Part 7 (1/2)
”Don't you think you have said enough for one night?” she asked, in a calm voice belied by the angry sparkle of her eyes, the faint irrepressible trembling of her lips. ”Do you think I want to hear that it is only convention and our neighbors that keep you with me? You have no right to insist that your horridness is true of me, either. I--I could hear music, if you would let me.” She sank on the little cus.h.i.+oned bench before her dressing table, where her youthfulness took on a piercing aspect of misery. f.a.n.n.y's declaration, not far from tears, that she was just as she had always been was admirably upheld by her appealing presence.
The tenderness he had admitted, reduced by a perceptive impatience and the sense of having been wholly, wilfully, misunderstood, carried him over to her. He took f.a.n.n.y, with her face strained away from him, into his arms. ”Don't be an idiot,” he begged softly; ”you ought to be used to my talking by now. Let me go on, it can't come to anything--” She stiffened in his embrace:
”What do you mean by that?”
”Nothing, nothing,” he answered shortly, releasing her; ”where is all that certainty you a.s.sured me of? If you go on like this I shall never be able to tell you my thoughts, discuss problems with you; and it seems to me that's very necessary.”
”It has been lately,” she spoke in a metallic voice; ”nothing satisfies you any more; and I suppose I should have been prepared to have you say things to me, too. But I'm not; you might even find that I am not the idiot you suspect.”
”I was giving you a chance to prove that,” he pointed out.
”Now you have discovered the fatal truth you can save yourself more trouble in the future.” She emphatically switched off a light beside her, leaving him standing in a sole unsparing illumination. Yet in her extreme resentment she was, he recognized, rubbing Vaseline into her finger nails, her final nightly rite. Then there was silence where once he had kissed her with a reluctance to lose her in even the short oblivion of sleep.
Throughout Monday, at his office, Lee Randon thought at uncomfortable intervals of the late incipient scenes with f.a.n.n.y. They had quarrels--who hadn't?--but they had usually ended in f.a.n.n.y shedding some tears that warmly recemented their deep affections. This latter time, however, she had not wept--at the point of dissolving into the old surrender she had turned away from him, both in reality and metaphorically, and fallen asleep in an unexpected cold reserve. He was sorry, for it brought into their relations.h.i.+p a definite new quality of difference. He was aware of the thorough inconsistency of his att.i.tude toward their marriage; again two opposed forces were present in him--one, f.a.n.n.y, as, bound to her, he knew and cherished; and the other--the devil take the other!
He was organizing a new company, and, figuring impatiently, he pressed the b.u.t.ton for Mrs. Wald, his secretary. She appeared at once and quietly, her notebook and pencil ready, took a place at his side. ”Run this out, please, Mrs. Wald,” and an involved financial transaction followed. What he wanted to ascertain was, with a preferred stock bearing eight per cent at a stated capitalization, and the gift of a bonus of common, share for share, how much pie would remain to be cut up between a Mr. Hadly, Sanford, and himself? The woman worked rapidly, in long columns of minute neat figures. ”About thirty-four thousand dollars, each, Mr. Randon,” she announced almost directly. ”Is that close enough; or do you want it to the fraction?”
”Good enough; send Miss Mathews in.”
Almost anyone on his staff, Lee reflected, knew more about the processes of his business than he did; he supplied the energy, the responsibility of the decisions, more than the brains of his organization; and it perfected the details. The stenographer, Miss Mathews, was very elaborately blonde, very personable; and, dictating to her, Lee Randon remembered the advice given him by a large wielder of labor and finance.
”Lee,” he had said, touching him with the emphasis of a finger, ”never play around with an employee or a client.”
He, John Lenning Partins, had been a man of eccentric humors, and--like all individuals who supported heavy mental burdens, inordinately taxed their brains--he had his hours, unknown to the investing public, of erratic, but the word was erotic, conduct. On more than one occasion he had peremptorily telegraphed for Lee to join him at some unexpected place, for a party. Once, following a ball at the Grand Opera House, in Paris, they had motored in a taxi-cab, with charming company, to Calais.
During that short stay in France John Partins had spent, flung variously away, four hundred thousand dollars.
The industrious, the clerks, efficient women like Mrs. Wald, the middle-aged lawyers in his office, were rewarded...by a pension. It was all very strange, upside down: what rot that was about the infinite capacity for taking pains! He supposed it wouldn't do to make this public, the tritest maxims were safer for the majority; but it was too bad; it spread the eternal hypocrisies of living. He asked Miss Mathews:
”You're not thinking of getting married, are you? Because if you do I'll have your young man deported; I simply won't let go of you.”
”I don't see any signs of it, Mr. Randon,” she replied, half serious and half smiling; ”my mother thinks it's awful, but I'm not in any hurry.
There are men I know, who might like me; they show me a very good time; but somehow I am not anxious. I guess in a way it's the other married girls I see: either they housework at home, and I couldn't be bothered with that; or they are in an office and, somehow, that seems wrong, too. I want so much,” she admitted; ”and with what clothes cost now it's terrible.”
”Moralists and social investigators would call you a bad girl,” he told her; ”but I agree with you; get your pretty hats and suits, and smart shoes, as long as you are able. You're not a bit better in a kitchen than you are here, taking dictation from me; and I am not sure you would be more valuable at home with a child or two. You are a very unusual stenographer, rapid and accurate, and you have a good mind in addition to your figure. Why should you lose all that at once, give it up, for the accidents of cholera infantum and a man, as likely as not, with a consumptive lung?”
”But what about love, Mr. Randon? That's what throws me off. Some say it's the only thing in life.”
”I'm d.a.m.ned if I know,” he admitted, leaning back from his wide flat-topped desk. ”I hear the same thing, and I am rather inclined to believe it. But I have an idea that it is very different from what most people insist; I don't think it is very useful around the house; it has more to do with the pretty hat than with a dishpan. If you fall in love go after the thing itself, then; don't hesitate about tomorrow or yesterday; and, above all else, don't ask yourself if it will last; that's immaterial.”
”You make it sound wild enough,” she commented, rising.
”The wilder the better,” he insisted; ”if it is not delirious it's nothing.”
The road and countryside over which he returned in the motor sedan, partly frozen, were streaked by rills of muddy surface water; the sky, which appeared definitely to rest on the surrounding hills, was grey with a faint suffusion of yellow at the western horizon. It was all as dreary, as sodden, as possible. Eastlake, appearing beyond a shoulder of bare woods, showed a monotonous scattering of wet black roofs, raw brick chimneys, at the end of a long paved highway glistening with steel tracks.
Lee Randon was weary, depressed: nothing in his life, in any existence, offered the least recompense for the misfortune of having been born. He left his car at the entrance of his dwelling; Christopher, the gardener, came slos.h.i.+ng over the sod to take it into the garage; and, within, he found the dinner-table set for three. ”It's Claire,” his wife informed him; ”she called up not half an hour ago to ask if she could come.
Peyton was away over night, she said, and she wanted to see us.” He went on up to his room, inattentive even to Claire's possible troubles.