Part 17 (1/2)
Twice, the following day, Lee telephoned to f.a.n.n.y, but neither time was she in the house; and, kept at his office, he was obliged to take an inconvenient train that made a connection for Eastlake. When Lee reached the countryside opening in the familiar hilly vistas he had, in place of the usual calm recognitions through a run of hardly more than an hour, a sense of having come a long way to a scene from which he had been absent for years. It appeared to him remarkably tranquil and self-contained--safe was the word which came to him. He was glad to be there, but at indeterminate stations rather than in Eastlake. He dreaded, for no plainly comprehended reason, his return home. The feelings that, historically, he should have owned were all absent. Had it been possible he would have cancelled the past forty-eight hours; but Lee was forced to admit to himself that he was not invaded by a very lively sense of guilt. He made a conventional effort to see his act in the light of a grave fault--whatever was attached to the charge of adultery--but it failed before the conviction that the whole thing was sad.
His sorrow was for Savina, for the suffering of her past, the ordeal of the present, and the future dreariness. There had been no suggestion of wrong in her surrender, no perceptible consciousness of shame: it was exactly as though, struggling to the limit of endurance against a powerful adverse current, she had turned and swept with it. The fact was that the entire situation was utterly different from the general social and moral conception of it; and Lee began to wonder which were stronger--the individual truth or the imposed dogmatic weight of the world. But the latter, he added, would know nothing of this. Concisely, there was to be no repet.i.tion of last night; there would be no affair.
Lee Randon had completely and sharply focussed the most adverse possible att.i.tude toward that: he saw it without a redeeming feature and bare of any chance of pleasure. His need for honesty, however special, was outraged on every facet by the thought of an intrigue. Lee reconstructed it in every detail--he saw the moments, doubtful and hurried and surrept.i.tious, s.n.a.t.c.hed in William Grove's house; the servants, with their penetration of the tone of an establishment, knowing and insufferable; he lived over the increasing dissatisfaction with quick embraces in the automobile, and the final indignities of lying names and rooms of pandering and filthy debas.e.m.e.nt. The almost inevitable exposure followed, the furies and hysterical reproaches. That, indeed, would have involved them fatally: in such circ.u.mstances the world would be invincible, crus.h.i.+ng; holding solidly its front against such dangerous a.s.sault, it would have poured over Savina and him a conviction of sin in which they would unavoidably have perished.
As it was, he had told her--with, in himself, the feeling of a considerable discovery--that they were to a marked degree superior: he could find no more remorse at his heart than Savina showed. This, exactly, was his inner conviction--that, since he had given something not in f.a.n.n.y's possession, he had robbed her of nothing. It was a new idea to him and it required careful thought, a slow justification. It answered, perhaps, once and for all, his question about the essential oneness of marriage. Yes, that was a misconception; marriage in an ideal state he wasn't considering, but only his own individual position. To love but one woman through this life and into a next would be blissful ... if it were possible; there might be a great deal saved--but by someone else--in heroically supporting such an Elysian tenet; Lee Randon definitely hadn't the necessary utopianism.
Love wasn't a sacred fluid held in a single vessel of alabaster; marriage didn't conveniently create shortsightedness. Lee couldn't pretend to answer all this for women, or even in part for Savina.
Her att.i.tude, he knew, in that it never touched the abstract, was far simpler than his; she didn't regard herself as scarlet, but thought of the rest of the world as unendurably drab. The last thing she had said to him was that she was glad, glad, that it had happened. This, too, in Savina, had preserved them from the slightest suggestion of inferiority: the night a.s.sumed no resemblance to a disgraceful footnote on the page of righteousness. It was complete--and, by G.o.d, admirable!--within itself. No one, practically, would agree with him, and here, in the fact that no one ever could know, his better wisdom was shown.
About love, the thing itself, his perceptions remained dim: he had loved f.a.n.n.y enormously at the time of their wedding and he loved her now, so many years after; but his feeling--as he had tried so unfortunately to tell her--wasn't the same, it had grown calm; it had become peaceful, but an old tempestuous need had returned. Yet, until he had gone to the Groves', his restlessness had been trivial, hardly more than academic, a half-smiling interest in a doll; but now, after he had left the realm of fancy for an overt act, a full realization of his implication was imperative. Without it he would be unable to preserve any satisfactory life with f.a.n.n.y at all; his uneasiness must merely increase, become intolerable. Certainly there was a great, it should be an inexhaustible, amount of happiness for him in his wife, his children and his home; he would grow old and negative with them, and there die.
But a lot of mental re-adjustment, understanding, was necessary first.
Suddenly the minor adventures and sensations of the past had become, even before the completeness of the affair with Savina, insuperably distasteful to him; he simply couldn't look forward to a procession of them reaching to impotence. No, no, no! That was never Cytherea's import. He didn't want to impoverish himself by the cheap flinging away of small coin from his ultimate store. He didn't, equally, wish to keep on exasperating f.a.n.n.y in small ways. That pettiness was wholly to blame for what discomfort he had had. His wife's claim was still greater on him than any other's; and what, now, he couldn't give her must be made up in different ways. This conviction invested him with a fresh sense of dignity and an increasing regard for f.a.n.n.y.
What a shame it was that he could not go quietly to her with all this, tell her everything. A lie was rooted, concealed, beyond removal at the base of the honesty he planned. There was, of course, this additional phase of the difficulty--what had happened concerned Savina even more than it did his wife and him. He had Savina Grove, so entirely in his hands, to guard. And the innate animosity of women toward women was incalculable. That wasn't a new thought, but it recurred to him with special force. As much as he desired it, utter frankness, absolute safety, was impossible. f.a.n.n.y's standard of duty, or responsibility, was worlds apart from his.
Bitterly and without premeditation he cursed the tyranny of s.e.x; in countless forms it dominated, dictated, every aspect of life. Men's conception of women was quite exclusively founded on it in its aspects of chast.i.ty or license. In the latter they deprecated the former, and in the first they condemned all trace of the latter. The result of this was that women, the prost.i.tutes and the mothers alike, as well, had no other validity of judgment. The present marriage was hardly more than an exchange of the violation of innocence, or of acted innocence, for an adequate material consideration. If this were not true, why was innocence--a silly fact in itself--so insisted upon? Lee was forced to conclude however, that it was the fault of men: they turned, at an advancing age when it was possible to gather a comfortable competence, to the young. By that time their emotions were apt to be almost desperately variable.
In his case it had been different--but life was different, easier, when he had married--and his wedding most appropriate to felicity. Yet that, against every apparent reason to the contrary, had vanished, and left him this calm determining of his fate. Through his thoughts a quirk of memory ran like a tongue of flame. He felt Savina's hand under his cuff; he felt her sliding, with her arms locked about his neck, out of her furs in the automobile; a white glimmer, a whisper, she materialized in the coldness of the night. There was a long-drawn wailing blast from the locomotive--they were almost entering the train-shed at Eastlake. When f.a.n.n.y expected him, and it was possible, she met him at the station; but tonight he would have to depend on one of the rattling local motor hacks. Still, he looked for her and was faintly and unreasonably disappointed at her absence. An uncontrollable nervousness, as he approached his house, invaded the preparation of a warm greeting.
f.a.n.n.y was seated at dinner, and she interrupted her recognition of his arrival to order his soup brought in. ”It's really awfully hard to have things nice when you come at any time,” she said in the voice of restraint which usually mildly irritated him. He was apt to reply shortly, unsympathetically; but, firm in the determination to improve the tone of his relations with f.a.n.n.y, he cheerfully met the evidence of her sense of injury. ”Of course,” she added, ”we expected you yesterday up to the very last minute.” When he asked her who exactly she meant by we she answered, ”The Rodmans and John and Alice Luce. It was all arranged for you. Borden Rodman sent us some ducks; I remembered how you liked them, and I asked the others and cooked them myself. That's mixed, but you know what I mean. I had oysters and the thick tomato soup with crusts and Brussels sprouts; and I sent to town for the alligator pears and meringue. I suppose it can't be helped, and it's all over now, but you might have let me know.”
”I am sorry, f.a.n.n.y,” he acknowledged; ”at the last so much piled up to do. Mina Raff was very doubtful. I can't tell if I accomplished anything with her or not.” f.a.n.n.y seemed to have lost all interest in Peyton Morris's affair. ”I had dinner with Mina and talked a long while. At bottom she is sensible enough; and very sensitive. I like sensitive women.”
”You mean that you like other women to be sensitive,” she corrected him; ”whenever I am, you get impatient and say I'm looking for trouble.”
There was, he replied, a great deal in what she said; and it must be remedied. At this she gazed at him for a speculative second. ”Where did you take Mina Raff to dinner?” she asked; ”and what did you do afterward?” He told her. ”She was so tired that she went back to the Plaza before ten. No, I returned to the Groves'. It's no good being in New York alone. We'll have our party together there before Christmas.”
”I imagined you'd see a lot of her.”
”Of Mina Raff? What nonsense! She is working all day and practically never goes out. People have such wrong ideas about actresses, or else they have changed and the opinions have stood still. They are as business-like now as lawyers; you make an appointment with their secretaries. Besides that, Mina doesn't specially attract me.”
”At any rate you call her Mina.”
”Why so I do; I hadn't noticed; but she hasn't started to call me Lee; I must correct her.”
”They played bridge afterward,” f.a.n.n.y said, referring, he gathered, to the occasion he had missed. ”That is, the Rodmans and the Luces did, and I sat around. People are too selfish for anything!” Her voice grew sharper. ”They stayed until after twelve, just because Borden was nineteen dollars back at one time. And they drank all that was left of your special Mount Vernon. It was last night that you were at the St.
Regis?”
”No,” he corrected her, ”the night before. Last evening I had dinner with the Groves.” This was so nearly true that he advanced it with satisfaction. ”Afterward we went to the Greenwich Follies.”
”I don't see how you had to wait, then,” she observed instantly. ”You were in New York on account of Claire, you stayed three nights, and only saw Mina Raff once.” He told her briefly that, unexpectedly, more had turned up. ”What did you do the first night?” she persisted.
”I dragged a cash girl into an opium place on Pell Street.”
”That's not too funny to be borne,” she returned; ”and it doesn't altogether answer my question.”
”We went to Malmaison.”