The Crystal Cup

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

He managed to shut Gita out of his thoughts for a week, and then welcomed her back. And he thought of her not only as a woman but as a case. He understood that case thoroughly. He also knew its cure, but he was helpless even if she loved him and she did not; although he never doubted he could win her if it were not for the malignancy of Fate. If her husband were any man but his best friend!—but like all men’s men of breeding he had a high and inexorable code.

His outbreak at Mrs. Pleyden’s had been irresistible. Well, let her know it. Why not? He was entitled to that much. And he approached her on the night of her party no more than courtesy demanded, and devoted himself to Polly, who always diverted him.

He had asked no questions of Elsie that night he had been summoned to the manor to save Bylant’s life, but he had thought of little else, arriving at conclusions not far from the truth. Whether she had recognized Bylant or believed him to be a felonious intruder, she had defended not her house from outrage but her body; that body a peculiar neurosis had made more sacred than virtue itself. He fancied he could reconstruct the scene! Eustace had been a brute and a fool and got his just deserts. As a man he might sympathize with him but as a scientist he felt only arrogant contempt.

By this time he knew Gita’s history. What either she or Polly had not confided in moments of expansion, Elsie’s keen analytical mind had divined, and she had found both pleasure and profit in discussing the girl with her brother. Pelham felt an immense pity, and if a surgical operation would have cured her he would have contributed his services as impersonally as when he cut a neat incision and extracted a poisonous appendix. But the knife must come out of the blue. It must find its own way—down through the stagnant waters, and release the sap underneath.

He might have been the man to watch it fall if he had not been compelled to walk down that staircase beside her holding the candelabra over her head and feeling as if he were sinking under the weight of the stone in his breast. If the time were two centuries earlier he would have snatched her from Eustace at the foot of the stair and dashed off with her into the darkness. But illusions had fled. That golden haze had gone whence it came. Men had become mere travesties of themselves.

Although his imagination had shown unexpected activities he indulged in no longings to mount with Gita into the empyrean and dwell with her in spiritual contact. He was a man and he wanted her, comprehensively, exclusively. And he wanted her because he loved her; he was suffering from no mere gust of passion. His scientific balance might be restored, he might converse with himself as reasonably about the fatal similarities and prosaic purpose of woman, but he had never denied (being by no means lacking in observation) that men, at times, were intensely personal in their selection; and whether this were due to a sudden alliance between the generative cells and the unconscious, or eugenic suggestion, or fetishes, or propinquity, or a pretty face, or a restless longing for completion, or whatever, the fact remained that man, sometime during his life, unless thymo-centric, wanted one woman in particular and moved heaven and earth to get her. Well, he had come to that pass, and by what special set of phenomena induced was a matter of no interest to him. He wished that codes had never been invented. Certainly that he had met Gita Carteret before he had known Eustace Bylant.

He had suffered torments enough during that winter in New York. Gita and Eustace in that narrow house! Companions, friends, almost intimates. How could the man fail to win her? He began with everything in his favor, and if a man could not convert a friend into a lover when he lived under the same roof with her he must be a poor apology for one. And Geoffrey had the highest admiration for Eustace Bylant.

He had sometimes gone out at night and stood in front of that narrow house, paralyzed in a sort of nightmare; then fleeing like a man possessed. Once he collided with a policeman and had some trouble explaining himself, for the hour was two and he guessed that his eyes were as wild as his thoughts.

But on the night after he extracted the bullet from Bylant’s body he knew that one phase of his torments had been a waste of nerve-energy. Gita could not have been more cruelly indifferent if she had wounded a criminal just out of Sing Sing. And he had received a subtle message from that golden gown and powdered hair. That she had been indulging in an orgy of intimate psychology, his future as well as her own disposed of in rough outline, he was mercifully ignorant, but that the masquerade was in some way connected with himself and the night they had hovered on the verge of an understanding, he knew as well as if she had told him.

But on this he dared not dwell. She was still Bylant’s wife, and Bylant was his patient. He devoted his skill to saving the man’s life, avoided Gita, and turned to Polly for distraction. And for all he knew Gita might really be consumed with remorse; or if undergoing a profound revulsion of feeling, needed only that first interview with her prostrate husband to melt into pity and the determination to atone with a lifetime of friendly devotion. Not love. If that had been latent it would have sprung to life in the moment she had turned on the light and seen him wounded and unconscious at her feet. But there was small consolation in the thought that even if Eustace, pursuing his new advantage, called in the services of an endocrinologist, it would avail him nothing unless Gita loved him. And Gita was by no means the type of woman to translate pity into love. But she might immolate herself, nevertheless.