XI.
BUT there were necessary accommodations, there always had been; Nick inold times, had been the first to own it.... How they had laughed at thePerpendicular People, the people who went by on the other side (sinceyou couldn't be a good Samaritan without stooping over and pokinginto heaps of you didn't know what)! And now Nick had suddenly becomeperpendicular....
Susy, that evening, at the head of the dinner table, saw--in the breaksbetween her scudding thoughts--the nauseatingly familiar faces of thepeople she called her friends: Strefford, Fred Gillow, a giggling foolof a young Breckenridge, of their New York group, who had arrived thatday, and Prince Nerone Altineri, Ursula's Prince, who, in Ursula'sabsence at a tiresome cure, had, quite simply and naturally, preferredto join her husband at Venice. Susy looked from one to the other ofthem, as if with newly-opened eyes, and wondered what life would be likewith no faces but such as theirs to furnish it....
Ah, Nick had become perpendicular!... After all, most people wentthrough life making a given set of gestures, like dance-steps learnedin advance. If your dancing manual told you at a given time to beperpendicular, you had to be, automatically--and that was Nick!
"But what on earth, Susy," Gillow's puzzled voice suddenly came to heras from immeasurable distances, "Are you going to do in this beastlystifling hole for the rest of the summer?"
"Ask Nick, my dear fellow," Strefford answered for her; and: "By theway, where is Nick--if one may ask?" young Breckenridge interposed,glancing up to take belated note of his host's absence.
"Dining out," said Susy glibly. "People turned up: blighting bores thatI wouldn't have dared to inflict on you." How easily the old familiarfibbing came to her!
"The kind to whom you say, 'Now mind you look me up'; and then spend therest of your life dodging-like our good Hickses," Strefford amplified.
The Hickses--but, of course, Nick was with the Hickses! It went throughSusy like a knife, and the dinner she had so lightly fibbed became ahateful truth. She said to herself feverishly: "I'll call him up thereafter dinner--and then he will feel silly"--but only to remember thatthe Hickses, in their mediaeval setting, had of course sternly deniedthemselves a telephone.
The fact of Nick's temporary inaccessibility--since she was nowconvinced that he was really at the Hickses'--turned her distress to amocking irritation. Ah, that was where he carried his principles, hisstandards, or whatever he called the new set of rules he had suddenlybegun to apply to the old game! It was stupid of her not to have guessedit at once.
"Oh, the Hickses--Nick adores them, you know. He's going to marry Coralnext," she laughed out, flashing the joke around the table with all herpracticed flippancy.
"Lord!" grasped Gillow, inarticulate: while the Prince displayed theunsurprised smile which Susy accused him of practicing every morningwith his Mueller exercises.
Suddenly Susy felt Strefford's eyes upon her.
"What's the matter with me? Too much rouge?" she asked, passing her armin his as they left the table.
"No: too little. Look at yourself," he answered in a low tone.
"Oh, in these cadaverous old looking-glasses-everybody looks fished upfrom the canal!"
She jerked away from him to spin down the long floor of the sala, handson hips, whistling a rag-time tune. The Prince and young Breckenridgecaught her up, and she spun back with the latter, while Gillow-it wasbelieved to be his sole accomplishment-snapped his fingers in simulationof bones, and shuffled after the couple on stamping feet.
Susy sank down on a sofa near the window, fanning herself with afloating scarf, and the men foraged for cigarettes, and rang for thegondoliers, who came in with trays of cooling drinks.
"Well, what next--this ain't all, is it?" Gillow presently queried, fromthe divan where he lolled half-asleep with dripping brow. Fred Gillow,like Nature, abhorred a void, and it was inconceivable to him that everyhour of man's rational existence should not furnish a motive for gettingup and going somewhere else. Young Breckenridge, who took the same view,and the Prince, who earnestly desired to, reminded the company thatsomebody they knew was giving a dance that night at the Lido.
Strefford vetoed the Lido, on the ground that he'd just come back fromthere, and proposed that they should go out on foot for a change.
"Why not? What fun!" Susy was up in an instant. "Let's pay somebody asurprise visit--I don't know who! Streffy, Prince, can't you think ofsomebody who'd be particularly annoyed by our arrival?"
"Oh, the list's too long. Let's start, and choose our victim on theway," Strefford suggested.
Susy ran to her room for a light cloak, and without changing herhigh-heeled satin slippers went out with the four men. There was nomoon--thank heaven there was no moon!--but the stars hung over them asclose as fruit, and secret fragrances dropped on them from garden-walls.Susy's heart tightened with memories of Como.
They wandered on, laughing and dawdling, and yielding to the driftingwhims of aimless people. Presently someone proposed taking a nearer lookat the facade of San Giorgio Maggiore, and they hailed a gondola andwere rowed out through the bobbing lanterns and twanging guitar-strings.When they landed again, Gillow, always acutely bored by scenery, andparticularly resentful of midnight aesthetics, suggested a night clubnear at hand, which was said to be jolly. The Prince warmly supportedthis proposal; but on Susy's curt refusal they started their ramblingagain, circuitously threading the vague dark lanes and making for thePiazza and Florian's ices. Suddenly, at a calle-corner, unfamiliar andyet somehow known to her, Susy paused to stare about her with a laugh.
"But the Hickses--surely that's their palace? And the windows all litup! They must be giving a party! Oh, do let's go up and surprise them!"The idea struck her as one of the drollest that she had ever originated,and she wondered that her companions should respond so languidly.
"I can't see anything very thrilling in surprising the Hickses," Gillowprotested, defrauded of possible excitements; and Strefford added: "Itwould surprise me more than them if I went."
But Susy insisted feverishly: "You don't know. It may be awfullyexciting! I have an idea that Coral's announcing her engagement--herengagement to Nick! Come, give me a hand, Streff--and you the other,Fred-" she began to hum the first bars of Donna Anna's entrance in DonGiovanni. "Pity I haven't got a black cloak and a mask...."
"Oh, your face will do," said Strefford, laying his hand on her arm.
She drew back, flushing crimson. Breckenridge and the Prince had sprungon ahead, and Gillow, lumbering after them, was already halfway up thestairs.
"My face? My face? What's the matter with my face? Do you know anyreason why I shouldn't go to the Hickses to-night?" Susy broke out insudden wrath.
"None whatever; except that if you do it will bore me to death,"Strefford returned, with serenity.
"Oh, in that case--!"
"No; come on. I hear those fools banging on the door already." He caughther by the hand, and they started up the stairway. But on the firstlanding she paused, twisted her hand out of his, and without a word,without a conscious thought, dashed down the long flight, across thegreat resounding vestibule and out into the darkness of the calle.
Strefford caught up with her, and they stood a moment silent in thenight.
"Susy--what the devil's the matter?"
"The matter? Can't you see? That I'm tired, that I've got a splittingheadache--that you bore me to death, one and all of you!" She turned andlaid a deprecating hand on his arm. "Streffy, old dear, don't mind me:but for God's sake find a gondola and send me home."
"Alone?"
"Alone."
It was never any concern of Streff's if people wanted to do things hedid not understand, and she knew that she could count on his obedience.They walked on in silence to the next canal, and he picked up a passinggondola and put her in it.
"Now go and amuse yourself," she called after him, as the boat shotunder the nearest bridge. Anything, anything, to be alone, away from thefolly and futility that would be all she had left if Nick wer
e to dropout of her life....
"But perhaps he has dropped already--dropped for good," she thought asshe set her foot on the Vanderlyn threshold.
The short summer night was already growing transparent: a new bornbreeze stirred the soiled surface of the water and sent it lappingfreshly against the old palace doorways. Nearly two o'clock! Nick had nodoubt come back long ago. Susy hurried up the stairs, reassured by themere thought of his nearness. She knew that when their eyes and theirlips met it would be impossible for anything to keep them apart.
The gondolier dozing on the landing roused himself to receive her, andto proffer two envelopes. The upper one was a telegram for Strefford:she threw it down again and paused under the lantern hanging from thepainted vault, the other envelope in her hand. The address it bore wasin Nick's writing. "When did the signore leave this for me? Has he goneout again?"
Gone out again? But the signore had not come in since dinner: of thatthe gondolier was positive, as he had been on duty all the evening.A boy had brought the letter--an unknown boy: he had left it withoutwaiting. It must have been about half an hour after the signora hadherself gone out with her guests.
Susy, hardly hearing him, fled on to her own room, and there, beside thevery lamp which, two months before, had illuminated Ellie Vanderlyn'sfatal letter, she opened Nick's.
"Don't think me hard on you, dear; but I've got to work this thing outby myself. The sooner the better-don't you agree? So I'm taking theexpress to Milan presently. You'll get a proper letter in a day or two.I wish I could think, now, of something to say that would show you I'mnot a brute--but I can't. N. L."
There was not much of the night left in which to sleep, even had asemblance of sleep been achievable. The letter fell from Susy's hands,and she crept out onto the balcony and cowered there, her foreheadpressed against the balustrade, the dawn wind stirring in her thinlaces. Through her closed eyelids and the tightly-clenched fingerspressed against them, she felt the penetration of the growing light,the relentless advance of another day--a day without purpose and withoutmeaning--a day without Nick. At length she dropped her hands, andstaring from dry lids saw a rim of fire above the roofs across the GrandCanal. She sprang up, ran back into her room, and dragging the heavycurtains shut across the windows, stumbled over in the darkness to thelounge and fell among its pillows-face downward--groping, delving for adeeper night....
She started up, stiff and aching, to see a golden wedge of sun on thefloor at her feet. She had slept, then--was it possible?--it mustbe eight or nine o'clock already! She had slept--slept like adrunkard--with that letter on the table at her elbow! Ah, now sheremembered--she had dreamed that the letter was a dream! But there,inexorably, it lay; and she picked it up, and slowly, painfully re-readit. Then she tore it into shreds hunted for a match, and kneeling beforethe empty hearth, as though she were accomplishing some funeral rite,she burnt every shred of it to ashes. Nick would thank her for that someday!
After a bath and a hurried toilet she began to be aware of feelingyounger and more hopeful. After all, Nick had merely said that he wasgoing away for "a day or two." And the letter was not cruel: therewere tender things in it, showing through the curt words. She smiledat herself a little stiffly in the glass, put a dash of red on hercolourless lips, and rang for the maid.
"Coffee, Giovanna, please; and will you tell Mr. Strefford that I shouldlike to see him presently."
If Nick really kept to his intention of staying away for a few days shemust trump up some explanation of his absence; but her mind refused towork, and the only thing she could think of was to take Strefford intoher confidence. She knew that he could be trusted in a real difficulty;his impish malice transformed itself into a resourceful ingenuity whenhis friends required it.
The maid stood looking at her with a puzzled gaze, and Susy somewhatsharply repeated her order. "But don't wake him on purpose," she added,foreseeing the probable effect on Strefford's temper.
"But, signora, the gentleman is already out."
"Already out?" Strefford, who could hardly be routed from his bed beforeluncheon-time! "Is it so late?" Susy cried, incredulous.
"After nine. And the gentleman took the eight o'clock train for England.Gervaso said he had received a telegram. He left word that he wouldwrite to the signora."
The door closed upon the maid, and Susy continued to gaze at her paintedimage in the glass, as if she had been trying to outstare an importunatestranger. There was no one left for her to take counsel of, then--no onebut poor Fred Gillow! She made a grimace at the idea.
But what on earth could have summoned Strefford back to England?
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 11