The brief level voice of Savina Grove arranging over the telephone an hour, very late in the afternoon, for him to call, gave Lee a comparatively long time in which to examine his feelings, particularly in connection with Savina. His state of mind, his intentions, he realized, should be clear for the moment when he saw her. In general they were; but the particulars, the details of any probable immediate action, evaded him. He should have to consult her about them. What he most firmly grasped of all was that he couldn't—what, in reality, he breathed to himself was they—remain in New York. The comparatively orderly and delayed legal arrangement projected by the Morrises and Mina Raff seemed to have no application to the impetuosity of the situation before him. However, he was advancing at a speed, to a position, for which there was no warrant. None at all. Perhaps Savina, satisfied by the one occasion which—he had been so careful to insist—must be the last, would regard him as merely importunate.
Strictly held to discretion by the fact of Fanny, Savina might have found him then—more available than when free—only the acceptable model of an indiscreet man. Yet, he reminded himself, he hadn't left Eastlake, broken wide open his home, on account of Savina. This, he again insisted, would have happened independently of her; his life in Eastlake had broken up of its own accord; its elements had been too tenuous for the withstanding any longer of the stress of existence. But, he was forced to add, the collapse had been hastened by his knowledge of Savina. And this brought him to the examination of what, at bottom, she meant to him. What was her significance, her bulk, in his life?
That could be approached only through an understanding of his feeling for her, what it was now and what it might become; not conspicuously easy of comprehension. Lee tried the old, the long inaccurately used, word, love. He asked himself the question squarely—did he love Savina? Damned if he knew! He might reply to that, he thought ruefully, if he grasped what love was, what the blasted phrase meant. As it was, it seemed to Lee, a dictionary of synonyms would be helpless to make all its varied significances distinct. He tried a simpler approach—did he want to be with Savina more than with anyone else? At last he had put a question to himself that he could answer: he most assuredly preferred being with Savina to anyone else he knew. But that alone would not have taken him to her.
A simple desire on his part, naive like a daisy, could not have overthrown the structure of his being. Yet the connection between the two, the woman and the event, was undeniable, his impulse to go to her now irresistible. That last word, as fully as any, expressed what lately had happened to him. He was considering the occurrences logically while the fact was that logic hadn't been touched on, summoned, once. He had moved emotionally and not intellectually; he hadn't known, from hour to hour, in what direction he would proceed. Certainly nothing could be said in his defense on the score of common sense; that, though, didn't disturb him; at a time when he might have been said to rely on it, common sense had failed him utterly. He had thrown that over his shoulder. Nor was he searching for an exterior justification of his present anomalous position, for, briefly, an excuse; excuses were the furthest of all things from his mind. The truth was that he was decidedly exhilarated, as though he had left the hard narrow road for a gallop over the green. He was merely dwelling on, analyzing, the present as it was becoming the newly promising, the opening, future.
But he did need to understand—for an attitude, a choice of speech, if nothing else—his feeling for Savina. It consisted principally in the tyrannical desire to be with her, to sink in the immeasurable depths of her passion, and there lose all consciousness of the trivial mundane world. That, Lee felt, given the rest, the fact that he was here as he was, was sufficient; but—again still—he had had no voice in it. The passion had inundated him in the manner of an incoming tide and a low-water rock. Abruptly, after a certain misleading appearance of hesitation on the part of the waves, he had gone under. Well, it was very pleasant. In his case the celebrated maxims were wrong.
He left this, for the moment, and returned to what, actually, lay ahead of him. Would Savina go away with him, leave the correct William, the safety of their New York house in the style of eighteen-eighty? Lee considered in her two impulses, not alike—her overwhelming passion, herself generally; and her admission, no, cry, that she loved him, or the special part he had in her. It rather looked as though he'd be successful. It did for a fact. He had not been idle through all the day, but had drawn from the Harriman Bank twenty thousand dollars. So much had not been necessary; it was very bad business to segregate in idleness such a sum of money now; but he enjoyed the extravagance of it. Prudence, frugality, was no longer a factor in his affairs.
His present personal liberty, more complete than it had ever been before—than, he added lightly, it might ever be again—was astonishingly soothing. Sitting comfortably in a room in his customary hotel, there wasn't a pressure that could be brought to bear on him. It was now twenty minutes past four, he was to go to Savina at a quarter to six, and until then there was nothing, nothing, to force him this way or that: no directors' meetings, gabbling East-lake figures, responsibility, housewife or children. He hadn't realized the extent to which he had been surrounded and confined, the imponderable mass of what he had not only been indifferent to but actually disliked. He could lie down—he had been up the entire past night—and be called in an hour; he could sit as he was, in an unbuttoned waistcoat with his legs comfortably spread out; he could motor or walk on Fifth Avenue; smoke; drink—all in an inviolable security of being.
Or, going back to that moment when he had, so mistakenly, turned aside
from visionary promptings to a solid comfortable career, he might—what
was it?—write. Perhaps his sharp regret at the loss of his youth was
premature, youth itself comparatively unimportant. But no, that would
involve him in fresh distasteful efforts, imperceptibly it would build
up a whole new world of responsibilities: writing would be arduous,
editors captious, and articles, stories, books, tie him back again to
all that from which he had so miraculously escaped. Savina would be
enough. What a beautiful body, so unexpectedly full, she had; how
astounding, intoxicating, was the difference between what she seemed to
be and what she was. Lee Randon thought with amused pity of the files
of men who must have passed by her, with the most considerate bows, in
ignorance of the inner truth.
That discovery, while, naturally, it had not been entirely reserved
for him, had accumulated in a supreme delight, been kept back, like the
best of all presents, for the last. He was glad that it wasn't too
late for him to enjoy it. Here, suddenly, intervening in the midst of
a prosaic drudgery, a tepid and meaningless period, was a magnificent
relief. By God, would he take advantage of it! Would he! There was a
knock at the door, and the hotel valet hung a freshly pressed suit
in the closet; the shoes into which he intended to change were in a
perfection of readiness; laid out were a heavy blue silk shirt and a
dull yellow tie. Lee got these various carefully selected articles of
dress slowly, exactly, on. His pearl pin Fanny had given him! Well, it
was a good pearl, selected personally by a celebrated dealer; and Lee
was obliged to her, nothing more. He lighted a cigarette, collected his
hat and gloves, his overcoat and stick, and descended in the elevator in
a mood of unrestrained enjoyment.
The door attendant, who knew him, whistled for a taxi-cab, commenting lightly on the visible accident to his jaw. But, in spite of it, Lee had an appearance, as he phrased it, of good luck. The world, he said, was evidently in favor of Mr. Randon. The latter agreed that it had such a look. He was positively jovial. He dismissed the cab before the familiar entrance on East Sixty-sixth Street, and was admitted immediately: the servant caught his coat, and he went into the drawing-room. There had been, he saw, a tea; the confusion lingering from a crowd was evident; the cups, on all the available surfaces, had not been removed; in a corner were the skeleton-like iron music racks of a small orchestra; ash trays were overflowing; and a sealskin muff, with a bunch of violets pinned to it, had been left.
Savina had gone upstairs, but she would be down at once. Lee was turned away from the door when she entered; she was wearing a cloth dress of dull red—hadn't he heard it called Cuba color?—with a heavy girdle of grotesque intertwined silver figures. With a single glance behind her she swept forward into Lee's arms, her mouth held up to his.