“I mean!—You know!”—the quick excited laugh, the hoarse and thrilling tones, the eager animation of a boy—were all so beautiful, so appealing, and somehow, one felt in this hard mystery, so good,—“If only—” people would think regretfully as Mrs. Jack now thought as she looked at that sunny head—“Oh, if only things had turned out differently for her!—” and then would seek back desperately through the labyrinthine scheme to find the clue to her disorder—saying, “Here—or here—or here—it happened here, you see—if only!—If only men were so much clay, as they are blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling!—if they only were!”
“I mean!—You know!—” at these familiar words, so indicative of her inchoate thought, her splintered energies, her undefined enthusiasm, Amy jerked the cigarette away from her lips with a quick and feverish movement, laughed hoarsely and eagerly, and turned to her companions as if fairly burning with an excited desire to communicate something to them that filled her with a conviction of exuberant elation—“I mean!” she cried hoarsely again,—“When you compare it with the stuff they’re doing nowadays!—I mean! There’s simply no comparison!”—and laughing jubilantly as if the meaning of these splintered phrases was perfectly clear to everyone, she drew furiously upon her cigarette again and jerked it from her lips.
During the course of this exuberant and feverish monologue, the group of young people, of which Amy was the golden centre and which included besides Alma and Ernest Jack, Roy Farley and his two young male companions, the young Japanese sculptor and the rich young Jew who had accompanied Amy to the party, had moved over toward the portrait of Mrs. Jack above the mantle, and were looking up at it.
The famous portrait, which was now the subject of Amy’s jubilant admiration, was deserving of its reputation and of the enthusiastic praise that was now being heaped upon it. It was one of the best examples of Henry Mallows’ early work and it had also been created with the passion, the tenderness, the simplicity of a man in love.
“I mean!” cried Amy jubilantly again, pausing below the portrait, and gesturing at it with rapid movement of her impatient cigarette, “When you look at it and think how long ago that was!—and how beautiful she was then!—and how beautiful she is now!” cried Amy exultantly, laughed hoarsely, then cast her lovely grey green eyes so full of splintered torment around her in a glance of almost feverish exasperation—“I mean!” she cried again and drew impatiently on her cigarette—“There’s simply no comparison!”—without saying what it was there was simply no comparison to or for or with, and certainly not saying what she wanted to say—“Oh, I mean!” she cried with a tone and gesture of desperate impatience, jerked her golden head and tossed her cigarette angrily and impatiently away into the blazing fire—“The whole thing’s obvious,” she muttered leaving everyone more bewildered than ever. Then, turning toward Hook with a sudden and impulsive movement, she demanded; “How long has it been, Steve? It’s been twenty years ago, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, quite all of that,” Hook answered in a cold bored tone. In his agitation and embarrassment he turned still farther away from her with an air of fatigued indifference, until he almost had his fat back turned upon the whole group. “It’s been nearer thirty, I should think,” he tossed back indifferently over his fat shoulder and then with an air of bored casualness, he gave them the exact date which he knew precisely as he knew all such dates, “I should think it was done in nineteen one or two,—wasn’t it, Esther?”—he drawled in a bored tone, turning to Mrs. Jack, who, rosily beaming, and with a jolly and rather bewildered look upon her face, had now approached the group, “Around nineteen one, wasn’t it?”—he said more loudly in answer to her sharply lifted little hand cupped at the ear and her eager and inquiring “Hah?”
“Hah? What?” cried Mrs. Jack in an eager rather bewildered tone, then went on immediately, “Oh, the picture! No, Steve—it was done in nineteen—” She checked herself so swiftly that it was not apparent to anyone but Hook that she was not telling the truth—“In nineteen-four.” She saw just the momentary trace of a smile upon the pale bored features as he turned away and gave him a quick warning little look, but he just murmured in a casual and disinterested tone: “Oh … I had forgotten it was as late as that.”
As a matter of fact, he knew the exact date, even to the month and day it had been finished—which had been October, 1902. And still musing on the vagaries of the sex, he thought: “Why will they be so stupid! She must know that to anyone who knows the least thing about Mallows’ life, the date is as familiar as the Fourth of July—”
“Of course,” Mrs. Jack was saying rapidly, “I was just a child when it was made, I couldn’t have been more than eighteen at the time—if I was that—”
“Which would make you not more than forty-three at the present time,” thought Hook cynically—“if you are that! Well, my dear, you were twenty when he painted you—and you had been married for two years and had a child and you had been Henry Mallows’ mistress for a year. … Why do they do it!”—he thought impatiently, and turned away with a feeling of sharp annoyance—“Does she take me for a fool!”
He turned toward her almost impatiently and looked at her and saw her quick glance, an expression startled, almost pleading in her eye. He followed it, and saw the hot eye, the fierce packed features of ungainly youth: he caught it in a flash: “Ah! It’s this boy! She’s told him then that—” and suddenly remembering the startled pleading of that look—so much of child, of folly, even in their guile—was touched with pity: “Oh! I see!”
Aloud, however, he merely turned away and murmured indifferently, with no expression in his heavy eyes: “Oh, yes, you couldn’t have been very old.”
“And God!” cried Mrs. Jack. “But I was beautiful!” She spoke these words with such gleeful conviction, with such a jolly and good-humored face, with such innocent delight that they lost any trace of objectionable vanity they might have had, and people smiled at her affectionately, as one might smile at a child, and Amy Van Leer, with a quick hasty little laugh, said impulsively,
“Oh, Esther! Honestly you’re the most—But I mean!” She cried impatiently, with a quick toss of her golden head, as if answering some invisible antagonist—“She is!”
“In all your days,” cried Mrs. Jack, her tender little face suffusing with laughter and good-humor like a flower, “You never saw the like of me! I was just like peaches and cream,” she said; then with her rich plain humor, simply “I’d have knocked your eye out!”
“But darling! You do now!” cried Amy—“What I mean to say is, darling you’re the most—isn’t she, Steve?” She laughed hoarsely, uncertainly, turning to Hook with a kind of feverish eagerness in her tone.
And he, seeing the ruin, the loss, the desperation in her splintered eyes was sick with horror and with pity. He looked at her disdainfully, with weary lidded eyes, and a haughtily pursy face, like a gentleman who has just been accosted in his club by a drunken sot who has clutched him by the sleeve, and after looking at her for a moment in this way, with this disdainful hauteur, he said, “What?” quite freezingly, and then turned pompously away, saying in a bored and weary tone: “Oh …”
He saw the rosy smiling face of Mrs. Jack beside him, and above, the portrait of the lovely girl that she had been. And the anguish and the majesty of time stabbed through him like a knife.
“My God, here she is!” he thought. “Still featured like a child, still beautiful, still loving someone—another boy!—Almost as lovely now as she was then when Mallows was a boy, and she had just begun to sleep with him in—in—”
1902! Ah! Time! The figures reeled in drunken dance before his eyes. He rubbed his hand before his eyes, and turned wearily away. No figures these—but symbols in a witches’ dance, a dance of evil and enchanted time. In 1902!—How many centuries ago was that?—How many lives and deaths and floods, how many million days and nights of love, of hate, of anguish and of fear, of guilt, of hope, of disillusion and defeat here in the geologic aeons of this monstrous catacomb, this riddled isle!—in 1902! Good God! It was the very Prehistoric Age of man!—the Neolithic Era of this swarming Rock! Why, all that had happened several million years ago—so much had happened after that, so much had begun and ended, been forgotten, so many, many million lives of truth, of youth, of old age, death, and new beginning, so much blood and sweat and agony had gone below the bridge—why he himself had lived through at least ten million years of it! Had lived and died a million births and lives and deaths and dark oblivions of it, had striven, fought, and hoped and been destroyed through so many centuries of it that even memory had failed—the sense of time had been wiped out—and all of it had seemed to happen in a timeless dream; a kind of Grand Canyon of the human nerves and bones and blood and brain and flesh and words and thought, all timeless now, all congealed, all there solidified in a kind of timeless and unchanging stratum, there impossibly below, mixed into a general geologic layer with all the bonnets, bustles and old songs, the straw hats and the derbies, the clatter of forgotten hooves, the thunder of forgotten wheels upon forgotten cobbles, together with lost words, lost music and lost songs, the skeletons of lost thought and lost ideas—merged together now there in a geologic stratum of the sunken world—while she
—She! Why surely she had been a part of it with him—with Mallows—with all these times, these places—what?—
She had turned to listen to another group with Lawrence Hirsch, and he could see her rosy little face serious and attentive now, and saying earnestly:—
“Oh, yes, I knew Jack Reed. He used to come to Mabel Dodge’s place; we were great friends—That was when Alfred Stieglitz had started his salon—”
Ah, all these names! Had he not been with these as well? Or, was it but another shape—a seeming!—in this phantasmal and traumatic shadow-show of time! Had he not been beside her at the launching of the ship?—When they were captive among Thracian faces?—Or lighted tapers to the tent when she had come to charm remission from the lord of Macedon?—All these were ghosts—save she! And she—Circean she, this time-devouring child of time—had of this whole huge company of ghosts alone remained immortal and herself, had shed off the chrysalis of all these her former selves, as if each life that she had loved was nothing but an out-worn garment—and now stood here—here! Good God! Upon the burnt out candle-ends of time—with her jolly face of noon, as if she had just heard of this brave new world on Saturday—and would see if all of it was really true tomorrow!
Mrs. Jack had turned again at the sound of Amy’s eager and throat-husky tone and now beaming rosily, she had bent forward to listen to the girl’s disjointed monologue, one hand cupped to her ear, and an eager, childlike little smile upon her lips.
“I mean! You know! But Esther! What I mean to say is!—Darling, you’re the most!—It’s the most!—I mean, when I look at both of you, I simply can’t—I mean, there’s simply no comparison, that’s all!” cried Amy, with hoarse elation, her lovely face and head all sunning over with light, with eagerness, with generous enthusiasm and boyish animation. “Oh, what I mean to say is!” Amy cried, then shook her head with a short strong movement, tossed her cigarette away impatiently and cried with the expiration of a long sigh—“Gosh!”
Poor child! Poor Child!—Hook turned pompously and indifferently away to hide the naked anguish in his eyes—So soon to grow, to go, to be consumed and die like all of us—beyond this timeless breed, unlike them so unschooled, incautious, and so prone to peril and to go too far. Like him she was, he knew, unused to breathe the dangerous vapors of this most uncertain place; unlike these children of the furious street, so soon to feel unhoused, unhomed, unhearted, strangers and alone!
Never to walk as they, with certitude and hope, the stoney canyons of these cruel vertices, to speak with joy the babel of its strident tongues—like him, to deafen to strong steel,—alas! To want the nightingale, and to shrink beneath these monstrous and inhuman pyramids of Asiatic pride! She was, like him, too prone to die the death upon a single death; to live the life upon the single life; to love the love upon the single love—never to save out of anything, life, death, or love—a prudent remnant for the hour of peril or the day of ruin; but to use it all, to give it all, to be consumed, burnt out like last night’s moths upon a cluster of hard light!
Poor child! Poor child!—thought Hook—So quick and short and temporal, both you and I, the children of a younger kind! While she!—just for a moment, briefly, seeming-cold, he surveyed the innocence enrosed of Mrs. Jack. And these!—the sensual volutes of strong nostrils curved with scornful mirth: he looked at them—These others of this ancient chemistry—unmothed, reborn, and venturesome, yet wisely mindful of the flame—these others shall endure! Ah time!—Poor Child!