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.