Chapter Twenty
The dinner was over—a medley of flowers and fruit, shining candles, extravagantly imaginative food (Clare was no gourmand but her cook was a prize), much banter and some conversation. The cake had crowned it all. It was a perfectly recognizable model, two feet high or so, of the building where Lewis had his offices, and Petra herself, done in violet-colored gumdrops, was represented on the roof, sitting on a typewriter and surrounded by twenty minute candelabras each holding five candles. It was obvious that Dick had conspired with the cook. Every one was enchanted, but Petra most of all. “What a child she is!” Lewis had thought, with a variety of pang he had never before experienced concerning this girl. “A baby, really!” A thousand candelabra of birthday candles might have gone to the shining of her eyes, and her cheeks were rosy. She clapped her hands like a child in a fairy tale ... at least, that is something children outside of fairy tales seem not to do, clap their hands when they are suddenly delighted.
But now they had left the dining room and come through the great hall to a small drawing-room at one side of the street door. Lewis and his hostess, at any rate, were there, sitting together on a sofa with ends curved like a lyre, facing the wide arched doorway into the hall, their backs to open French doors flooded with moonlight. Moonlight, dim lamplight, a fire burning on a white-tiled hearth, roses in silver vases—that was Clare’s little drawing-room to-night. Cynthia and Farwell had drifted through the room with their cigarettes and out the French door to the moonlit road. Farwell called back as they went, “This is delicious, Clare! Your road is like a silver river to-night. You and Doctor Pryne must come.”
But Clare by a glance had held Lewis where he was. She said to him in a low voice, “I’d rather watch Petra! Isn’t she too delightful to-night! This is the way I have dreamed her. If only all days were birthdays!”
Harry Allen had gravitated to the piano up on the dais at the side of the great hall, and now he was drumming out jazz to make your heart jump, while Petra and Dick danced. They did not confine themselves to one small space on the floor in the usual way, but circled the whole hall freely. At dinner Lewis had noticed how the relationship of these two had changed since he had first seen them together, that fateful Saturday in June. Then Dick had only been aware of Petra, it seemed, as an excrescence on Clare’s life. Now they were comrades. You saw it in the way they looked at each other, laughed at each other, teased each other. In fact, they counted with each other every minute. This was a development for which Lewis was totally unprepared; for Dick had kept his promise, and since the fiasco of his and Lewis’ holiday at Northeast Harbor had never so much as mentioned Petra the few times they had met. So Lewis had rather taken it for granted that Petra’s naïve and illusioned letter had destroyed any possibility of an honest relation between them. From what ground had the present happy intimacy evolved? Lewis could not guess. When the cake had been brought in and set on the cleared table in front of Petra and she had clapped her hands, Dick who was beside her had kissed her cheek. It was a brotherly caress, hearty and genuine. But Lewis’ heart had stood still. Was this to be the answer? Why not! How unconscionably unimaginative and stupid he had been!
Lewis and Clare were in a position to see the dancers during much of their way around the great hall. But Dick and Petra seemed not aware of the little drawing-room and their audience there. They might have been dancing out under the moon alone, so unconscious they appeared of anybody’s eyes or attention. Dick held Petra as if she were a delightful glass doll that might break. And Petra gave the impression of glass. Brittle. Lovely. Her birthday gown made Lewis think of spun glass, it was so stiff and fragile. Even her fantastically high-heeled slippers seemed glassy. And her forehead, leaning against Dick’s bowed-down forehead in the latest absurd mode of the dance, added the last aspect of brittle fragility to what they were doing.
“Petra and Dick are great friends now,” Clare said suddenly. “You can imagine, Doctor Pryne, how that gratifies me.”
“Yes?” he said. “Yes. It’s very nice.” Lewis did not mind the idiotic sound of his own words. Clare simply did not count enough for him to listen to her. She was less than nothing to his consciousness, with Petra out there in Dick Wilder’s arms, turning on fantastic spun-glass heels to Harry’s intrepid, persistent, absolutely compelling jazz.
Clare was all too aware of Lewis’ indifference. Nothing to-night had gone quite as she had planned it. If she were honest with herself, she would have known that the imperfection of the way the birthday party was going really consisted in its perfection. The object of the party, Petra, had somehow, strangely, unbelievably, taken the center of the stage and held it. Even for her father she had held it. Several times, when Clare had said something directly to Lowell down the table, he had been slow to turn his eyes from his daughter. And once he had not turned them at all—merely answered his wife absently, while he continued to smile at some silly byplay between Dick and Petra. As for Doctor Lewis Pryne—who sat at her right during dinner—his manners were impeccable but his attention, she had known perfectly well, was for Petra. Even when he was not looking at the girl—and to be fair, he scarcely looked at her at all—he heard every silly, childish thing she said, every laugh,—heard them through the things Clare was saying to him. This had never happened to Clare before. To sit at her own table and have all the attention sweep over her and away from her toward another. This was something she had never imagined or planned! It filled her with a sort of wild unbelief in its reality. It was dreamlike. Almost nightmarish.