IV
Twice, the following day, Lee telephoned to Fanny, 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 repetition of last night; there would be no affair.
Lee Randon had completely and sharply focussed the most adverse possible attitude 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 surreptitious, snatched 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 debasement. The almost inevitable exposure followed, the furies and hysterical reproaches. That, indeed, would have involved them fatally: in such circumstances the world would be invincible, crushing; holding solidly its front against such dangerous assault, 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 Fanny'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 attitude, 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 assumed no resemblance to a disgraceful footnote on the page of righteousness. It was complete—and, by God, 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 Fanny 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 Fanny 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 Fanny 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 Fanny.
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. Fanny's standard of duty, or responsibility, was worlds apart from his.
Bitterly and without premeditation he cursed the tyranny of sex; 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 chastity 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 prostitutes 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 Fanny 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.
Fanny 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 Fanny, 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, Fanny,” 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.” Fanny 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,” Fanny 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.”
“We?” she mimicked his earlier query.
“Oh, the Groves. I like them very much, Fanny—” To her interruption that that was evident he paid no attention. “He is an extremely nice man, a little too conscious of his pedestal, but solid and cordial. Mrs. Grove is more unusual; I should say she was a difficult woman to describe. She dresses beautifully, Paris and the rest of it; but she isn't a particle good-looking. Not a bit! It's her color, I think. She hasn't any. Women would fancy her more than men; no one could call her pleasant.”
“You haven't asked about the children.” She had apparently heard nothing of what had gone before.
“Of course they are all right or you'd have told me.”
“Lee, you astonish me, you really do; at times I think you forget you have a family. We'll all be dead before you know it. I'm sorry, but you will have to get into the habit of staying home at least one night a week. I attend to all I can manage about the place, but there are some things you must settle. The trouble is I haven't demanded enough from you.”
“That's silly,” he responded, almost falling into his discarded irritation; “I practically never go out without you. Unless you are with me I won't be in New York again for weeks.”
“I should have thought you'd be back at the Groves's tomorrow. It's more amusing there, I don't doubt; but, after all, you are married to me.”
“Good heavens, Fanny,” he protested, “what is this about? You're really cutting with the Groves—two excessively nice people who were decent to me.”
“You are such an idiot,” she declared, in a warmer voice. “Can't you see how disappointed I was? First I had everything laid out on the bed, my best nightgowns and lace stockings, for the trip; then I couldn't go; and I arranged the party so carefully for you, Gregory had a practice piece ready for you to hear, and—and nothing. I wonder if any other man is as selfish as you?'
“Maybe not,” he returned peaceably. “What happened was unavoidable. It was a social necessity, decided for me. I couldn't just run into the house and out again. But there is no need to explain further.” He left the table, for a cigar, and returned. “You have on a new dress!”
“I ought to be complimented,” she admitted, “but I am not; it's only the black velvet with the fulness taken out and a new ruffle. Clothes are so expensive that I wanted to save. It isn't French, either. Perhaps you'll remember that you said the new length didn't become me. No, you're not the idiot—I am: I must stop considering and trying to please you at every turn. I should have gone in and ordered a new dress; any other woman you know would have done that; and, I have no doubt, would have told you it was old when it wasn't. I wish I didn't show that I care so much and kept you guessing. You'd be much more interested if you weren't so sure of me. That seems to me queer—loyalty and affection, and racking your brain to make your husband comfortable and happy, don't bring you anything. They don't! You'll leave at once for a night in New York or a new face with an impudent bang at the dances. I have always tried to do what I thought was right, but I'm getting discouraged.”
“Don't lose patience with me,” he begged gravely. “If I am worth the effort to you, Fanny, don't stop. I do the best I can. Coming out in the train I made up my mind to stop petty quarreling. No, wait—if it is my fault that makes it easy, we're done with it.”
“From the way you talk,” she objected, “anyone would think we did nothing but fight. And that isn't true; we have never had a bit of serious trouble.” She rose, coming around to him:
“That wasn't a very nice kiss we had when you came in. I was horrid.”
Lee Randon kissed her again. The cool familiarity of her lips was blurred in the remembered clinging intensity of Savina's mouth. “Lee, dear, blow out the candles; the servants forget, and those blue handmade ones cost twenty-five cents apiece.” They left the dining-room with her arm about him and his hand laid on her shoulder. Lee's feeling was curious—he recognized Fanny's desirability, he loved her beyond all doubt, and yet physically she had now no perceptible influence on him. He was even a little embarrassed, awkward, at her embrace; and its calmly possessive pressure filled him with a restive wish to move away. He repressed this, forced himself to hold her still, repeated silently all that she had given him; and she turned a face brilliant with color to his gaze. Fanny made him bring her stool—how sharply Savina's heels had dug into him under the table at the Lafayette—and showed him her ankles. “You see, I put them on tonight for you.” Her stockings, he assured her, were enchanting. A difficulty that, incredibly, he had not foreseen weighed upon him: the body, where Fanny was concerned, had given place to the intellect; the warmth of his feeling had been put aside for the logic of determination; and he was sick with weariness. In his customary chair, he sank into a heavy brooding lethargy, a silence, in which his hands slowly and stiffly clenched.
On the following morning, Sunday, Lee rode with Claire Morris. Fanny, disinclined to activity, stayed by the open fire, with the illustrated sections of the newspapers and her ornamental sewing. Claire was on, a tall bright bay always a little ahead of Lee, and he was constantly urging his horse forward. “Peyton went to the Green Spring Valley for a hunt party last night,” she told him; “he said he'd be back.” Why, then, he almost exclaimed, he, Lee, had been successful with Mina Raff. Instead he said that she would undoubtedly be glad of that. “Oh, yes! But neither of us is very much excited about it just now; he is too much like a ball on a rubber string; and if I were a man I'd hate to resemble that. I won't try to hide from you that I've lost something; still, I have him and Mina hasn't. They shouldn't have hesitated, Lee; that was what spoiled it, in the end beat them. It wasn't strong enough to carry them away and damn the consequences. There is always something to admire in that, even if you suffer from it.”
The night had been warm, and the road, the footing, was treacherous with loosened stones and mud. The horses, mounting a hill, picked their way carefully; and Lee Randon gazed over his shoulder into the valley below. He saw it through a screen of bare wet maple branches—a dripping brown meadow lightly wreathed in blue mist, sedgy undergrowth along water and the further ranges of hills merged in shifting clouds. A shaft of sunlight, pale and without warmth, illuminated with its emphasis an undistinguished and barren spot. On the meadows sloping to the south there were indefinite spaces of green. Claire was heedless of their surroundings.
“What does surprise and disturb me,” she continued vigorously, “is that I haven't any sympathy for him. That is gone too; I only have a feeling that he bitched it. As you may observe, Lee, I am not at all admirable this morning: a figure of inconsistency. And the reason will amaze you—I've rather come to envy what they might have had. I am afraid that if the positions of Mina and me had been reversed I wouldn't have seen you in New York. I found that out last night when I knew Peyton wasn't going. What he said over and over was that everything could be just as it was.” She laughed, riding easily, subconsciously, on the snaffle rein. “Peyton's simplicity is marvelous. In a year, or maybe less, he will be quite the same as always. I had nothing to do with it; Peyton and Mina will go on as fresh as daisies; yet only I'll be damaged or, anyway, changed. What shall I do about it?” she demanded of Lee Randon, so sharply that her horse shied.
“About what?” he returned. “My senses are so dulled by your ingratitude that I can't gather what you mean.”
“Well, here I am—a girl with her head turned by a glimpse at a most romantic play, by cakes and champagne cup, and then sent home to bread without jam. Since I've known of this it has taken most of the color out of everyday things, they are like a tub-full of limp rags with the dye run from them. I want Peyton, yes, I love him; but what I thought would satisfy me doesn't. I want more! I am very serious about the romantic play—it is exactly what I mean. I had read about great emotions, seen them since I was a child at the opera, and there was the Madrid affair; but that was so far away, and I never thought of the others as real; I never understood that people really had them, in Eastlake as well as Spain, until I watched Peyton miss his. And then it came over me in a flash what life could be.”
“We are all in the same fix, Claire,” he told her.
“But not you,” she replied impatiently; “your existence with Fanny is the most perfect for miles around. Fanny is marvelous to you, and you are as sensible as you are nice.”
“You think, then, that I haven't seen any of this romantic show you are talking about?”
“If you had you wouldn't let it spoil your comfort.”
The pig again!
“Well, what is it here or there?” she cried. “I'll feel like this for a little and then die alive. Did you ever notice an old woman, Lee? She is like a horrid joke. There is something unconquerably vain and foolish about old men that manages to save them from entire ruin. But a woman shrivelled and blasted and twisted out of her purpose—they either look as though they had been steeped in vinegar or filled with tallow—is simply obscene. Before it is too harrowing, and in their best dresses and flowers, they ought to step into a ball-room of chloroform. But this change in me, Lee, isn't in my own imagination. The people who know me best have complained that what patience I had has gone; even Ira, I'm certain, notices it. I have no success in what used to do to get along with; my rattle of talk, my line, is gone.”
“Those relations of Mina Raff's, the Groves,” he said, shifting the talk to the subject of his thoughts, “are very engaging. Mrs. Grove specially. She has splendid qualities almost never found together in one person. She is, well, I suppose careful is the word, and, at the same time, not at all dull. I wonder if she is altogether well? Her paleness would spoil most women's looks and, it seems to me, she mentioned her heart.”
“Good Lord, Lee, what are you rambling on about? I don't care for a description of the woman like one of those anatomical zodiacs in the Farmers' Almanac.” She turned her horse, without warning, through a break in the fence; and, putting him at a smart run, jumped a stream with a high insecure bank beyond, and went with a pounding rush up a sharp incline. He followed, but more conservatively; and, at the solid fence she next took, he shouted that she'd have to continue on that gait alone.
“Don't be so careful,” she answered mockingly, trotting back; “take a chance; feel the wind streaming in your face; you'll reach Fanny safely.”
What, exasperated, he muttered was, “Damn Fanny!” He had jumped a fence as high and wide as respectability; and he enormously preferred Savina's sort of courage to this mad galloping over the country. What Claire and Peyton and Mina Raff talked about, longed for, Savina took. He involuntarily shut his eyes, and, rocking to the motion of his horse, heard, in the darkness, a soft settling fall, he saw an indefinite trace of whiteness which swelled into an incandescence that consumed him. They had turned toward home and, on an unavoidable reach of concrete road, were walking. The horses' hoofs made a rhythmic hollow clatter. Claire, with the prospect of losing her love, had hinted at the possibilities of an inherited recklessness; but here was a new and unexpected cause of disturbance.
Lee would never have supposed that such ideas were at the back of Claire's head. He gazed at her, in spite of the fact that she had ruffled his temper, even with an increased interest. In her direct way she had put into words many of the vague pressures floating, like water under night, through his brain. He would act differently; Claire wasn't practical—all that she indicated couldn't be followed. It was spun of nothing more substantial than the bright visions of youth; but the world, he, Lee Randon, was the poorer for that. His was the wise course. It took a marked degree of strength; no weak determination could hope for success in the conduct he had planned for himself; and that gave him material for satisfaction.
He turned to the left, at the road leading past his driveway, and Claire went up the hill into Eastlake alone. She had thought he was describing Savina for her benefit! The truth was that he had been possessed by a tyrannical necessity to talk about Savina Grove, to hear the sound of her praise if it were only on his own voice. It assisted his memory, created, like the faintly heard echo of a thrilling voice, a similitude not without its power to stir him. The secret realms of thought, of fancy and remembrance, he felt, were his to linger in, to indulge, as he chose. Lee had a doubt of the advisability of this; but his question was disposed of by the realization that he had nothing to say; his mind turned back and back to Savina.
He wondered when, or, rather, by what means, he should hear from her again; perhaps—although it required no reply—in response to the letter he had written to the Groves acknowledging their kindness and thanking them for it. To Lee, William Loyd Grove was more immaterial than a final shred of mist lifting from the sunken road across the golf course; even his appreciation of the other's good qualities had vanished, leaving nothing at all. He was confused by the ease with which the real, the solid, became the nebulous and unreal, as though the only standard of values, of weights and measures, lay absurdly in his own inconsequential attitude.
The Randons had no formal meal on Sunday night; but there were sandwiches, a bowl of salad, coffee, and what else were referred to generally as drinks; and a number of people never failed to appear. It was always an occasion of mingled conversations, bursts of popular song at the piano, and impromptu dancing through the length of the lower floor. The benches at either side of the fire-place were invariably crowded; and, from her place on the over-mantel, Cytherea's gaze rested on the vivacious or subdued current of life. Lee Randon often gazed up at her, and tonight, sunk in a corner with scarcely room to move the hand which held a cigarette, this lifted interrogation was prolonged.
Mrs. Craddock, whom he had not seen since the dinner-dance at the club, sat beside him in a vivid green dress with large black beads strung from her left shoulder. She looked very well, he reflected; that was a becoming dimple in her cheek. He had had the beginning of an interest in her—new to Eastlake, and her husband dead, she had taken a house there for the winter—but that had vanished now. He was deep in thought when she said:
“Didn't I hear that you were infatuated with that doll?”
Who, he demanded, had told her such a strange story? “But she does attract me,” he admitted; “or, rather, she raises a great many questions, natural in a person named Cytherea. The pair of castanets on a nail—Claire used them in an Andalusian dance—might almost be an offering, like the crutches of Lourdes, left before her by a grateful child of the ballet.”
“I can't see what you do, of course; but she reminds me of quantities of women—fascinating on the outside and nothing within. Men are always being fooled by that: they see a face or hear a voice that starts something or other going in them, and they supply a complete personality just as they prefer it, like the filling of a paté case. That is what you have done with this doll—imagined a lot of things that don't exist.”
“If they do in me, that's enough, isn't it?” he demanded. “You're partly wrong, at any rate—Cytherea is the originator and I'm the paté. But where, certainly, you are right is that she is only a representation; and it is what she may represent which holds me. Cytherea, if she would, could answer the most important question of my life.”
“How tragic that she can't speak.”
“Yet that isn't necessary; she might be a guide, like a pointing finger-post. I met a woman lately, as charming as possible, who resembled her; and I'm sure that if I had them together—” he left the end of his sentence in air. Then he began again, “But that could not be managed; not much can, with advantage, in this world.” From beyond the hall, to the accompaniment of the piano, came the words, “She might have been a mother if she hadn't looped the loop.” Lee made a disdainful gesture. “That is the tone of the present—anything is acceptable if it is trivial; you may kiss wherever you like if you mean nothing by it. But if it's important, say like—like sympathy, it's made impossible for you.”
“If you were someone else,” Mrs. Craddock observed, “I'd think you were in love. You have a great many of the symptoms—the wandering eye and wild speech.”
“I am, with Fanny,” he declaimed, struggling out of the bench corner. No one should discover the memory he carried everywhere with him. The lights had been switched off in the living-room, but the piano continued, and glowing cigarettes, like red and erratically waving signals, were visible. Returning, going into the dining-room, he saw that the whiskey had been plentifully spilled over the table. In the morning the varnish would be marred by white stains. The stairs were occupied, the angle in the hall behind which a door gave to the cellar steps, was filled; a sound, not culinary, came from the kitchen pantry. Even Fanny, with her hair in disorder, was dancing an eccentric step with Borden Rodman. All this vibrating emotion created in him, sudden and piercing, a desire for Savina.
He wanted her, the touch of her magnetic hands, her clinging body, her passionate abandon, with every sense. It was unbearable that she, too, wasn't here, waiting for him in the convenient darkness. He had to have her, he muttered. At the same time he was appalled by the force of his feeling: it shook him like a chill and gripped his heart with an acute pain. His entire being was saturated with a longing that was at once a mental and physical disturbance. Nothing in his life, no throe of passion or gratification, had been like this. Lee hastily poured out a drink and swallowed it. He was burning up, he thought; it felt as though a furnace were open at his back; and he went out to the silence, the coldness, of the terrace flagging on the lawn. The lower window shades had been pulled down, but, except in the dining-room, they showed no blur of brightness. Through the walls the chords of the piano were just audible, and the volume of voices was reduced to a formless humming.
It had cleared, the sky was glittering with constellations of stars; against them Lee could trace the course of his telephone wire. But for that his house, taking an added dignity of mass from the night, might have been the reality of which it was no more than an admirable replica. There was little here, outside, to suggest or recall the passage of a century and over. In the lapse of that time, Lee thought, more had been lost than gained; the simplicity had vanished, but wisdom had not been the price of its going.
Of all the people at present in his dwelling, Fanny was the best in the sense of old solid things; he could see her, with no change, at the board of an early household. Compared to her the others seemed like figures in a fever; yet he was, unhappily, with them rather than with Fanny. God knew there was fever enough in his brain! But the winter night was cooling it—a minor image of the final office of death; the choking hunger for Savina was dwindling. He hoped that it wouldn't be repeated. He couldn't answer for himself through many such attacks. Yes, his first love, though just as imperative, had been more ecstatic; the reaching for an ideal rather than the body of a woman.
His allegiance to Cytherea, though, was in part to the former, to youth; now it seemed to him he had preserved that through all his life. But the latter, at least in its devastating power, was new. Lee recognized it as passion, but passion to a degree beyond all former experience and comprehension. Why had it been quiescent so long to overwhelm him now? Or what had he done to open himself to such an invasion? A numbing poison couldn't have been very different. Then, contrarily, he was exhilarated by the knowledge of the vitality of his emotion; Lee reconsidered it with an amazement which resembled pride.
The penny kisses here—he was letting himself into the house—were like the candies Fanny had in a crystal dish on the sideboard, flavors of cinnamon and rose and sugary chocolate. They were hardly more than the fumes of alcohol. But the party showed no signs of ending, the piano continued to be played without a break; one sentimental song had been repeated, without the omission of a line, a held note, ten times, Lee was sure. Fanny paused breathlessly, with a hand on his arm:
“They are all having such a good time; it is absolutely successful. Isn't Borden sweet to bother teaching me that heel tap. Go in and talk to Mrs. Craddock again; I thought you liked her.”
In the hall the victrola had been started in opposition to the piano beyond, and the result was a pandemonium of mechanical sound and hysterical laughter. Cytherea was unmoved, enigmatic, fascinating; the gilt of her headdress shone in minute sparkles—Lee had turned on the lights by the mantel. “You always come back to her,” Mrs. Craddock said. When he replied that this time he had returned to her, she shook her head sceptically. “But I suppose you have to say it.” He dropped back into a corner of one of the benches; they were a jumble of skirts and reclining heads and elevated pumps. The victrola, at the end of a record and unattended, ran on with a shrill scratch. Cytherea had the appearance of floating in the restrained light; her smile was not now so mocking as it was satirical; from her detached attention she might have been regarding an extraordinary and unpredictable spectacle which she had indifferently brought about. It was evident that among what virtues she might possess charity was not present.
After the last automobile leaving—shifted through the diminishing clamor of its gears—had carried its illumination into the farther obscurity of the road, Fanny, uncomfortable in the presence of disorder, quickly obliterated the remaining traces of their party: she emptied the widely scattered ash trays into a brass bowl, gathered the tall whiskey glasses and the glasses with fragile stems and brilliantly enamelled belligerent roosters, the empty charged water bottles, on the dresser in the pantry, and returned chairs and flowers to their recognized places, while Lee locked up the decanters of whiskey. Fanny was tired but enthusiastic, and, as she went deftly about, rearranging her house with an unfailing surety of touch, she hummed fragments of the evening's songs.
Lee Randon was weary without any qualification; the past day, tomorrow—but it was already today—offered him no more than a burden, so many heavy hours, to be supported. The last particle of interest had silently gone from his existence. His condition was entirely different from the mental disquiet of a month ago; no philosophical considerations nor abstract ideas absorbed him now—it was a weariness not of the mind but of the spirit, a complete sterility of imagination and incentive, as though an announced and coveted prize had been arbitrarily withdrawn during the struggle it was to have rewarded. There was no reason Lee could think of for keeping up his diverse efforts. He sat laxly in his customary corner of the living room—Fanny, he felt, had disposed of him there as she had the other surrounding objects—his legs thrust out before him, too negative to smoke.
His wife leaned over and kissed him; she was, she had suddenly discovered, dead with fatigue. The kiss was no more than the contact of her lips on his. The clear realization of this startled him; now not an emotion, not even tenderness, responded to her gestures of love. His indifference had been absolute! There had been periods of short duration when, exasperated with Fanny, he had lost the consciousness of his affection for her; but then he had been filled with other stirred emotions; and now he was coldly empty of feeling. It was this vacancy that specially disturbed him: it had an appearance, new to all his processes, of permanence.
Outside his will the fact was pronounced for him that—for a long or short period—he had ceased to love his wife. There was something so intimately and conventionally discourteous in his realization that he avoided it even in his thoughts. But it would not be ignored; it was too robust a truth to be suppressed by weakened instincts. He didn't love Fanny and Fanny did love him ... a condition, he felt indignantly, which should be automatically provided against; none of the ethics of decency or conduct provided for that. It wasn't for a second, without the single, the familiar and ancient, cause, allowed. Fanny, least of any imaginable woman, had given him a pretext for complaint. Yet, with everyone acknowledging her to be the perfect wife, and he at the fore of such praise, he had incontestably stopped caring for her. It was a detestable situation.
In the whole body of preconceived thought and action there wasn't a word, a possible movement, left for him. He was, simply, a hyena; that description, not innocent of humor, was still strikingly close to what he would generally hear if the state of his mind were known. It was paralyzing, but absolutely no provision had been made for men, decent enough, who had stopped loving decent wives. Lee was not, here, considering the part of his life involved with Savina Grove: Savina had nothing to do with his attitude toward Fanny. This didn't hang on the affection he might have for one at the superficial expense of the other: Savina—while it was undeniable that she had done exactly this in the vulgar physical sense—hadn't essentially taken him away from Fanny. He had gone self-directed, or, rather, in the blind manner of an object obeying the law of gravity. He couldn't argue that he had been swept away.
It wasn't, either, that he overwhelmingly wanted to go to Savina Grove, he overwhelmingly didn't; and the strangling emotion, the desire, that had possessed him earlier in the evening had been sufficiently unwelcome. His only reaction to that was the vigorous hope that it wouldn't come back. No, he had, mentally, settled the affair with Savina in the best possible manner; now he was strictly concerned with the bond between his wife and himself. The most reliable advice, self-administered or obtained from without, he could hope for would demand that he devote the rest of his life, delicately considerate, to Fanny. She must never know the truth. This was the crown of a present conception of necessity and unassailable conduct, of nobility. But, against this, Lee Randon was obliged to admit that he was not a particle noble; he wasn't certain that he wanted to be; he suspected it. Putting aside, for the moment, the doubtfulness of his being able to maintain successfully, through years, such an imposition, there was something dark, equally dubious, in its performance. He might manage it publicly, even superficially in private, and as a father; but marriage wasn't primarily a superficial relationship. It was very much the reverse. Its fundamental condition was the profoundest instinct that controlled living; there no merely admirable conduct could manage to be more than a false and degrading, a temporary, lie. How could he with a pandering smugness meet Fanny's purity of feeling? Yet, it seemed, exactly this was being done by countless other applauded men. But, probably, the difference between them and himself was that they had no objective consciousness of their course; happily they never stopped to think. It was thought, he began to see, and not feeling that created nearly all his difficulties.
In a flash of perception he grasped that formal thought, in its aspect of right conduct, was utterly opposed to feeling. While the former condemned the surrender of Savina and himself to passion, the latter, making it imperative, had brushed aside the barriers of recognized morals. It had been a tragic, it might well be a fatal, error to oppose religion—as it affected both this world and the impossible next—to nature.
Yet men could no longer exist as animals; he saw that plainly. They had surrendered the natural in favor of an artificial purity. In a land where sea shells were the standard of value, rubies and soft gold were worthless. Lee was opposed to his entire world; he had nothing but his questioning, his infinitesimal entity, for his assistance. Literally there wasn't a man to whom he could turn whose answer and advice weren't as predictable as useless. There was nothing for him but to accept his position and, discharging it where he was able, fail where he must.
There was, however, no need for that failure to be absolute; and the underlying responsibility he had fully considered, subject to its own attained code, would have to do service as best it could. Here he paused to realize that the improved manners he had determined on were no more than the expression of his growing, his grown, indifference. It should be easy to be restrained in a situation that had small meaning or importance. What struck him again was the fact that his connection with Fanny was of far greater moment than that with Helena and Gregory. His responsibility to them was a minor affair compared to the weight increasingly laid upon their elders. Somehow, they didn't seem to need him as sharply as Fanny did. Materially they were all three more than sufficiently provided for, and spiritually, as he had so often reflected, he had little or no part in his children's well-being. Perhaps this, he had told himself, could be changed; certainly he was solely to blame if he had stood aside from their education.
He would see more of them—four days a week were now plenty for the conducting of his successful enterprises in the city—and give them what benefits his affection and experience held. In this he mustn't contradict the influence of their mother; that, so late, would only be followed by chaos; he'd merely be more with them. Helena was old enough for a small tractable horse and Gregory must have a pony. All four, Fanny and he and the children, would jog out in the spring together. From that mental picture he got a measure of reassurance; a condition resembling peace of mind again returned. As much as possible, against the elements of danger, was in his favor. He might have had a wife who, on the prevalent tide of gin and orange juice, of inordinate luxuriousness, degraded him with small betrayals. Or he might have been any one of a hundred unfortunate things. He took life too seriously, that was evident; a larger degree of mental irresponsibility would be followed by a more responsible accomplishment of the realities which bore no more heavily on him than on other men; and in this the cocktails had their office.
Lee agreed readily, therefore, when, on Friday afternoon, Fanny asked him to bring Helena and Gregory from dancing-school. This was held in the Armory; and, past five o'clock, mounting the wide stone steps in the early gloom and going through the bare echoing hall, he joined the complacent mothers ranged in chairs pushed against the wall in a spirit of interested attention. The Armory, following the general literal interpretation of the sternness of military usage, was gaunt, with a wide yellow floor and walls of unconcealed brick. In a far corner, on a temporary and unpainted platform, the pianist sat with her hands raised, her wrists rigid, preparatory to the next demand upon her strongly accentuated playing. Lee was surprised at the large number of children ranged in an irregular ring about the erect brittle presence and insistent voice of the instructor.
What scant hair he possessed, carefully disposed to cover its meagreness, was grey, and its color permeated, suggested, the tone of his thin face. Surrounded by the cruel exuberance of the children, he seemed incalculably worn, permanently weary, although he was surprisingly sharp-eyed and adequate. It was, Lee thought unsympathetically, a curiously negative occupation for a man; the small graces of the dancing teacher, the bows gravely exchanged with childish bows, the bent dancing with diminutive slips, the occasional fretful tone of his voice, further alienated Lee Randon. But the children were a source of entertainment and speculation.
He saw Gregory at once, short and sturdy-legged, in a belted jacket and white breeches; his son was standing peaceably, attentive, clasping the hand of a girl smaller than himself with obstinate bobbed hair. This, the high pointed voice in the center of the floor continued, was an Irish folk dance; they would try it again; and the reiterated details were followed by the sounding of a whistle and music. Lee had no idea of the exact number of children engaged, but he was certain that there were just as many totally different executions of the steps before them. Not one had grasped an essential of the carefully illustrated instruction; he could see nowhere an evidence of grace or rhythm. But, with a few notable exceptions, all boys, there was an entire solemnity of effort; the swinging of bare short legs, the rapid awkward bobs, were undertaken with a deep sense of their importance.
The Irish folk dance was attempted for a third time, and then relinquished in favor of a waltz. Miniature couples circled and staggered, the girls again prim, the boys stolid or with working mouths, or as smooth and vacuous as chestnuts, little sailors and apparitions in white, obviously enjoying their employment. During this not a word was exchanged; except for the shuffling feet, the piano, an occasional phrase of encouragement from the instructor, himself gliding with a dab of fat in exaggerated ribbons, there wasn't a sound. To Lee it had the appearance of the negation of pleasure; it was, in its way, as bad as the determined dancing of adults; it had the look of a travesty of that. Helena conducted a restive partner, trying vainly to create the impression that he was leading, wherever she considered it advantageous for him to go. The thick flood of her gold hair shimmered about her uncompromising shoulders, her embroidered skirt fluttered over the firmness of her body.
She was as personable a little girl as any present; and, while she hadn't Gregory's earnestness in what he attempted, she got on smoothly enough. Seeing Lee, she smiled and waved a hand almost negligently; but Gregory, at his presence, grew visibly embarrassed; he almost stopped. Lee Randon nodded for him to go ahead. There were various minor cataclysms—Helena flatly refused to dance with a boy who pursued her with an urging hand. At this conspicuous reverse he sat on a chair until the teacher brought him forcibly out and precipitated him into the willing arms of a girl larger and, if possible, more inelastic than the others. The ring was again assembled, and the complicated process of alternating a boy with a girl was accomplished.
“Never mind what he does,” the instructor directed sharply; “always be sure you are right.” A shift was made further around in the line, and the elder wisdom was vindicated. “Now, the chain.” The whistle blew. “Left and right, left and right.” In spite of this there was an equal engagement of rights with lefts. The assumption of gravity acutely bothered Lee Randon: they had no business, he thought, to be already such social animals. Their training in set forms, mechanical gestures and ideas, was too soon hardening their mobility and instinctive independence. Yes, they were a caricature of what they were to become. He hadn't more sympathy with what he had resolved to encourage, applaud, but less. The task of making any headway against that schooling was beyond him.
The dancing reached a pause, and, with it, the silence: a confusion of clear undiversified voices rose: the face of an infant with long belled trousers and solidified hair took on a gleam of impish humor; older and more robust boys scuffled together with half-subdued hails and large pretentions; groups of girls settled their skirts and brushed, with instinctive pats, their braids into order; and there was a murmur of exchanged approbation from the supporting, white-gloved mothers. Gregory appeared at Lee's side; his cheeks were crimson with health, his serious eyes glowed:
“Well, do you like it?”
“Yes,” Gregory answered shyly. He lingered while Lee Randon tried to think of something else appropriate to say, and then he ran abruptly off. His children were affectionate enough, but they took him absolutely for granted; they regarded him very much as they did their cat; except for the conventional obeisance they made him, not so voluntary as it was trained into them, they were far more involved with Martha, their black nurse. Everywhere, Lee felt, they repelled him. Was he, then, lacking in the qualities, the warmth, of paternity? Again, as he was helpless where Fanny lately was concerned, he was unable to be other.
It was increasingly evident that he had not been absorbed, obliterated, in marriage; an institution which, from the beginning, had tried—like religion—to hold within its narrow walls the unconfinable instincts of creation. It hadn't, among other things, considered the fascination of Cytherea; a name, a tag, as intelligible as any for all his dissent. But cases like his were growing more prevalent; however, usually, in women. Men were the last stronghold of sentimentality. His thoughts were interrupted by a dramatic rift in the discipline of the class: a boy, stubbornly seated, swollen, crimson, with wrath and heroically withheld tears, was being vainly argued with by the dancing master. He wouldn't stir, he wouldn't dance. The man, grasping a shoulder, shook him in a short violence, and then issued a final uncompromising order.
The boy rose and, marching with an increasing rapidity toward the entrance, he struck aside a placid and justifiably injured child, dragged open the door, and slammed it after him with a prodigious and long echoing report. His contempt, holding its proportion in the reduced propriety of the occasion, was like a clap of communistic thunder in an ultra-conservative assembly. For a moment, together with all the others, Lee Randon was outraged; then, with a suppression of his unorderly amusement, he had a far different conception—he saw himself, for no easily established reason, in the person of the rebel who had left behind him the loud announcement of his angry dissent. Helena sought Lee immediately.
“That's his mother,” she said in a penetrating whisper, indicating a woman with a resolutely abstracted expression and constrained hands. The children were gathered finally and formed into a line which, to the drumming piano, moved and halted, divided and subdivided. Led by the instructor it was involved in an apparently issueless tangle and then straightened smoothly out. The dancing class at an end, Helena and Gregory, wedged into the seat with Lee in the car, swept into an eager chatter, a rush of questions, that he was unable to follow. A Sara Lane was announced by Helena to be the object of Gregory's affection, and Gregory smugly admitted this to be true. He was going to marry her, he declared further.
“Perhaps,” Lee suggested, “you'll change your mind.”
“Why, Gregory has four girls,” Helena instructed him.
“Well,” Gregory retorted, “I can marry them all.”
But what, under this reflected chatter, was his son like? What would he be? And Helena! They eluded him like bright and featureless bits of glass. His effort to draw closer to them was proving a failure; what could he give them safer than their attachment to the imponderable body of public opinion and approval? He had nothing but doubts, unanswerable questions; and a mental, a moral, isolation. It was easier to remain in the dancing class than to be sent out in an agony of revolt and strangling shame.
Often, during his conversations with Fanny, she returned to the subject of his late New York trip and stay with the Groves. She asked small interested questions, commented on the lavish running of the Grove house; she couldn't, she explained, get nectarines and Belgian grapes in Eastlake; but when she was in the city again she'd bring some out. “Mina Raff's limousine sounds luxurious,” she acknowledged. But Fanny wasn't curious about Mina; after the first queries she accepted her placidly; now that she had withdrawn from the Morrises' lives, Fanny regarded her in the light of a past episode that cast them all together on a romantic screen. What mostly she asked touched upon Savina Grove. “Did they seem happy?” she inquired about the Groves. He replied:
“Very. William Grove was quite affectionate when he left for Washington.”
A momentary and ominous suspense followed a sudden stopping of his voice.
“You didn't say anything about that before,” she observed carefully. “When did he go, how long was he away?” She put aside what she was doing, waiting.
“He left unexpectedly; just when I forget; but during the last day I was there.”
“Lee, why didn't you say that Mr. Grove had gone to Washington? It seems very peculiar.”
“I told you it had slipped my mind,” he retorted, striving, in a level tone, to hide his chagrin and an increasing irritation at her persistence.
“When did he come back?”
“I don't know.” Suddenly he gave way to a complete frankness. “He may not be back yet.”
“Then you had dinner at the restaurant and went to the theatre alone with her.”
“If it's possible to be alone with anyone, you are correct. What, in the name of heaven, are you getting at?”
“Only this—that, for some reason I can't gather, you lied to me. I have had the most uncomfortable impression about her all along. Why?” Her demand had a quality of unsteady emotion. “I have been so close to you, Lee, we have had each other so completely, that I have feelings I can't account for. I always know when—when you've been a little silly; there is something in your eyes; but I have never felt like this before. Lee,” she leaned suddenly forward, her hands clasping the sides of her chair, “you must be absolutely truthful with me, it's the only way I can live. I love you so much; you're all I have; I don't care for anyone else now. You have taken me away from my family; you are my family. Ours isn't an ordinary marriage, like the Lucians', but worlds deeper.”
Yet, he told himself, in spite of her assurances the truth would ruin them; besides, as he had recognized, it didn't belong exclusively to him; it was, as well, Savina's truth. At any cost he had to protect her. Lee replied by saying that it was useless to tell her facts in her present unreasonable humor. “Why didn't you tell me he had gone to Washington?” she repeated; her tone had a sharper edge. “Was there anything you needed to hide?” Just what, he demanded, did she suspect? Fanny didn't know.
“Only I have had this worrying feeling. Did you go straight back from the theatre or take a drive?” He was amazed at her searching prescient questions; but his manner was admirable.
“New Yorkers are not very apt to drive around their Park at night. They are rather familiar with it. There's the afternoon for that, and the morning for the bridle paths. I won't go on, though, in such a senseless and positively insulting conversation.”
“You are not yourself since you returned,” she observed acutely. “Sunday night you were too queer for words. You couldn't talk to Mrs. Craddock for more than a minute at a time. Did you call her Savina?” Mrs. Craddock's name, he responded in a nicely interrogating manner, he had thought to be Laura. She paid no attention to his avoidance of her demand. “Did you?”
“No.” His self-restraint was fast vanishing.
“I can't believe a word you say.”
“Hell, don't ask me then.”
“You must not curse where the servants can hear you, and I won't listen to such talk, I'll leave the table. I wish you'd look in the mirror and see how red and confused you are. It is too bad that I cannot depend on you after so long, and with the children. You were sitting close to that woman, and—and your arms; you were kissing.”
“I have her garter on my bureau.”
“Stop.” Her anger now raised her above petty sallies. “I have stood a great deal from you, but there is more I simply won't. Do you understand? I've always done my duty and I'll make you do yours. I never have looked at another man, nor been kissed, except that horrid one last July at the Golf Club.” While she paused, breathless, he put in that it might do her good. “Oh, I see,” she spoke slowly: “you think that would give you an excuse. If I did it I couldn't complain about your nasty affairs. How cheap and easy I must seem. You ought to be ashamed to try to trick me.”
“If you are going to fly at conclusions you can sit in the tree alone,” he protested. “It's amazing where you have arrived from nothing. Let me tell you that I won't be ragged like this; if you think so much of our life why do you make it hideous with these degrading quarrels? You would never learn that way if there was the slightest, the slightest, cause for your bitterness. You have all you want, haven't you? The house and grounds are planted with your flowers, you are bringing up the children to be like yourself. I don't specially care for this,” he made a comprehensive gesture; “building an elaborate place to die in doesn't appeal to me. What is so valuable, so necessary, to you, I never think of. You are so full of your life that you don't consider mine, except where it is tied up with your interests.”
“Lee Randon,” she cried, “I've given you everything, it's all planned for you, here. Nothing comes on the table that you dislike—we haven't had beefsteak for months; when you are busy with your papers I keep it like a grave; and if the house seems cold, and I can't find Christopher, I don't bother you, but slip down to the furnace myself.”
“Make me uncomfortable, then,” he retorted; “I think that's what I'm sick of—your eternal gabbling about comfort and dinner. Let the God damn furnace go out! Or burn up.”
“That's all I have, Lee,” she said helplessly; “it is my life. I tried, the last month, to be different, after watching you with gayer women; but it only made me miserable; I kept wondering if Gregory was covered up and if the car would start when you wanted to go home. But I won't be sorry for it.” Her head was up, her cheeks blazing. “I know, and so ought you, what being good is. And if you forget it you will have a dreadful misfortune. God is like that: He'll punish you.”
“You don't need help,” he commented brutally.
Detached tears rolled over her cheeks. “I won't cry,” she contradicted the visible act; “I won't. You take such a cowardly advantage of me.”
The advantage, he reflected, was entirely on her side. Within, he was hard, he had no feeling of sympathy for her; the division between them was absolute. With an angry movement she brushed the tears from her cheeks. “I hate her,” she said viciously; “she is a rotten detestable woman.”
“On the contrary,” he replied, “Mrs. Grove, if you happen to mean her, is singularly attractive. There is no smallness about her.”
“Hell,” she mocked him, “it is really too touching. When shall you see her again?”
“Never.” At once he saw that he had made a second mistake.
“How sad—never; I can't bear it. You both must have been wretched at that long hopeless parting. And she agreed to let you go—back to your wife and children.” Fanny's voice was a triumph of contempt. “I ought to thank her; or be magnanimous and send you back.”
“This is all built on a ridiculous assumption,” Lee reminded her; “I even forget how we started. Suppose we talk about something else; Mrs. Grove, as a topic, is pretty well exhausted.” Fanny, narrow-eyed, relapsed into an intent silence. She faded from his mind, her place taken by Savina. Immediately he was conscious of a quickening of his blood, the disturbed throb of his heart; the memory of delirious hours enveloped him in a feverish mist more real than his wife sitting before him with a drawn brow.
Usually after such scenes Fanny had flowered in a tender remorse for their bitter remarks, the wasted opportunity of happiness; but again she left him coldly, unmelted. He was glad—a show of affection would have been unsupportable. But his marriage was becoming precarious; Lee seemed to be without power to execute his firm intentions; a conviction of insecurity settled over him. The sense of a familiar difficulty returned; there was nothing for him to do but order his life on a common pattern and face an unrelieved futility of years. He remembered, with a grim amusement, the excellent advice he had given Peyton Morris, Peyton at the verge of falling from the approved heights into the unpredictable. If he had come to him now in that quandary, what would he, Lee, have said? Yet all that he had told Peyton he still believed—the variety of life lay on the circular moving horizon, there was none at hand. But now he comprehended the unmeasurable longing that had, for the time, banished every other consideration from the younger man. It had upset his heredity, his violent prejudices, and his not negligible religion.
Peyton, too, had fallen under the charm of Cytherea; but chance—was it fortunate?—had restrained him. Lee had seen Morris the evening before, at a dinner with Claire, and he had been silent, abstracted. He had scarcely acknowledged Lee Randon's presence. The Morrises had avoided him. Still, that was inevitable, since, for them, he was charged with unpleasant memories.
He collected in thought all the married people who, he knew, were unhappy or dissatisfied: eleven of the eighteen Lee called to mind. “What is the matter with it?” he demanded savagely, aloud, in his room. He considered marriage—isolated for that purpose—as a social contract, the best possible solving of a number of interrelated needs and instincts; and, practical and grey, it recommended itself to his reason; it successfully disposed of the difficulties of property, the birth and education of children, and of society. It was a sane, dignified, way to live with a woman; and it secured so much. Undoubtedly, on that count, marriage couldn't be bettered. As it was, it satisfied the vast majority of men and women: against the bulk of human life Fanny and he, with their friends, were inconsiderable. But the number of men who struggled above the common level was hardly greater; and he and his opinions were of that preferable minority. The freedom of money, the opportunities of leisure, always led directly away from what were called the indispensable virtues.
Men—he returned to the Eastlake streets on Saturday night—except those lost in the monomania of a dream, didn't want to work, they didn't even wish to be virtuous. They turned continually to the bypaths of pleasure, that self-delusion and forgetfulness of drink. Yes, released from the tyrannies of poverty, they flung themselves into a swift spending. The poor were more securely married than the rich, the dull than the imaginative—married, he meant, in the sense of a forged bond, a stockade. This latter condition had been the result of allowing the church to interfere unwarrantedly in what was not its affair. Religion had calmly usurped this, the most potent of the motives of humanity; or, rather, it had fastened to it the ludicrous train of ritual. That laughable idea that God had a separate scrutinizing eye, like the eye of a parrot, on every human atom!
Lee changed his position, physically and mentally—he was lying in bed—and regarded religion in itself. It was, in the hunger for a perpetual identity, almost as strong a force as the other passion. But were they conspicuously other? They had many resemblances. He didn't, by religion, refer to Christianity which, he thought, was but a segregated and weakened form of worship. It was, for example, against the Christian influence that he was struggling. He meant the sense of profound mystery, the revolt against utter causelessness, which had tormented to no clearness so many generations of minds. He accepted the fact that a formless longing was all that he could ever experience; for him, uncritically, that seemed enough; he had willingly relinquished any hope of an eternity like a white frosted cake set with twinkling candles. But viewed as a tangible force operating here and now, identical—to return to his main preoccupation—with love, it demanded some settled intelligence of comprehension.
What he wanted, he was drawn bolt upright as if by an inner shout, was an assurance that could be depended on, that wouldn't break and break and leave him nothing but a feeling of inscrutable mockery. He wanted to understand himself, and, in that, Fanny and the children ... and Savina. Obviously they were all bound together in one destiny, by a single cause. Why had he stopped loving Fanny and had no regret—but a sharp gladness—in his adultery with Savina? He discarded the qualifying word as soon as it had occurred to him: there was no adultery, adulteration, in his act with Savina; it had filled him with an energy, a mental and nervous vigor, long denied to the sanctified bed of marriage. He wanted not even to be justified, but only an explanation of what he was; and he waited, his hands pressed into the softness of the mattress on either side of him, as if the salvation of some reply might come into his aching brain. Nothing, of course, broke the deep reasonable stillness of the night. He slipped back on his pillow weary and baffled.
There, to defraud his misery, he deliberately summoned the memory of Savina, and of delirious hours. She came swiftly, with convulsive shoulders, fingers drawn down over his body; he heard her little cry, “Ah!” How changed her voice had been when she said, “I love you.” It had had no apparent connection with the moment, their actual passion. It had disturbed him with the suggestion of a false, a forced, note. In a situation of the utmost accomplishable reality it had been vague, meaningless. I love you. It was a strange phrase, at once empty and burdened with illimitable possibilities. He had said it times without number to Fanny, but first—how seductively virginal she had been—on a veranda at night. Then, though not quite for the first time, he had kissed her. And suddenly her reserve, her protecting chastity, had gone out of her forever.
When had the other, all that eventually led to Savina, begun; when had he lost his love? A long process of turning from precisely the orderly details which, he had decided, should make marriage safe. He was back where he had started—the realization of how men deserted utility for visions, at the enigmatic smile of Cytherea. A sterile circle. Some men called it heaven, others found hell. His mental searching, surrounded, met, by nullity, he regarded as his supreme effort in the direction of sheer duty. If whoever had it in command chose to run the world blindly, unintelligibly, in a manner that would soon wreck the strongest concern, he wasn't going to keep on annoying himself with doubts and the dictates of a senseless conscience. What, as soon as possible, he'd do was fall asleep.
The crowing of a rooster pierced the thinning night, a second answered the first, and they maintained a long self-glorifying, separated duet. The wind which had been flowing in at the north window changed to the south-west.
The difficulties of his living with Fanny increased the next morning: it was one of the week-days when he didn't go into town after breakfast. He was dressed for riding, his horse was at the door, when, without previous announcement and unprepared, she decided to go with him. He could hear her hurrying upstairs—it upset her unreasonably to rush—and suddenly, with the audible fall of a boot on the floor, there was the unmistakable sound of sobbing.
Lee went up, half impatient and half comprehending, and found her seated on a bed, leaning her head in an arm on the foot-board. “Don't wait for me,” she cried in a smothered voice; “it makes you so nervous. Just go; it doesn't matter what I do. You've—you've shown me that. Oh, dear, I am so miserable. Everything was right and so happy, and now it's all wrong.”
“Nonsense,” he replied tonically; “it will take Christopher a few minutes to get your saddle on. I'll be outside.” Mounted and waiting for her, his horse stepping contrarily over the grass beyond the drive, he didn't care whether she came or stayed. When she appeared her eyes, prominent now rather than striking, were reddened, and the hastily applied paint and powder were unbecomingly streaked with some late irrepressible tears.
When they had returned, and through lunch and after, a not unfamiliar stubborn silence settled over Fanny. When she spoke it was with an armor-like sarcasm protecting and covering her feelings. He was continually surprised at the correctness of her attitude toward Savina; his wife could know nothing; she was even without the legitimate foundation of a suspicion; but her bearing had a perceptible frostiness of despair. What, he wondered moodily, would next, immediately, develop? Something, certainly—Fanny's accumulations of emotion were always sharply discharged; they grew in silence but they were expended in edged words.
In a way he was glad that he had made the error of speaking about William Grove's absence in Washington: it was a step toward a final resolution, a tranquilization, of the pressure at home. He didn't know what would bring it up, possibly a storm surpassing in violence all that had preceded it; and then ... the open prospect of old age. Fanny should not actually learn of the occurrence in New York, there must be no mistake about that; she would act on the supposition that he had been merely indulging in a more or less advanced dallying; but her patience in that, he judged, was at an end. Well, he could ultimately, in all sincerity, agree with her there. Not too soon, of course, for she was at present deeply suspicious of such protestations; he would maintain for a short while longer an appearance of annoyance, his old successful indignations at her minor charges, and then let her see that she had nothing left to combat from that quarter.
But how, in the other implications of such a scene, would he act? Until now his part in the inevitable frictions of matrimony had been conditioned by a tenderness toward Fanny and a measurable supporting belief that he was generally to blame. She had reduced him to the compounding of excuses; after her attack, drawing away, she had managed to make him follow her. Not cheaply, with the vulgarity of a gift, a price outheld, but with the repeated assertions of his endless love. Nothing less satisfied her. In this she was superior. But, even if he surrendered his life to the effort, could he keep up that pretence of a passion unimpaired? And had he, Lee asked himself over and over, the wish, the patience, for that heavy undertaking?
It was still fairly evident that he hadn't. All that he could hope for, which they both could summon, was luck and the deadening hands of time. He told himself, here, that it was more than probable that he was exaggerating the proportions of the whole situation—Fanny had been angry before; her resentment faded the sooner for its swift explosive character. But this assurance was unconvincing; his presentiment, which didn't rest on reason, was not amenable to a reasonable conclusion. Of this he was certain, that Fanny never had harbored the suspicion of what, for her, would be the very worst. Did she know? If she did, he decided, it was only in the form of an unanalyzed, unidentified, feeling. She wasn't a coward. His determination to keep smooth, by mere politeness, the further course of their marriage seemed frivolous. That might do, it was even indispensable, when the present corner was turned; but for the moment—
What, in the name of God, had got into her? He grew increasingly irritated at her arbitrary manner. Lee had kept forgetting that, where Fanny was concerned, it was causeless, or no better than a wild surmise, a chance thrust at random. He made up his mind that he wouldn't submit to a great deal of her bad humor. And, in this spirit, he ignored a query put to him bitingly:
“Where is the paper cutter?”
His gaze remained level on the page before him.
“Didn't you hear me, Lee? I want the paper cutter. If it's on your night table, get it.”
“Let Amanda go up.”
“She's out. I let both the girls go tonight. But I needn't explain.” She sat expectantly upright. Obliterating his cigarette, he returned, without moving, to the magazine. Then he raised his head:
“You can't hope for much from that tone of voice.”
“I'll always insist on your showing me some courtesy. I can't imagine what you think I am. You lie to me as though I were a school-girl and you haven't even common good manners. That trip to New York—I'll hear the truth about it. Anyone could tell it was serious by the effect it had on you. Put down your magazine, you might as well; you can't keep on behind it forever. Why did you try to hide that Mrs. Grove and you were alone?”
“To stop all this!” He dropped the magazine upon the floor. “To save my nerves and the noise of your eternal questions. I knew, if you found out, what would follow; this isn't the first time.”
“You can't be completely trusted,” she replied. “I have always had to worry and hold you up. If it hadn't been for me—but there is no use in going into that. You must tell me about the Grove woman.”
“At one time it was Mrs. Grove,” he observed; “now it is 'the Grove woman.' What will you call her next?”
“You will have to tell me that,” Fanny said. “Lee Randon, what must I call her?”
“Perhaps, if you knew her, you'd try Savina.”
“Not if it was to save me from dying. But I have no doubt of which you preferred. Did you?”
“Did I what?” He was aware that his speech was growing far louder than necessary.
“Call her Savina.”
“Yes!” He sat glaring at her in an anger which he felt swelling his neck.
Fanny's expression was obscure. At his admission she had shivered, as though it had reached her in the form of an actually threatened violence, and then she was rigid. “I knew that, all the while.” Her voice was low, with a pause between the words. “Savina”; she repeated the name experimentally. “Very pretty. Prettier to say than Fanny; yes, and newer. And, having called her that, you couldn't very well not kiss her, could you?”
However, his caution had again asserted itself over the dangers of a lost temper. “You have made so much of this up that you had better finish it yourself. Put what end you prefer on it; you don't need help.”
“The end,” she echoed, in a strange and smothered voice. “Is this it? But not yet.”
Lee's gaze rested on the magazine lying spread half on the Eastern symbolism of a rug and half on the bare polished flooring. “Your story is far more interesting than any in that,” he commented, with a gesture. “It's a pity you haven't turned your imagination to a better use.” This, he recognized, could not go on indefinitely. Fanny added:
“But I was wrong—you'd kiss her before you said Savina. That, I believe, is the way it works. It is really screaming when you think what you went to New York for—to protect Claire, to keep Peyton Morris out of Mina Raff's hands. And, apparently, you succeeded but got in badly yourself. What a pair of hypocrites you were: all the while worse than the others, who were at least excused by their youngness, ever could dream of being. What was the good of your contradicting me at first? I knew all along. I felt it.”
“What was it, exactly, that you felt?” he asked with an assumption of calmness.
“I don't understand,” she acknowledged, for the moment at a loss. “It was inside me, like lead. But, whatever happened, it will come out; it always does; and you'll be sorry.”
Did the truth, he wondered, always appear, and triumph over the false; was that precept of morality secure for those who depended on it? And, as Fanny threatened, would he be sorry? But most assuredly he would, for three reasons—Savina, Fanny, and himself; there might, even, be two more, Helena and Gregory; yes, and William Loyd Grove. What a stinking mess it was all turning out to be. Why wasn't life, why weren't women, reasonable? But he could not convince himself that anything final—a separation—threatened them. Fanny couldn't force an admission from him, nor speak of this, investigate it, anywhere else. Savina was well able to take care of herself. There was nothing to do but wait. In the process of that he once more picked up the magazine. Fanny said unexpectedly:
“I ordered your Christmas present. It took all the money I had in the Dime Savings Bank.” He muttered a phrase to the effect that Christmas was a season for children. This recalled his own—they wouldn't be asleep yet—and, to escape temporarily from an impossible situation, to secure the paper knife, he went up to see them.
They greeted him vociferously: before he could turn on the light they were partly out of the covers, and the old argument about whose bed he should sit on in full progress. Helena's was by the door, so, returning her to the warmth of her blankets, he stopped beside her. The room, with the windows fully open, was cold, but he welcomed the white frozen purity of its barrenness. More than ever he was impressed by the remoteness of the children's bed-room from the passionate disturbances of living; but they, in the sense Fanny and he knew, weren't alive yet. They imitated the accents and concerns, caught at the gestures, of maturity; but, even in the grip of beginning instincts, they were hardly more sentient than the figures of a puppet show. Or, perhaps, their world was so far from his that they couldn't be said to span from one to the other. Gregory, in mind, was no more like him than a slip was like a tree bearing fruit—no matter how bitter. Helena more nearly resembled her mother; that had never occurred to him before.
It was undoubtedly true—her posturing recalled the feminine attitude in extreme miniature. In that he felt outside her sympathy, she belonged with her mother; to Gregory he was far more nearly allied. Gregory, anyhow, had the potentialities of his own dilemma; he might, in years to come, be drawn out of a present reality by the enigma, the fascination, of Cytherea. Lee Randon hoped not; he wanted to advise him, at once, resolutely to close his eyes to all visions beyond the horizon of wise practicability. Marry, have children, be faithful, die, he said; but, alas, to himself. Gregory, smiling in eager anticipation of what might ensue, was necessarily ignorant of so much. Something again lay back of that, Lee realized—his occupation in life. There he, Lee, had made his first, perhaps most serious, mistake. While the majority of men turned, indifferent, from their labor, there were a rare few—hadn't he phrased this before?—lost in an edifice of the mind, scientific or aesthetic or commercial, who were happily unconscious of the lapsing fretful years.
That was the way to cheat the sardonic gathered fates: to be deaf and blind to whatever, falsely, they seemed to offer; to get into bed heavy with weariness and rise hurried and absorbed. Over men so preoccupied, spent, Cytherea had no power. It was strange how her name had become linked with all his deepest speculations; she was involved in concerns remote from her apparent sphere and influence.
“Gracious, you're thinking a lot,” Helena said.
“What are you thinking about?” Gregory added.
“A doll,” he replied, turning to his daughter.
“For me,” she declared.
“No, me,” Gregory insisted.
Lee Randon shook his head. “Not you, in the least.”
“Of course not,” Helena supported him. “I should think it would make you sick, father, hearing Gregory talk like that. It does me. Why doesn't he ask for something that boys play with?”
“I don't want them, that's why,” Gregory specified. “Perhaps I'd like to have a typewriter.”
“You're not very modest.” It was Helena again.
“It's father, isn't it? It isn't you.”
“Listen,” Lee broke in, “I came up here to be with two good children; but where are they?”
“I'm one.” Helena, freeing herself definitely, closed her arms in a sweet warmth about his neck. “I'm one, too,” Gregory called urgently. “No,” his father pressed him back; “you must stay in bed. They are both here, I can see.”
He wondered if, everything else forgotten, his children could constitute a sufficient engagement; but the sentimental picture, cast across his thoughts, of himself being led by a child holding each of his hands defeated it. He was turned in another direction.
Yet, tonight, they were remarkably engaging.... He had lost a great deal. For what? He couldn't—as usual—answer; but the memory of Savina, stronger than Fanny, metaphorically took Helena's arms away from his neck and blurred the image of Gregory. “Have you said your prayer?” he asked absent-mindedly making conversation. Oh, yes, he was informed, they did that with Martha. “I'll say mine again,” Gregory volunteered. Again—a picture of a child, in a halo of innocence, praying at a paternal knee to a fresco of saccharine angels!
“Once is enough,” he answered hurriedly. “I am sure you do it very nicely.”
“Well, anyhow, better than Helena,” Gregory admitted. “She hurries so.” Lee instructed him to confine his observations to his own performance. Now was the time for him to deliver a small sermon on prayer to Helena. He recognized this, but he was merely incensed by it. What could he reply if they questioned him about his own devotions? Should he acknowledge that he thought prayer was no more than a pleasant form of administering to a sense of self-importance? Or, at most, a variety of self-help? Luckily they didn't ask. How outraged Fanny would be—he would be driven from the community—if he confessed the slightest of his doubts to his children. If, say at the table, when they were all together, he should drop his negative silence, his policy of nonintervention, what a horrified breathlessness would follow. His children, Lee thought, his wife, the servants in the kitchen, none knew him; he was a stranger to his own house.
If he had still, quite desperately, instinctively, looked to Helena and Gregory for assistance, he had met a final failure. Brushed with sleepiness they were slipping away from him. He was reluctant to have them go, leave him; the distance between them and himself appeared to widen immeasurably as he stood watching them settle for the night. He wanted to call them back, “Helena and Gregory, Gregory!” But he remained quiet, his head a little bent, his heart heavy. The tide of sleep, silent, mystical, recompensing! It wasn't that, exactly, he was facing.
Switching off the light he went into their playroom, scattered with bright toys, with alphabet blocks and an engine, a train of cars and some lengths of track, and a wooden steamboat on wheels gaily painted. Already these things had a look of indifferent treatment, of having been half cast aside. Gregory had wanted a typewriter; his jacket, at dancing-school, had been belted like his, Lee Randon's. They each had, in the lower hall, a bicycle on which they rode to and from school and to play. “Will he need me later?” Lee asked himself; “or will it be the same till the end?” But he had already decided that the latter was infinitely better.
He lingered on the second floor, putting off from minute to minute the unavoidable taking up of Fanny's demands. She was, he knew, waiting for his appearance to begin again energetically. In their room it struck him forcibly that he must make some mental diagram of his course, his last unshakable position. Certainly in admitting that he had called Savina Grove by her first name he had justified Fanny's contention that he had kissed her. Fanny should have asked him how many times that had occurred. “A hundred,” he heard himself, in fancy, replying. By God, he would like to say just that, and have it all over, done with. Instead he must lie cunningly, imperturbably, and in a monumental patience. Why? He hadn't, pointedly, asked that before. Things here, his life, the future, must be held together.
After he had descended, he lingered in the hall: in the room where his wife was sitting not a sound was audible, there wasn't an indication of her presence. Lee turned away to the mantel-piece dominated by Cytherea. Here, he addressed himself silently to the doll, you're responsible for this. Get me out of it. I'll put it all in your hands, that hand you have raised and hold half open and empty. But his, he added, in an embittered lightness, was an affair of matrimony; it was a moral knot; and it had nothing to do with Cytherea, with the shape, the sea, the island, of Venus. She was merely disdainful.
Fanny was seated in the chair, the exact position, in which he had left her. And when he returned to the place he had deserted, she took no notice of him.
Her eyes were fixed in thought, her lips pinched. Was it only now, or had he never noticed it before, that her hands resembled her face, bony with a dry fine skin? Perhaps, heroically, she was thrusting the whole subject of Savina Grove from her mind; he couldn't tell; her exterior showed Lee Randon nothing, He waited, undecided if he'd smoke. Lee didn't, he found, want to. She shook her head, a startled look passed through her eyes, and Fanny sighed deeply. She seemed to come back from a far place. It was, of course, the past, her early aspirations; herself, young; but what, out of her remembrance, had she brought with her?
Nothing.
Her first words instantly dispelled what had many aspects of his last hope for peace. “It is surprising to me that you could go up to the children; but I suppose we must all be glad to have you pay attention to them at any time.” This minor development he succeeded in avoiding. “I have been thinking hard,” she continued, “and I have made up my mind about you; it is this—you just simply have to be different. I won't let you, us, stay like this. It is hideous.”
“You are quite right,” he admitted; “and I have already agreed that the change must principally be in me. If you'd explain it to me, what you have decided on, we'll find out, if possible, how to go about it.”
“At least you needn't be sarcastic,” she replied; “I am not as impossible as you make out. You will have to be different at home—”
“I thought it was outside home you objected to.”
“It's one and the same,” she went on; “and I won't have them, it, a minute longer. Not a minute! You have got to behave yourself.”
“You haven't been very definite yet.”
“Mrs. Grove—Savina,” she flung back at him.
“That is a name and not a fact.”
“It's a fact that you kissed her.” Fanny leaned forward, flushed and tense, knocking over her stool. “And that you put your arms around her, and said—oh, I don't know what you did say. Did she mention me?”
“Only indirectly,” he replied with a gleam of malice; “neither of us did.”
“I am glad of that anyhow.” But her vindictive tone betrayed the words. “Although I can easily guess why you didn't—you were ashamed. You did kiss her; why won't you admit it?”
“What's the good? You've done that for me. You have convinced yourself so positively that nothing I could say would be of any use.”
“Did she call you Lee?”
“Hell, Fanny, what a God-forsaken lot of young nonsense!” His anger was mounting. “You can understand here as well as later that I am not going to answer any of it; and I'll not listen to a great deal more. Sometimes, lately, you have been insulting, but now you are downright pathetic, you are so ridiculous.”
“You will stay exactly where you are until I get done.” Her tone was perceptibly shriller. “And don't you dare call me pathetic; if you only knew—disgracing yourself in New York, with a family at home. It is too common and low and vulgar for words: like a travelling salesman. But I'll make you behave if I have to lock you up.”
Lee Randon laughed at her; and, at the contempt in his mirth, she rose, no longer flushed, but white with wrath. “I won't have it!” Her voice was almost a scream, and she brought her hands down so violently on the table that, as she momentarily broke the circuit of the electric lamp, there was a flash of greenish light. It was exactly as though her fury, a generated incandescence of rage, had burned into a perceptible flare. This, he realized, was worse than he had anticipated; he saw no safe issue; it was entirely serious. Lee was aware of a vague sorrow, a wish to protect Fanny, from herself as much as anything; but he was powerless. At the same time, with the support of no affection, without interest, his patience was rapidly vanishing. He was conscious of Fanny not as his wife, nor as a being lost in infinite suffering, but as a woman with her features strangely, grotesquely, twisted and drawn.
His principal recognition was that she meant nothing to him; she wasn't even familiar; he couldn't credit the fact that they had long lived together in an entire intimacy. Dissolved by his indifference, the past vanished like a white powder in a glass of water. She might have been a woman overtaken by a mental paroxysm in the cold impersonality of a railway station. “Stop it,” he commanded sharply; “you are hysterical, all kinds of a fool.”
“Only one kind,” she corrected him, in a voice so rasped that it might have come from a rusted throat; “and I'm not going to be it much longer. You have cured me, you and that Savina. But what—what makes me laugh is how you thought you could explain and lie and bully me. Anything would do to tell me, I'd swallow it like one of those big grapes.” She was speaking in gusts, between the labored heavings of her breast; her eyes were staring and dark; and her hands opened and shut, shut and opened, continuously. Fanny's cheeks were now mottled, there were fluctuating spots of red, blue shadows, on the pallor of her skin.
“In a minute more you'll be sick,” he warned her.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, “that's all he knows, all he feels! In a minute, a minute, I'll be sick. Don't you see, you damned fool,” her voice rose until it seemed impossible that she could hold the pitch, “can't you understand I am dying?”
“No.” His terseness was calculated: that, he thought, would best control her wildness. “No one could be more alive. If I were you, though, I'd go up to bed; we've had enough of this, or I have; I can't speak for you. But, however that may be, and as I've said before, it has got to stop, now, at once.”
If it didn't, he continued silently, he wouldn't be eternally responsible for himself; never a patient man, what might follow the end of his endurance was unpredictable. His feeling toward the woman before him was shifting, as well; the indifference was becoming bitterness; the bitterness glittered, like mica, with points of hatred. He felt this, like an actual substance, a jelly-like poison, in his blood, affecting his body and mind. It bred in him a refined brutality, an ingenious cruelty. “A mirror would shut you up quicker than anything else,” he informed her; “you look like a woman of sixty—go somewhere and fix your face.”
“It doesn't surprise me you are insulting,” she replied, “but I didn't expect it quite so soon. I thought you might hide what you really were a little longer; it seemed to me you might try to keep something. But I guess it's better to have it all done with at once, and to meet the worst.”
“You talk as though there were no one but you in this,” he said concisely; “and that I didn't matter. You'll find that I have a little to say. Here it is: I am tired of your suspicions and questions and insinuations. You haven't any idea of marriage except as a bed-room farce. You're so pure that you imagine more indecencies in a day than I could get through with in five years. If there were one I hadn't thought of, you'd have me at it in no time. It was pleasant at the Groves' because there was none of this infernal racket. Mrs. Grove, no—Savina, is a wise woman. I was glad to be with her, to get away—”
“Go back, then!” Fanny cried. “Don't bother about me and your home and the children. You brought me here, and made me have them, all the blood and tearing; but that doesn't matter. Not to you! I won't let you touch me again.”
“That needn't trouble you,” he assured her.
“Not ... when you have her ... to touch.” She could scarcely articulate, each word was pronounced as though it had cost a separate and strangling effort. “You vile, rotten coward!”
The flood of her hysteria burst so suddenly that, unprepared, he was overwhelmed with its storm of tears and passionate charges. “You ought to be beaten till you fell down. You wouldn't say these things to me, treat me like this, if I weren't helpless, if I could do anything. But I can't, and you are safe. I am only your wife and not some filthy woman in New York.” As she moved her head the streaming tears swung out from her face. “God damn you.” Her hand went out to the table and, rising, it held the heavy dull yellow paper cutter. Before he could draw back she struck him; the copper point ripped down his jaw and hit his shoulder a jarring blow.
In an instant of passion Lee Randon caught Fanny by the shoulders and shook her until her head rolled as though her neck were broken. Even in his transport of rage, with his fingers dug into her flesh, he stopped to see if this were true.
It wasn't. She swayed uncertainly, dazed and gasping, while her hair, shaken loose from its knot, slowly cascaded over one shoulder. Then stumbling, groping, with a hand on a chair, against the frame of the door, she went out of the room.
Lee's jaw bled thickly and persistently; the blood soaked, filled, his handkerchief; and, going to the drawer in the dining-room where the linen was kept, he secured and held against a ragged wound a napkin, He was nauseated and faint. His rage, killed, as it were, at its height, left him with a sensation of emptiness and degradation. The silence—after the last audible dragging footfall of Fanny slowly mounting the stairs—was appalling: it was as though all the noise of all the world, concentrated in his head, had been stopped at once and forever. He removed the sop from the cut, and the bleeding promptly took up its spreading over his throat and under his collar. That blow had killed a great deal: the Lee Randon married to Fanny was already dead; Fanny, too, had told him that she was dying, killed from within. It was a shame.
He was walking when it occurred to him that he had better keep quiet; if the blood didn't soon stop he should require help; he was noticeably weak. His feeling with regard to Fanny was confined to curiosity, but mainly his thoughts, his illimitable disgust, were directed at himself. His anger, returning like the night wind from a different direction, cut at himself, at the collapse of his integrity. He was, in reality, frightened at what had been no better than a relapse into a state of mania; he was shocked at the presence, however temporary, of a frenzy of madness.
Nothing had altered his attitude toward the woman who was his wife; all his active emotions for her had gone. Then his attention was drawn from his personality to his life, his surroundings; they were suffocating. Not to be borne! Nowhere could he discover a detail, an episode, that had the importance of reality. He had a sensation of being wrapped in a feather bed, the need to make a violent gesture—sending the white fluff whirling through space—and so be free to breathe. This house, the symmetrical copied walls, the harmonious rugs, symbols of public success and good opinion, the standard of a public approbation, exasperated him beyond endurance. He wanted to push the walls out, tear the rugs into rags, and scatter them contemptuously before the scandalized inertness of Eastlake. Lee had what was regarded as an admirable existence, an admirable family—the world imposed this judgment on him; and the desire, the determination, swept over him to smash to irremediable atoms what was so well applauded.
The thought fascinated him: to break his life wide open. He'd let it go, it was worthless to him, the companies and bonds and the woman and children, the jog-trotting on fenced roads, the vain pretentions of the country club, the petty grasping at the petticoats—where they were worn—of variety. Lee wished that he could do this in the presence of everyone he knew; he wanted to see their outraged faces, hear the shocked expressions, as he insulted, demolished, all that they worshipped. The blood, he found, had stopped; his hurt was relatively unimportant. The fever of rebellion, of destruction, increased in him until it was as violent, as blinding, as his earlier fury; and he went at once in search of Fanny.
She had undressed, and, in a nightgown effectively drawn with blue ribbons, she lay face down across the bottom of her bed. One shoulder, immaculately white except for the leaden bruises of his fingers, was bare, and an arm, from which her jewelled wrist watch had not been removed, was outstretched. He stood above her, but, breathing faintly, she made no sign of a consciousness of his presence.
“Fanny,” he began, speaking with an effort of calmness out of his laboring being, “this is all over for me. As I told you so many times, I've had too much of it. It's yours, anyhow, and the children are yours, and you may do what you like with the whole affair. I'm done.” Still she didn't move, reply. “I am going,” he said more impatiently, “tonight. I want you to understand that this is final. You were too good a wife; I couldn't keep even with you; and I can't say, now, that I want to. Everyone will tell you that I am no good—you see, I haven't the shadow of a cause for leaving—and the best thing you can do is believe them. If I had what was recognized as a reason for going, I'd stay, if that has any sense; you may put your own interpretation on it.”
She turned and half rose, regarding him from the edge of the bed. Her face, no longer brightly mottled, was sunken, and dull with despair. “I can't talk,” she said; “the words are all hard like stones down in my heart. You'll have to go; I can't stop you; I knew you had gone yesterday, or was it last week? I saw it was a hopeless fight but I tried, I had to; I thought your memory would help.”
“It wasn't Savina who did this,” he informed her; “I want you to realize that fully. Whatever happens, she is not to blame. All, all the fault is mine; it would take too long to explain, you wouldn't believe me—you couldn't—and so I am deserting you. That is the word for it, the one you will use.” Fanny gazed at him in a clouding perplexity.
“I can't think it's true.” Her voice was dazed. “A thing like this couldn't be happening to us, to me. It's only for a little, we are both cross—”
He cut her short with the assurance that what he said he meant. Sentimental indulgence, he felt, was dangerously out of place. She slipped back, supine, on the bed; and, with short sobs, she cried, “Go! Go! Go!”
In his room he methodically and thoughtfully assembled the necessities for his bag; he was arranging mentally the details of his act. Where, primarily, it affected Fanny and the children, his lawyers could handle it best; it was the present consequences to himself, the step immediately before him, that demanded consideration. But his deliberation was lost in the knowledge that he would go to New York where, inevitably, he should see Savina. No one could predict what would determine that; it would unfold, his affair with Savina must conclude, as it had begun—in obedience to pressures beyond their control. An increasing excitement flowed over him at the thought of being with her, possessing her, again. There was no doubt of that in his mind; he knew that Savina would come to him. She was far more ruthless in brushing aside artificial barriers, prejudices, than, until now, he. The figure of William Grove occupied him for a little, but he seemed insubstantial, not so much a being as a convention to be smashed in his own house.
Lee Randon decided not to speak again, to say good-bye, to Fanny. It would only multiply the difficulties of his leaving; she might have another attack of rage, or—worse—of affection. He was amazed at his lack of feeling, a little disturbed: perhaps there was something fatally wrong, lacking, about him, and he was embarked on the first violent stage of physical and mental degradation. It couldn't be helped, he told himself, once more down stairs, in the hall. Beyond, the stool lay where Fanny had kicked it; and he bent over to pick up the copper paper cutter from the floor. Putting it on the table, he reflected that Fanny would, in all probability, destroy it. His handkerchief, stiff, black with dried blood, was in the crystal ash holder with a mahogany stand; and that, as unnecessarily unpleasant, he hid in a pocket.
The electric globe in the floor lamp was yellow; it was nearly burned out and would have to be replaced. This had been his special corner, the most comfortable in the pen. But the pig, he remembered, had been slaughtered last week; and he wondered if the parallel he had established would hold true to the end. In the main aspect, he concluded, yes. But the pig had died without experiencing what was, undoubtedly, both the fundamental duty and recompense of living. The pig, happily or unhappily, had remained in ignorance of Cytherea and the delights of love; but, perhaps, if only for the moment, he had better call that passion; it was a word of clearer, more exact, definition.
He left the house walking, carrying his bag up the hill into Eastlake: a train left for the city at eleven-fifty-eight. Lee turned, beyond his property, and saw the light burning in what had been his and Fanny's room; the rest of the house, except for the glimmer below, was dark. The winter night was encrusted with stars. A piercing regret seized him—that he was past the middle of forty and not in the early twenties. To be young and to know Savina! To be young and free. To be young ... the increasing rapidity with which he went forward had the aspect of an endeavor to waste no more precious time.