He recovered her in the dusty portrait of Vashti, which had lain in disgrace in the stable for so many years. Vashti’s youthful figure, listening in the Garden Enclosed, was very like Desire’s; the lips, which his boyish kiss had blurred, prophesied kindness. He brought it out from its place of hiding and hung it on the wall above his desk.
He recovered her most poignantly in small ways: in the stubs of theatre-tickets for performances they had attended. When unpacking one of his trunks, he found some white hairs clinging to the sleeve of one of his coats. They set him dreaming of the pale, reluctant hands that had snuggled in the warmth of the white-fox muff.
But he recovered her most effectually a week after his home-coming, when her letters began to arrive. Not that they were satisfactory letters; if they had been, they would not have been like her. Her sins as a correspondent were the same as her sins of conduct: they consisted of things omitted. Where she might have said something comforting, she filled up the sentence with dots and dashes. He begged her to confess that she was missing him. She escaped him. She let all his questions go unanswered. There was a come-and-find-me laughter in her way of writing. She would tell him just enough to make him anxious—no more. She had been to this play; she had danced at that supper; last Sunday she had automobiled with a jolly party out into the country. Of whom the jolly party had consisted she left him in ignorance.
Strange letters these to receive in the old-fashioned quiet of Eden Row, where days passed orderly and marshaled by duties! They came fluttering to him beneath the gray London skies, like tropic birds which had lost their direction. He would sit picturing her in an Eden Row setting, telling himself stories of the wild combinations of circumstances that might bring her tripping to him!
He was homesick for the faeries. He felt dull in remembering her intenser modes of living—modes of living which in his heart he distrusted. They could not last. There lay his hope. When they failed, she might turn to him for security. He excused her carelessness. Why, because he was sad, should she not be glad-hearted? For such leniency he received an occasional reward, as when she wrote him, “I do wish I could hear your nice English voice. I met a lady the other day who asked me, ‘Is there any chance of your marrying Theodore Gurney? If you don’t, you’re foolish.’ You’d have loved her.” And then, in a mischievous postscript, “I forgot to tell you, she said you had beautiful eyes.”
Tantalizing as an echo of laughter from behind a barrier of hills!
In her first letters she coquetted with various forms of address: Meester Deek; Dear Meester Deek; My Dear. This last seemed to please her as a perch midway between the chilliness of friendship and too much fervor. She settled down to it. Her endings were equally experimental: Your Friend Desire; Your Little Friend; Yours of the White Foxes; Yours affectionately, the Princess. Usually her signature was preceded by some such sentiment as, “You know you always have my many thoughts”—which might mean anything. She never committed herself.
His chief anxiety was to discover what she had meant by her promise that they would meet very shortly. She refused to tell him. Worse still, as time went on, he suspected that she was missing him less and less. While to him no happiness was complete without her, she seemed to be embarrassed by no such curtailment. Her good times were coming thick and fast; her infatuation for Fluffy seemed to have strengthened. At last word reached him in February that they were off to California; she was too full of anticipation to express regret for the extra three thousand miles that would part them. On the day before she started, he cabled the florist at the Brevoort to send her flowers. In return he received a line of genuine sentiment. “Meester Deek, you are thoughtful! I nearly cried when I got them. You’ll never know what they meant. New York hasn’t been New York without you. It was almost as though you yourself had brought them. I wanted to run out and stop you, waving and waving to you down the stairs.”
That was the climax. From that point on her correspondence grew jerky, dealing more and more with trivial externals and less and less with the poignant things of the past. In proportion as she withdrew from him, he tried to call her back with his sincerity. When he complained of her indifference, she told him mockingly, “I’m keeping all your letters. They’ll give you away entirely when I bring my suit for breach of promise.”
He could detect Fluffy’s influence, “Oh, these men!” He waited longer and longer to hear from her. Sometimes three weeks elapsed. Then from Santa Barbara she wrote, “I’m having such a gay time. Don’t you envy me? I’m riding horseback and some one is teaching me to drive a car.”