Her mood had changed from one of restive worry to a sort of mild elation. She stretched out full length before the fire, her hair like the beams of a monstrance as it lay gleaming on the green carpet. The arc of her wide turquoise velvet skirt was broken by her small feet shod in gold dancing slippers. About her throat she wore a tightly plaited gold chain from which depended a scarabeus fluted with lapis lazuli. We were so still we heard Miss Pride moving about her room on the floor below us.
“It’s late,” I said. “I’m afraid I must go down.”
“Go down? But I thought you had agreed.”
I stood up. “You know I didn’t. But if you insist on it, take his flowers.” As I unpinned them, I pricked my finger and I thought how ruinous and beautiful this jewel of blood would be if it were to drop and glisten on her blue-green skirt.
She received the camellias, but as she pinned them to her shoulder, a shudder streamed from her face to her frivolous feet. “I wonder if he . . .”
“If he what?”
“If when he bought them he touched them with his hands. Oh, God!” She covered her face with her fingers, but her eyes were visible through the interstices. She stared up at me with a plea which, being unable to fathom, I could not grant. But as I turned to go, leaving the issue constructed between us like a barrier with no purpose, the girl’s seemingly diverse moods which she had addressed to me since our first words in the drawing-room at tea time now appeared as an unbroken concatenation, and I was enlightened as I saw the uniformity of her whims. I divined, through an intuition which had never been exercised in me before, either because of a physical immaturity or because of the want of circumstances, that there was a sole exigency that could drive her to this corner where, for all her insolence, she was terrified. And as I realized that not the satanic particles but the organic chemistry of her composition had led her to this replacement of myself for the evening (a replacement she was determined, I now knew, to make permanent), I was ready to withdraw any claims I might have had since her need was so much greater than my own. My delay at the door, occasioned by this certain understanding, may have communicated its derivation to her, although she said, to my surprise (for in this instant after I realized that my hand had been half a minute on the door knob, I almost expected her to confirm my suspicions, to admit frankly that she was pregnant), “Take back the flowers and go to dinner with him. I will see you all at Berthe’s.” I had not fully turned around and I envisaged the flowers, their magenta petals protecting the golden filaments of the core, and as I went back to retrieve them (though I no longer wanted them, for by their exchange of hands they had been bruised and their significance had been polluted) my eyes traversed the window where, by arc light from Louisburg Square, the cold December snow was falling, and I remembered, as we remember comfort when the crisis of our pain descends and hints of our recovery are given us, that Philip had told me once that camellias bloomed in midwinter in New Orleans.
The single peal, three flights down, preceded a moment the six bells struck by the nautical clock on Hopestill’s mantel. “It’s Philip,” I said, as I bent over to take the flowers. My utterance of his Christian name, upon the heels of my recollection of his report that camellias bloomed this time of year in the south (for, unable to visualize such a phenomenon, I had merely thought the words, Philip said . . .) imparted to my flesh an inchoate, sensual delight, similar as I perceived to that I had experienced when, identifying my own body with Hopestill’s to make my diagnosis of her altered nature, my comprehension had not been established by logic but by the completion of my own ripening. Hopestill still lay before the fire in her strategic immobility. It was strategic because she appeared transfixed by an invisible pinion to the floor as if, like the possum or the dung-beetle playing dead, she would come to life at once upon my departure. Her eyes, apparently shut, took in each motion it was necessary for me to make to unpin the flowers from her shoulder and, glancing at the bits of shining eyeball, visible through her long, sparse auburn lashes and seeing once in that brief space of my perusal, the gold-flecked iris that enshrined the eye’s soul, I knew myself to be in the presence of desperation so rarefied at this climax reared up by the signal at the outer door that it resembled lethargy. And simultaneously, I knew that no one else would see what I had seen and that she would go scot-free. Although at this point in her there was ambush and a cause for it, both would be obliterated; the sins would be exorcised not by the psycho-analyst but by concealing custom.
When I had left her and had stepped into the corridor, the sensation that summarized the scene in Hopestill’s sitting-room was not one of anger or indignation, had nothing in it more unfavorable to her than my old and now enfeebled antipathy to the child in the Barstow dining-room. I directed the movement of my body to partake of the grace of my dinner dress, desiring, as though Miss Pride’s dim hallway were lined with spectators, my organism to proclaim through its flattering draperies that the force inspiring me was one of fleshly love, akin to the passion that had undone Hopestill and with devoted obstinacy still clung to her in her dilemma. The love I felt, which like a rapid poison circulated throughout me, had no object, and until I was on the last flight of stairs from the top of which I saw Philip’s hat and gloves on the vestibule table, my desire did not focus, for until then, the elusive lover I had tried to construct was that unnamed, unacknowledged man whose impregnation of Hopestill was also an exegesis of my own changing self. Then, attaching my attention to a well-known object, for the space of ten seconds, I was determined to finish with him what I had so indecisively begun. But the moment my desire materialized, it vanished; the shame that recalled me to my usual timidity was incommensurate with its cause: at the same time that I took in the doctor’s bowler and the gray suède gloves, I heard Miss Pride’s voice through the closed door of her bedroom: “You may go now, Ethel. I am ready to undress.” The direction, which was probably superfluous to the well-trained maid who knew by heart her mistress’s habits, fell upon my ear like an injunction repeated to herself by a nun, and I could no more imagine Miss Pride in the deshabille she painstakingly kept for the eyes only of her mirrors, than I could have imagined a Mother Superior in her nightdress. I took no pleasure now in the décolletage of my new frock, and thought it would be improved by the addition of a shawl thrown about my shoulders. But the atavistic reaction was not complete as it had been formerly, when I was a child and had loathed my mother for those qualities I had now discovered in myself. For I had gone too far, by becoming myself a protagonist, to believe blindly any longer that Miss Pride’s was the ideal pattern: there was, in the tone of her voice, cold and neutral, a suggestion of ingrown, conceited lewdness which, having no sexuality to modify, advertised the secret nudity of the old, arid carcass.
The doctor had been shown into the library where he stood inaudibly conversing with a large young man, shaped like an athlete, but one whose muscles had relaxed already and beneath whose chin a soft second growth had begun. They turned to greet me and Dr. McAllister introduced me to his friend, Frank Whitney. The doctor was nervous and would not sit down. He said, “I’ve just lost my first patient and if there’s anything here besides Grandfather Pride’s port, I’d like to resort to the traditional sedative. Do you keep any whiskey here?” We did. I brought out a decanter of whiskey and a tumbler. Philip poured the glass three-quarters full. “I can blame only myself, although some kind-hearted person said the x-ray reading had been at fault. It was a skull-fracture and I advised against operating.” He drank half the whiskey and then, pausing, with the glass still in his hand, he said, “How stupid! I poured out three times as much as I wanted,” yet his hand remained suspended, clasping the tumbler and I knew that he wanted the rest of it, indeed, probably wanted another double portion, but that his will denied it to him.
“Hopestill is here,” I said. The response on his face to my announcement was a compressed version of what I had seen on the first afternoon I met her when he r
aised his hand and touched her hair. But his look was not one of surprise and I wondered again what she had written him.
“That’s convenient,” he said. “Frank decided at the last minute to come along. We can all go together. By the way, some friends of Hope’s rang me up a little while ago and said they were stopping by here . . . perhaps we can offer them a drink, what do you say?”
“Hope wasn’t expecting to have dinner with us,” I said.
“I’m sure we can persuade her,” put in Frank Whitney.
“Oh, yes, I have no doubt we can,” I replied. “She’s very anxious to see you, Philip.”
“That’s good of her.”
“She’s come back to stay. Did you know?”
Hopestill entered the room. The animal that had matured in Philip’s disciplined person, despite the herculean efforts of his Puritan will, strained towards its meeting with that other specimen of the same genus that I had seen rioting in the cold prison of the girl recumbent before her hearth. I turned away as he went to greet her and discovered Frank Whitney’s dreamy brown eyes regarding me with wonder. I had picked up Philip’s half-emptied glass and downed it. “Do you often do that?” inquired the young man. “I mean, drink that much whiskey neat?”
“No,” I told him. “But it’s a good idea.”
Philip was telling Hopestill that her friends were coming here. “The person who telephoned me was named Morgan,” he said.
“Oh, yes, of course. I know him,” replied Hopestill. “He’s from Long Island. From a branch of the family famous for its lack of fame. Quite a barbarian he is, but I’m rather fond of him.”
“Morgan?” said Mr. Whitney as if it were a name he had heard in some unsavory connection. “I don’t know any Morgans.” He uttered it as an accusatory epithet, as if its etymology had vested the name with respectability but its root meaning glared forth in the pronunciation; it was as if he had said, “A rum runner? I don’t know any rum runners.”
The door-bell rang, bringing us, in a moment, Mr. Morgan and a couple who were introduced with a great deal of laughter as the Cabots, the reason for the hilarity being that their name was really Babbitt. Mr. Babbitt who, because of an unfortunate obtrusion of his mouth, resembled an animal that rhymed with both Cabot and Babbitt (I pointed this out to Frank Whitney later and he said gravely, “That’s not our kind of joke.”), came up to me as if we had known one another all our lives and said, “Where’s the booze, honey?”
“The drinks are coming now,” I said. Ethel had brought in glasses and ice at Hope’s order.
“That’s dandy. Are you going to Berthe von Happel’s shindig?” I replied that I was and remarked that I was sure it would be a very lavish party since the Countess had dispensed with the dinner party and had expended all her efforts on the midnight supper.
“Oh, she’ll give us our money’s worth tonight, bless her royal heart. I nipped in this afternoon for five minutes to see if I could lend a hand, and had a look into that gorgeous drawing-room of hers. Would you believe it, she has a Christmas tree—a tannenbaum, as she insists—reaching to the ceiling, an absolute smack in Louis Quinze’s face. And she has poinsettias in green tubs all over the house, for all the world like a department store.”
“She’s really appalling,” said his wife, “but it’s impossible not to adore her.”
This was a brazen untruth, but Hopestill, Philip, and Frank Whitney all enthusiastically seconded it. The irony of the expressions, “Isn’t that absolutely the case!” “I love her parties, particularly her Christmas parties,” and “She’s a jewel, I’m head over heels in love with Berthe!” was so deeply embedded that had I not known that the authors of these praises actually despised the Countess, I should have thought them a cult convening to eulogize a high priestess. Thus, when they described her drawing-room to someone who had never seen it, they appeared to find it enchanting, and it was only the initiated who knew that some such statement as “She has two spurious Watteaus which are so charming one doesn’t mind their being frauds,” was actually inspired by the most savage spitefulness. The stranger, whose ear missed the note of contempt, at once admired the Bostonians for their defense of the Countess and felt little interest in the house itself, believing the word “charming” had been used out of simple generosity.
“Do you suppose Kalenkoff will be there?” asked Mr. Babbitt and the whole room laughed. Accustomed to their own habits of inbreeding and holding the common notion that royalty east of Austria was worthless because it was so abundant, these American aristocrats seemed to frequent the Louis Quinze salon chiefly for the purpose of snubbing its titled habitués. An obscure professor of physics from the University of Paris fared better at their hands than an arch-duke, and the dashing Baron Kalenkoff was invited nowhere while a wealthy British manufacturer of photographic equipment had a standing invitation to the best houses and clubs. They were so perversely American, so vehemently uninterested in any culture but that which their ancestors had found acceptable that they even went out of their way to offend the Countess’ friends by their intentionally inaccurate pronunciations of German place names or their smug misconstruction of political philosophy or even, though this was regarded as démodé, by bragging of the excellence of the American sanitary system. On the one Saturday the year before when the Admiral had put in an appearance, he had said to Baron Kalenkoff, “Is it true, mate, that you Russian chaps sleep with dogs in your bunks?” The Baron flashed him a friendly smile. “It is customary,” he said. “And when our guests are shown to their rooms they do not find detective novels and magazines on the night table to amuse them but they find the master’s best dog in the bed. If the guest is any kind of gentleman, he will refuse this extravagant kindness and will insist that he be given the second best dog. You may be sure, sir, that if he does not hesitate to climb into bed with his host’s prize wolfhound, he will never be asked again.” The Admiral was flabbergasted by this leg-pull and moved away, remarking gruffly to Mrs. Frothingham who quite agreed with him, “Those Russians have no sense of humor.”
Mr. Morgan alone did not join in the laughter and I surmised that he did not know the Countess. He had said nothing after the introductions and I quite erroneously thought that he was ill at ease. But when the laughter had subsided, he stepped forward shakily and said, “Don’t you know I’m to be congratulated?” Mr. Babbitt then informed us that Mr. Morgan was celebrating his coming into a vast fortune through the death of his grandmother. To my astonishment, I heard Philip propose a toast.
“Thank you, thank you,” said the heir, bowing at his stocky waist. “Somebody is missing from this conference, isn’t somebody? It looks like a damned little conference, and what is this place we’re holding it in? The Atheneum?”
“The missing person,” said Mr. Babbitt, familiarly nudging me with his elbow, “beg pardon, the missing link is Miss Nanny Brewster whom you left in the ladies’ retiring room at the Ritz bar.”
“Nanny Brewster?” cried Hopestill shrilly. “What do you mean by bringing that street-walker to my house?”
Morgan patted her shoulder and said soothingly, “There, there, she isn’t in the Atheneum. Didn’t you hear John say she was in the W.C.?”
Frank Whitney abruptly presented his back to the company, whispering to me, “I remember him now,” and began to read the titles of a section of books on Far Eastern studies. In a moment I joined him, preferring his pastime to the discussion of Miss Brewster’s whereabouts, but not before Mr. Babbitt murmured to me with a moist laugh, “I don’t know which one of them is getting the run-around.” We were some distance from the others, Mr. Whitney and I, when he growled, “Bad blood is the rule with those Long Islanders. How can Hope stomach a buffoon like Harry Morgan?” And then, because Mr. Babbitt seemed to be approaching us again, he said, taking a book down, “Here’s a funny thing, a Japanese novel translated into German. I call that too much of a good thing.” Then when
we saw that we were to be left alone since Mr. Babbitt was joining his friends, Frank Whitney told me about Morgan.
Mr. Harry Morgan was thirty years old. His equine face was being elongated year by year by the withdrawal of his black hair, and was being softened year by year by good living which the death of his grandmother, happily coinciding with Christmas, was evidently to make even better. We read in the newspapers that scions of famous families have gone to Hollywood to join, usually in a social capacity, the “film colony,” and it is hard to tell, from the impartial journalists, whether the colonists or the immigrant are hereby benefited. Mr. Morgan was such a person, although, if his credentials had been gone into, it would have been found that he was so distantly related to any of the celebrated tycoons whose name he bore that he was no more entitled to a share in their glory than is a person named Shakespeare entitled to the homage of literary people. But it happened that this Mr. Morgan was extremely wealthy and few knew that his money came from the maternal side of his family, named Schumacher, and had been made in a variety of enterprises, including brewing, the manufacture of artificial limbs, razor blades, hooks and eyes, and the breeding of longhorn cattle. But the fact of the money, not its history, was the important thing. It was likely that had his father’s name been Schumacher and he had not used Morgan at all or had used it as a middle name, he would have been as readily accepted in California. However, “the wealthy young Morgan” was a title of more tone than “Schumacher, the artificial limb heir.” At the same time that he maintained an establishment in New York near a café called the Lancelot Club which he owned, he not only frequently visited Sun Valley, Idaho, and while he was about it looked in at his Beverly Hills cottage, but he was also, and had been for years, a student at Harvard College. There was a rumor, Mr. Whitney told me, never confirmed, that he had once made application for a Rhodes’ scholarship.
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