ii
One evening as dinner was finishing Vera looked at me across the table and said: “Won’t you come sometime to tea when father can’t have you all to himself? He hates tea.”
I was startled and absurdly thrilled; but the curious feeling was that I became in that instant an object of curiosity and solicitude mingled, as one marked by fate for a certain experience. I got this particularly from Natalie who glanced first at me with an anxious expression, and then at her sister.
“We are always at home Sunday afternoon,” said Mrs. Galt.
I was the only caller the next Sunday. Galt did not appear. Tea was served in that middle room, between the parlor and dining room, which was a domain over which Vera exercised feudal rights. That was why it was more attractive than any other part of the house. It expressed something of her personality. Conversation was low-spirited and artificial. Natalie was not her sparkling self. Mrs. Galt was in her usual state of pre-occupation, though very gracious, and helpful in warding off silences. I do not know how these things are managed. Presently Vera and I were alone. I asked her to play. Her performance, though finished and accurate, was so empty that I said without thought: “Why don’t you let yourself go?”
“Like this?” she said, turning back. And then, having no music in front of her, she played a strange tumultuous Russian thing with extraordinary power. I begged her to go on. Instead she left the piano abruptly and stood for a minute far away at the window with her back to me, breathing rapidly, not from the exertion of playing, I thought, but from the emotional excitement of it. Then she called me to come and look at a group of Sunday strollers passing in the street,—three men and two women, strange, dark aliens full of hot slothful life. The men around their middles wore striped sashes ending in fringe, and no coats, like opera brigands; the women were draped in flaming shawls. All of them wore earrings.
“What are they?” she asked.
Immigrants, I guessed, from some odd corner of Southern Europe, who hadn’t been here long enough to get out of their native costume.
“They will be drab soon enough,” she said, turning away.
I wanted to talk of her playing, being now enthusiastic about it, but she put the subject aside, saying, “Please don’t,” and we talked instead of pictures. There was a special exhibition of old masters at the Metropolitan Museum which she hadn’t seen. Wouldn’t I like to go? It came out presently that she painted. I asked to see some of her things and she got them out,—two or three landscapes and some studies of the nude. She had just begun working in a life class, she said.
“Very interesting,” I said, trying to get the right emphasis and knowing instantly that it had failed. She gathered them up slowly and put them away.
“They are like your playing,” I added, “as you played at first.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean you somehow hinder your self-expression.”
“I do not let myself go? Is that what you mean?”
“Precisely. What are you afraid of?”
“Then you believe in letting oneself go?” she asked.
“Well, why not?”
“Suppose one isn’t sure of one’s stopping places?”
We became involved in a discussion of the moralities, hitherto, present and future, tending to become audacious. This is a pastime by means of which, in first acquaintance, two persons of opposite sex may indulge their curiosity with perfect security. The subject is abstract. The tone is impersonal. Neither one knows how far the other will go. They dare each other to follow, one step at a time, and are both surprised at the ground they can make. There is at the same time an inaudible exchange, which is even more thrilling, for that is personal. This need never be acknowledged. If the abstract does not lead naturally to the concrete, then the whole conversation remains impersonal and the inaudible part may be treated as if it had never occurred. That is the basic rule of the game.
Her courage amazed me. I began to see what she meant by supposing that one might not be sure of one’s stopping places. She had been reading France, Stendhal, Zola, Shaw, Pater, Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche.
Mrs. Galt reappeared. “We are debating the sins of Babylon,” I said. She smiled and asked me to dinner.
That was the beginning. We went the next Sunday to the Metropolitan Museum and one evening that same week to the theatre. What we set out to see was an English play that everyone was talking about. At the last minute she asked if the tickets might be changed. And when I asked her where she would go instead she naïvely mentioned a musical comedy much more talked about than the English play for very different reasons. Afterwards when I asked her what part of the show she liked best she said: “The way people laughed.”
Life transacting thrilled her. Contact with people, especially in free, noisy crowds, produced in her a kind of intoxication. We walked a great deal in the pulsating streets, often till late at night, and that she enjoyed more than the play, the opera or any other form of entertainment. Her curiosity was insatiable. She was always for going a little further, for prying still deeper into the secrets of humanity’s gregarious business, afraid yet venturesome and insistent. She would pick out of the throng whimsical, weird and dreadful personalities and we would follow them for blocks.
Once at a corner we came suddenly upon a woman importuning a man. She was richly gowned and not in any way common. He was sinister, sated and cruel. She had lost her head, her pride, her sense of everything but wanting him. We were close enough to hear. He spoke in a low, admonishing tone, imploring her not to make a scene. She grew louder all the time, saying, “I don’t care, I don’t care,” and continued alternately to assail him with revealing reproaches and to entreat him caressingly, until they both seemed quite naked in the lighted street. The man was contemptible; the woman was tragic. I took Vera by the arm to move her away, but she was fixed between horror and attraction and stood there regarding them in the fascinated way one looks at deadly serpents through the glass at the Zoo. The man at last yielded with a bored gesture, called a cab, whisked the woman into it, and the scene vanished. Vera shuddered and we walked on.
We explored the East Side at night, visiting the Chinese and Jewish theatres, Hungarian coffee houses and dance halls. Nobody had ever done this kind of thing with her before. It was a new experience and she adored it. Of what she did with it in her mind I knew almost nothing. Emotions in the abstract she would discuss with the utmost simplicity. Her own she guarded jealously.
One evening late, with a particularly interesting nocturnal adventure behind us, we stood in the hallway saying good-night. We said it and lingered; said it again and still lingered. She was more excited than usual. Her lips were slightly parted. She almost never blushed, but on rare occasions, such as now, there was a feeling of pink beneath the deep brunette color of her skin.
Her beauty seemed of a sudden to expand, to become greatly exaggerated, not in quality but in dimensions, so that it excluded all else from the sense of space. The sight of it unpoised me. And she knew. I could feel that she knew. My impulse toward her grew stronger and stronger, tending to become irresistible. This she knew also. Yet she lingered. Then I seized and kissed her. At the first touch her whole weight fell in my arms. Her eyes closed, her head dropped backward, face upturned. She trembled violently and sighed as if every string of tension in her being snapped.
How little we can save of those enormous moments in which the old, old body mind remembers all that ever happened! What was it that one knew so vividly in that co-extensive, panoramic, timeless interval, and cannot now recall?
The first kiss goes a journey. The second stays on earth. The first one is a meeting in the void. Then this world again.
“Vera! Vera!” I whispered.
Her eyes opened.... The look they gave me was so unexpected, so unnatural in the circumstances, that I had a start of terror lest she had gone out of herself. Then I recognized it. This was she whom I had forgotten. These were those impervious, scornful carnelian eyes you could not see into. The old hot and cold feeling came over me again. And though she still lay in my arms, not having moved at all, it was now as if I were not touching her, as if I never had. I released her. Without a word she turned and walked slowly up the stairway out of sight.
The next whole day was one of utter, lonely wretchedness, supported only by a feeling of resentment. I found myself humming “Coming Through the Rye,” and wondering why, as it was a ditty I had not remembered for years. Then it came to me why,—“If a body kiss a body need a body cry?” What had I done that was so terrible after all?
I went to the Galts’ for dinner uninvited, as now I often did. Vera did not appear. She was reported to be indisposed. I passed the evening with Galt in his study, and left early. Natalie was alone in the parlor, reading. She came into the hall as I was putting on my coat and laid a hand on my arm, consolingly.
“You won’t stop coming, will you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“They always do,” she said. “And some of them are so nice, like you.”
“Natalie, what are you talking about?”
“Father would miss you terribly,” she said.
I promised whatever it was she wanted. She shook hands on it and watched me down the steps.
The next evening I called after dinner. Vera was out. I wrote her a note of expostulation, then one in anger, and a third in terms that were abject; and she answered none of them.