Part 13 (1/2)
Immediately after he cursed himself for a blunder, a stupid error in emphasis, from which she drew perceptibly away. She extinguished the cigarette, his cigarette, and that, as well, added to the distance between them.
”I should go back to Eastlake tomorrow afternoon,” he observed, in a manner which he made entirely detached. To that she objected that he would not see Mina Raff, nothing would be accomplished. ”She might have dinner with you tomorrow night,” she thought; ”Mina gets back to the Plaza a little before seven. But we can call the studio.”
In view of what he had already done, Mrs. Grove's proposal seemed unavoidably reasonable. He would telephone f.a.n.n.y again in the morning and explain. f.a.n.n.y, his wife! Well, he continued, as though he were angrily retorting to a criticism from without, no man ever better realized the splendid qualities of his wife. That was beyond contradiction; and he sharply added that not f.a.n.n.y, but the role of a wife, a housewife, was under observation. Mrs. Grove was married, but that didn't keep her from the Malmaison, at what Eastlake disapprovingly called all hours of the night. She had no aspect of a servitude which, while it promised the most unlimited future rewards, took the present grace, the charm, from women. That--the consequent loss or gain--was open to question; but the fact remained: for the majority of women marriage was fatal to their persons. Only the rich, the fortunate and the unamenable escaped.
”In a very few minutes now,” Mrs. Grove said, ”you will be able to sleep.”
”I've never been wider awake,” he protested; ”I was thinking of how marriage submerged most women while you escaped.”
She laughed quietly, incomprehensibly.
”Well,” he insisted, aggrieved, ”haven't you?”
She leaned toward him; almost, he told himself, there was a flash of animation on her immobile face. ”Escape, what do you mean by that?” she demanded. ”Does anyone escape--will young Morris and Mina? And you?”
”Oh, not I,” he replied, thrown off his mental balance by the rapid attack of her questioning; ”I am tied in a thousand ways. But you surprise me.”
”I could,” she remarked, coldly, returning to her corner. ”Your self-satisfaction makes me rage, How do you dare, knowing nothing, to decide what I am and what I can do? You're like William, everyone I meet--so sure for others.”
”No, I'm not,” he contradicted her with a rude energy; ”and, after all, I didn't accuse you of much that was serious. I only said you were apparently above the circ.u.mstances that spoil so many women.”
”It isn't necessary to repeat yourself,” she reminded him disagreeably; ”I have a trace of memory.”
”And with it,” he answered, ”a very unpleasant temper.”
”Quite so,” she agreed, once more calm; ”you seem fated to tell me about myself. I don't mind, and it gives you such a feeling of wisdom.” The car stopped before the Grove house and, within, her good-night was indifferent even for her. What, he wondered, what the devil, had upset her? He had never encountered a more incomprehensible display of the arrogantly feminine.
In his room, however, re-establis.h.i.+ng his sense of comfort, he found, on a low table by the bed, a choice of whiskies, charged water, cigarettes, nectarines, orange-brown mangoes, and black Belgian grapes, Attached to an electric plug was a small coffee percolator; for the morning, Lee gathered. His pajamas, his dressing gown and slippers, were conveniently laid at his hand. He was, in fact, so comfortable that he had no desire to get into bed; and he sat smoking, over a tall drink, speculating about his hostess. Perhaps she had difficulties with the obdurate correctness of William; but Mrs. Grove would have been too well-steeled there to show any resentment to a virtual stranger; no, whatever it was lay within herself. He gave it up, since, he proclaimed aloud, it didn't touch him.
The opened windows admitted the vast unsubdued clamor of New York; the immeasurable force of the city seemed to press in upon the room, upon his thoughts. How different it was from the open countryside, the quiet scene, of his home in Eastlake. There the lowing of a chance cow robbed of her calf, her udder aching, the diminis.h.i.+ng barking of dogs and the birds--sparrows in winter and robins in the spring--were the only sounds that disturbed the dark. In the morning the farmer above Lee rolled the milk down the road, past his window, on a carrier, and the milk cans made a sudden rattle and ringing. Then Christopher washed the porches.
f.a.n.n.y, no matter how late she had been up the night before, was dressed by eight o'clock, and put fresh flowers in the vase. He hazarded the guess that Mrs. Grove was often in bed until past noon; here servants renewed the great hot-house roses with long stems, the elaborate flowers on the dining-table.
In the morning, as he had foreseen, the percolator was connected, cream and sugar placed beside it; and before his shaving was over, he had a cup of coffee with a cigarette casting up its fragrant smoke from the saucer. His shoes might have been lacquered from the heighth of the l.u.s.tre rubbed into them; a voice the perfection of trained sympathetic concern inquired for the exacted details of the suspended preparation of his eggs.
His dinner engagement with Mina Raff, arranged through her secretary, was for fifteen minutes past seven; and, meanwhile, as Mrs. Grove had offered, Adamson drove Lee down-town. The afternoon had nearly gone before he returned to East Sixty-sixth Street; but the maid at the door told him that there was tea up in the library. This he found to be a long gloomy room finished in a style which, he decided, might be ma.s.sively Babylonian. A ponderous table for the support of weightless trifles filled the middle of the rug; there were deep chairs of roan leather, with an immense sofa like the lounge of a club or steamer; low bookcases with leaded gla.s.s; and windows the upper panes of which were stained in peac.o.c.k colors and geometrical design.
The tea things were on a wagon beside the center table; there were a number of used cups and crumpled napkins, and whiskey gla.s.ses, in evidence, but Mrs. Grove was alone. She had been about to have them removed, she told him, when he rang. ”No, I am not in a hurry; and it's such a disagreeable day you ought to have a highball.”
She was in black, a dress that he found unbecoming, with a collar high about her throat and wide sleeves heavily embroidered in carmine. ”You will hate that one,” she said of the chair he selected; ”I can't think why chairs have to be so very uncomfortable--these either swallow you whole or, like a toboggan slide, drop you on the floor.” Lee drew up a tabourette for his gla.s.s and ash tray. The ba.n.a.l idea struck him that, although he had met Mrs. Grove only yesterday, he knew her well; rather he had a sense of ease, of the familiar, with her. The sole evidence she gave of an agreement in his feeling was that she almost totally neglected to talk. She smoked, absorbed in a frowning abstraction. A floor lamp behind them was lighted, and there was an illumination at the mantel, but the depths of the library were wrapped in obscurity: its sombreness had increased, the air was heavy with the dust of leather, a vague funereal oppressiveness.
Lee's sense of familiarity increased, but his ease left him, driven away by the strength of a feeling not exactly of being at home but of returning to an old powerful influence. Mrs. Grove's head was in shadow.
There was a stir at the door, and William Grove entered. He was, he told Lee civilly, glad that Adamson had been of use. ”I walk whenever it's possible,” he proceeded; ”but that way you wouldn't have reached Beaver Street yet. Nothing to drink, thanks, Savina, but a cigarette--” Lee Randon reached forward with the silver box and, inadvertently, he pressed into Mrs. Grove's knee. He heard a thin clatter, there was a minute hot splash on his hand, and he realized that she had dropped her spoon. She sat rigidly, half turned toward the light, with a face that shocked him: it was not merely pale, but white, drawn and harsh, and her eyes, losing every vestige of ordinary expression, stared at him in a set black intensity.
”I'm sorry,” Lee Randon said mechanically, and he offered the cigarette box to the other man; but, internally, he was consumed with anger.
The woman positively was a fool to mistake his awkwardness; he hadn't supposed that anyone could be so super-sensitive and suspicious; and it damaged his pride that, clearly, she should consider him capable of such a juvenile proceeding. Lee rose and excused himself stiffly, explaining that it was time for him to dress; and, in his room, telephoning f.a.n.n.y, he determined to leave New York, the Groves, as early as possible in the morning.
f.a.n.n.y responded from Eastlake in a tone of unending patience; nothing he could do, her voice intimated, would exhaust her first consideration of him; she wouldn't--how could she?--question the wisdom of his decisions, even when they seemed, but, of course, only to her faulty understanding, incomprehensible.
”You make it sound as though I were over here on an errand of my own,”
he protested cheerfully; ”I'd rather be in Eastlake.”