Part 9 (1/2)

This, for Linda, was horribly embarra.s.sing. However, she gravely promised. The Russian lighted a cigarette; almost she was serene again.

Linda said, ”Fatness is awful, isn't it?”

Pleydon replied, ”Death should be the penalty. If women aren't lovely--”

he waved away every other consideration.

”And if men have fingers like carrots--” Susanna mimicked him. Judith, flushed, her hair loosened, approached. ”Linda,” she demanded, ”do you remember when we ordered the taxi? Was it two or three?” Markue, at her shoulder, begged her not to consider home.

”I'm going almost immediately,” Pleydon said, ”and taking your Linda.”

His height and determined manner scattered all objections.

Linda, at the entrance to the apartment, found to her great surprise--in place of the motor she had expected--a small graceful single-horse victoria, the driver b.u.t.toned into a sealskin rug. Deep in furs, beside Pleydon, she was remarkably comfortable, and she was soothed by the rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the even progress through the crystal night of Fifth Avenue.

Her companion flooded his being with the frozen air. They had, it seemed, lost all desire to talk. The memory of Markue's party lingered like the last vanis.h.i.+ng odor of his incense; there was a confused vision of the murmurous room against the lighted exterior where the drinks sparkled on a table. Linda made up her mind that she would not go to another. Then she wondered if she'd see Pleydon again. The Russian singer had been too silly for words.

It suddenly occurred to her that the man now with her had taken Susanna Noda, and that he had left her planted. He had preferred driving her, Linda Condon, home. He wasn't very enthusiastic about it, though; his face was gloomy.

”The truth is,” he remarked at last, ”that Susanna is right--I am not in the first rank. But that was all nonsense about the necessity of the gutter--sentimental lies.”

Linda was not interested in this, but it left her free to explore her own emotions. The night had been eventful because it had shaken all the foundation of what she intended. That single momentary delicious thrill had been enough to threaten the entire rest. At the same time her native contempt of the other women, of Judith with her tumbled hair, persisted.

Was there no other way to capture such happiness? Was it all hopelessly messy with drinks and unpleasant familiarity?

What did Pleydon mean by spirit? Surely there must be more kinds of love than one--he had intimated that. She gathered that ”Homer's children,”

those airs of Gluck that she liked so well, were works of art, sculpture, such as he did. Yet she had never thought of them as important, important as oatmeal or delicate soap. She made up her mind to ask him about it, when she saw that they had reached the Eighties; she was almost home.

”I am going away to-morrow,” he told her, ”for the winter, to South America. When I come back we'll see each other. If you should change address send me a line to the Harvard Club.” The carriage had stopped before the great arched entrance to the apartment-house, towering in its entire block. He got out and lifted her to the pavement as if she had been no more than a flower in his hands. Then he walked with her into the darkness of the garden.

The fountains were cased in boards; the hedged borders, the bushes and gra.s.s, were dead. High above them on the dark wall a window was bright.

Linda's heart began to pound loudly, she was trembling ... from the cold. There was a faint sound in the air--the elevated trains, or stirring wings? It was nothing, then, to be lifted into heaven. There was the door to the hall and elevator. She turned, to thank Dodge Pleydon for all his goodness to her, when he lifted her--was it toward heaven?--and kissed her mouth.

She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. ”Linda Condon?” he said, in a tone of inquiry.

At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importance a sharp icy pain cut at her heart. It hurt her so that she gasped. Then, and this was strange, she realized that--as a kiss--it hadn't annoyed her. Suddenly she felt that it wasn't just that, but something far more, a part of all her inner longing. He had put her down and was looking away, a face in shadow with an ugly protruding lip.

She saw him that way in her dreams--in the court under the ma.s.sive somber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to her that, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in a darkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with never a sound sleeping in the prison of winter.

XVII

Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the following May. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and the entire Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorous cheer than ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines and banked flowers were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches, healths and tears.

Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of all the loud good humor and stupid compliments. The sense of her isolation from their life was unbearably keen. She would have a very different wedding with a man in no particular like Pansy's.

After dinner--an occasion, with Pansy absent, where Mr. Moses Feldt's tears persisted in flowing--she had strayed into the formal chamber across from the dining-room and leaned out of a window, gazing into the darkening court. Directly below was where Pleydon had kissed her. She often re-examined her feelings about that; but only to find that they had dissolved into an indefinite sense of the inevitable. Not alone had it failed to shock her--she hadn't even been surprised. Linda thought still further about kissing, with the discovery that if, while it was happening, she was conscious of the kiss, it was a failure; successful, it carried her as far as possible from the actuality.

Pleydon, of course, had not written to her; he had intimated nothing to the contrary, only asking her to let him know, at the Harvard Club, if she changed address. That wasn't necessary, and now, probably, he was back from South America. Where, except by accident, might she see him?