2
It was strange—he said to himself—that he should continue to be so upset by Rose-Ann’s absence! He realized grudgingly and unwillingly how much the centre of his Chicago she had been. Without her companionship, his life seemed to have lost its significance.
His class at Community House had come to seem a nuisance, his newspaper work mere empty trickery. And there was nothing in the outside world to turn to, no cause that seemed worth serving. Socialism—it was too Utopian. Social reform—perhaps that was not Utopian enough. The art of writing—no, he must not think of that.... He found in his life nothing to give it meaning.
Rose-Ann’s letters increased his sense of futility. They were friendly letters, telling of her mother’s illness, which it seemed was sufficiently real this time, and of her encounters with a family of aggressively brotherly brothers; and to these letters he had responded in equally friendly terms.
That was the trouble. He did not want to write friendly letters.... He wanted to write angry letters. He wanted to tell her to stop writing to him—to let him alone, and let him forget her, as she would soon forget him. He wanted to say: “You know, and I know, that your moment of freedom, and all it promised, is over for good now. Springfield has got you, you belong to your family again, you will never come back except as the wife of some fat Springfield manufacturer, to see the sights, or go to the theater with him and show off your new gowns, and—yes, you will come to Community House, and visit your old class, and as you go away you will say to your husband, ‘I used to know such a quaint and interesting boy here—I wonder what has become of him!’ And your fat husband will put his fat cigar into the other corner of his fat mouth, and say, ‘Yes, I suppose it’s a good thing your folks got you back to Springfield when they did!’ But he will be wrong, at that; Springfield is your natural habitat, you would have gone back there anyway....”
He wanted to write absurd things like that to her. Instead, he wrote friendly letters, “frank” and comradely and cool, in the tone in which their whole relationship had been couched from the first, up to that insane moment on the station platform....
He was ashamed of himself for thinking so much about her. Of course he was not in love with her! He was merely lonely.
Clive was still preoccupied with that troublesome girl to whom he had darkly and allusively referred in their infrequent luncheons together.
He needed other friends. He called on Roger and Don one Sunday afternoon, and they were primping to go out to a tea, and urged him to come along. “It’s at Doris’s—you know Doris, don’t you? Doris Pelman. You’ll like her.”
Doris Pelman’s apartment, somewhere on the north side, was like Don’s and Roger’s in having a certain impressive charm which consisted precisely in its being un-homelike. It was meant, somehow, to be looked at, rather than lived in. The chairs were thin-legged and rickety, but doubtless genuine antiques; the rugs were hung on the walls instead of on the floor; and on the walls, too, were dim Chinese paintings to whose beauty Felix was dense; yet altogether the place had an effect of being somewhere quite out of the world, and Felix liked it for that.
He was introduced at once to half-a-dozen young men and women, and in the course of the afternoon to half-a-dozen more. The young men greeted Don and Roger with a languid enthusiasm, and the young women with a sort of boisterous camaraderie. Felix was struck by something at once delicate and artificial about these young men, something which he had at first noted and then became oblivious to in Roger and Don. Among them, he felt somehow coarse and brutal.... He had an impulse to swear, or spit on the floor.
Don and Roger and two other young men were talking about travel. A nostalgia for foreign parts seemed to afflict them all. They had, it seemed, been everywhere in Europe; and most of them knew, with an especial and fond intimacy, the geography of France, Italy, and Spain. They had all been somewhere, if not East of Suez, at least somewhere exotically remote, last year; and they were going somewhere even more strange and distant, next year. With Don and Roger the question was, Tunis or Tahiti?—they could not decide which.
Felix had accepted this travel-mania as part of Don’s and Roger’s interesting scheme of life. Sometimes he had even envied them, for they boasted that they did all this travelling “on their wits”; they insisted that one could go anywhere and live well, without money—and Felix had felt rather ashamed of his own singular lack of nomadic enterprise. But today he felt annoyed with them. He remarked to himself that though he had not ostensibly travelled, he had actually spent his life in changing his place of habitation, from house to house and from town to town; and even if these places were only the same middle-western town all over again each time, yet he felt that he had never stayed long enough to get really acquainted with it! He observed aloud, challengingly, that he thought one might stay in a city like Chicago the whole of one’s life without quite exhausting its interest.
The four young men raised their eyebrows, and uttered impressively the names of the great capitals of Europe; and even more unctuously the names of little out-of-the-way foreign towns of which he had never heard.
“The trouble with writers,” Don remarked—he and Roger paid Felix the compliment of regarding him as a fellow-writer—“is that they try to write before they have sufficient background.”
Evidently, Felix reflected, Don and Roger had not made that mistake! They had been acquiring background for years, according to their own testimony—Roger for some ten years, and Don for perhaps five. And neither of them had, so far as he could discover, written anything yet!... And when would they begin, with so much background still left to be acquired? Tunis and Tahiti!
He turned impatiently to the young women.... They seemed at first much more congenial spirits. And yet there was something odd about them, too—something odd in their very friendliness. His hostess, Doris Pelman, a strikingly handsome girl, tall and fair, was the one with whom he had what most nearly resembled a conversation—a thing difficult enough to achieve at a tea. What immediately impressed him was that she did not seem at all conscious of her looks—she might, from her behaviour, not have been possessed of any; or rather, the mysterious barrier across which two strangers, man and woman, must communicate, seemed not to be there for her; she was apparently unaware of herself and him, in a way that even old Mrs. Perk, a grandmother, never could be. There was in her manner an utter absence of shyness, an apparent perfect ease in this contact of personalities. But in her easy unembarrassed friendliness there was something steely and aloof—a fundamental untouchableness. She talked fluently, about his work and hers—she was an interior decorator, it appeared,—about the new books and plays, and, with an especial zest, about people.... A peculiar zest, too: she had a way, which at first gave him an uncanny feeling, of talking about human beings as though they were insects. The only things of which she spoke with visible affection were the fabrics and materials of her profession—and art in general.
But they were all, he felt, rather like this. The tea had become a kind of family gathering, in which only Felix felt out of place. Dusk fell, tall candles were lighted, and everyone became anecdotal. It would seem that they had spent their lives in collecting these anecdotes, and they related them and heard them with an inexhaustible relish—each one being rehearsed at full length with a loving care for the minutest psychological details. Some of these stories were apparently precious gems in their collection, worthy of being taken out and enjoyed over and over again. Other stories they laughed over uproariously, chokingly, helplessly—though to Felix the point of these seemed frequently rather obscure, and seldom very funny.
He went away feeling surprised, and not knowing quite whether he was disappointed or grateful at the absence of any challenge in these new feminine acquaintanceships. He had never consciously realized, except now in its absence, that undercurrent of vague questioning, at once delightful and disconcerting, as to just what there might be in a new “friendship”—what rich and beautiful possibilities it might hold in store: all the familiar and foolish day-dreaming that follows the most casual meeting of masculine with feminine youth. But here there was no question whatever; imagination took no hold on this extraordinarily self-possessed, this imperturbable young womanhood.... Here was, indeed, the “detached attitude”!