“The greatest tenor since Caruso—”
“I never heard Caruso,” Lynn told her. But she had not been thinking of the childlike and entertaining Scarletti.
IT WAS NOT very late when Lynn reached home. Jennie was out, and Lynn had the apartment to herself. She felt wide-awake, stimulated, almost overstimulated. She thought, self-scornfully, Just because you’ve dined in a penthouse and listened to an operatic tenor free of charge, and prewar wine and played bridge with a famous lawyer! Laugh it off! But she wasn’t able to laugh it off. She observed herself in Jennie’s mirror, for once entering that untidy bedroom without a feeling that she would like to go through it with a rag-bag, a vacuum cleaner, and about a million square feet of fresh air. She leaned her hands on the dressing-table top and surveyed her flushed, small face and very shining eyes. Her wrap dropped from her bare-shoulders, and she regarded her reflection, “rose-quartz pagoda,” satin cap of black hair, curved, half-smiling lips. She said aloud, solemnly, “Society becomes you, darling!”
The gardenias held their deep fragrance but were dropping, turning slightly brown and curling at the waxen edges as if they had been put in a slow oven. Lynn unpinned them and went into the living room to hunt for a small vase. She found one and put the flowers in water, carefully unwinding the cruelty of wires from their hard stems with little exclamations of compunction.
No, she was not sleepy. She turned the dials of Tom’s homemade radio idly and listened to dim snatches of distant jazz, loud screams of local jazz, and the complaining voice of static for a few minutes. Finally, silencing the machine, she undressed lingeringly.
Such a happy evening. Such a glorious apartment. Such a delightful company of four. Such a charming host. Well, why shouldn’t he be? she argued to herself, as if against some unspoken disloyalty. He has everything—position, money, brilliance, and the most enormous acquaintance and experience.
She slipped her striped flannel robe over her nightgown, tied the cord about her slim waist, and thrust her feet into slippers. She couldn’t be hungry after dinner! But she was. She was rummaging in the icebox when Jennie came in.
“Home, Lynn?”
“Yes—I’m out here—be right in—”
Lynn arrived in the living-room with a glass of pale milk in one hand and a chicken bone in the other.
“For God’s sake,” said Jennie blankly, “didn’t they feed you tonight?”
“And how! Darling, such food! Cocktails, caviar in blocks of ice, super-soup, sole Marguery, partridge, wine, hearts of lettuce, individual Alaskas—”
“Stop, you’re driving me crazy!”
Jennie fled to the icebox, returning bearing a ravaged-looking bone, fixed Lynn with a reproachful eye. “And I had spaghetti and beer!” she said.
“Good time?”
“No. Yes. I’ve got to stop seeing Slim. He’s serious and poor. I’m getting to like him, sort of. Darned if I know why. First thing you know I’ll go soft on the situation and he’ll have me living in a hen coop in Jersey yet. Not for this baby.”
Lynn, not listening, said excitedly, “Jennie, it was a most marvelous party, really. Look, gardenias”—she gestured toward the little vase—“and bridge—and Scarletti sang—”
“How’s the new boy friend?”
“Boy friend?” Lynn’s eyes were wide.
“Drop the lashes over the baby stare. Dwight, the lad who gets ‘em out of the hoosegow, for a price.”
“Oh, he’s a dear,” said Lynn wholeheartedly.
“Huh,” said Jennie, gnawing a bone. “Exit Tom.”
“Jennie, don’t be absurd—as if Tom could ever—as if Mr. Dwight—oh, you’re crazy,” cried Lynn, entangled in odds and ends of sentences.
“Yeah. Crazy like a fox, that’s me!”
“But Jennie, he’s married, he’s way over forty, he isn’t the least bit interested in me. Besides, I love Tom!” Lynn reminded her, flaming.
“I know you love Tom,” said Jennie soothingly. “But the rest of it doesn’t make sense. Married? What does that mean? Way over forty—that’s a good laugh, too! And of course he isn’t interested in you; he sends you gardenias out of charity. Only, I’m telling you that Mr. David Dwight is just about as harmless as a serpent.”
“He asked me,” remarked Lynn, subsiding slightly, “to bring you to one of his parties.”
“He did? Well,” said Jennie, slinging the bone with accuracy into the scrap basket, “that’s the best news I’ve heard since the stock market crashed and show girls lost their stables. How about catching a little sleep?”
7
ON THE KNEES OF THE GODS
IT WAS A LONG TIME BEFORE LYNN SLEPT. JENNIE’S idiocies were barbed. Absurd, impossible to think that Dwight was personally interested in her, Lynn Harding. Why should he be, with all the world from which to choose? She liked him frankly enough. But she hadn’t a significant thought for anyone but Tom. Perhaps she’d been foolish to think this evening so important. It had gone to her head a little. It had been so differently from anything she had ever experienced. If Dwight had made pretty speeches to her it was because his profession was, partly, speechmaking, and because he said just such things to every woman he met. Tomorrow night she would see Tom again, and tell him about the party, and for a little while she would remember it with pleasure and then she’d forget it; and that was that.
She smiled, and, suddenly as a child, fell fathoms deep into sleep.
Blocks away, David Dwight was walking, still softly as a cat, about his library. Wilkins, yawning, waited discreetly in the background to see his employer into bed. Dwight looked at a small gold clock on his desk. Not yet two o’clock. He knew several all-night clubs. Not worthwhile to go there, he said to himself yawning, but he had never felt less like sleep in his life.
A pretty girl. But he had known girls and women far prettier. An intelligent girl. That didn’t mean much either; he had known women of signal brilliance, and after a while they, too, had bored him.
But little Lynn—there was something tremendously appealing about her; something fresh and radiant and untouched; something quaintly serious. But she could laugh, as a child laughs, with spontaneity, and her eyelids would crinkle and there was the unexpected fingerprint of a dimple in her cheek. Her left cheek. He hadn’t been as interested in a girl in months. Or was it years?
What about this sex business anyway?—he thought vaguely—stupid or ugly or beautiful or mysterious, depending upon how you viewed it and when you viewed it. Before and after, like the advertisements. Indefinable, no matter how much print was wasted on it. You met someone—and that was that. Unreasonable, unreasoning.
He must see her again. He would see her again.
He must walk as delicately as Agag. There was no immediacy about it. When a man left the careless twenties and the casual thirties behind him he grew to know the value of making haste slowly, of savoring the moments, as a gourmet swirls the Napoleon brandy in the great crystal glass, aware of its perfume, and permits it to slide, drop by burning, smooth drop, over his palate. The girl in her dusky pink frock was like spring. And you grew to value spring, to cherish it, to take each day in your hands as if it were breakable and infinitely precious, and exact from it the last drop of heartbreaking fragrance, the last atom of star dust.
He thought briefly of Sarah. Frowned. Sarah—Sarah might make trouble. But perhaps not. Still, he thought easily, he could handle Sarah.
He made no plans, uttered no definitions. He was not a seducer of innocence. Seduction was abhorrent to him. He called it by another name, by several names. Every love affair into which he entered had its special glamor, its exceptional romance; he loved like a boy, like a mature man, and for the first time; and loved the more ardently because it would not last, because in the nature of things it could not endure. Knowing this, he said, each time, This is the last time, this will not perish.
Therefore, he did not say to himself, in words, This girl attracts me. I shall possess her. Few men do.
&
nbsp; Any love affair was, with him, upon the knees of the gods. No one, he least of all, knew what tomorrow might bring. Sometimes, the quarry ran down, the capture effected, he would wake to find a woman in his arms; would wake, grateful, astonished, and superbly moved emotionally. Later when it was over, he would ask himself how it had happened. “I did not will it. It was not my fault.”
The anchorite is not more mentally chaste than the true Casanova. For to the true Casanova every woman is the first, every woman is the last, love is as sentimental as an old-fashioned valentine, every love is the goal and the end of the road, each victory brings amazement.
These are the men who never grow up, who do not pass perceptibly from adolescence into maturity, who are forever seeking the impossible, forever demanding the static and the stable of something as variable as the seasons and the winds; who look to the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, and who say finally, it is tinsel after all, but the next rainbow shall not fail me. And who, insecure and somehow unsure of themselves, seek always to prove to themselves their own potence.
Of such men was Dwight, one of that charming, tragic, and misinterpreted company whose opprobrium is so much more than they deserve because they mean no harm, and so much less, also because they mean no harm, and whose day of reckoning is blacker than any rumor because the other days have dawned so bright with promise. This is the company whose end is the Kiplingesque one of “sittin’ and thinkin’,” who, having grasped the shadow for the substance, cry out upon life as a cheater, and believe themselves cheated—never knowing that it was always the other way about.
So David Dwight drew no mental pencil marks through his own and Lynn Harding’s name, murmuring interrogatively, Friendship, hate, indifference, love, kiss, court, marry. Merely he went to bed thinking that he had spent a delightful evening; thinking that even though his extravagances had been notable during the past year or so, he was bound to win the Carson case when it came up on the calendar in the fall, and thus retrieve his slightly dejected fortunes; thinking too that he had never felt better in his life and that tomorrow was another day.
Girls should always have gray eyes, a little inquiring, a little mischievous, tremendously trusting and eager and shining; they should always wear a sleek blackbird’s cap of hair with a dark arrow pointing the way upon a smooth white forehead. They should have a fugitive, elusive dimple, always in the left cheek, and a black beauty mark to tempt the beholder at the corner of a very young, very red mouth. They should be small and slenderly rounded, and they should always wear dusky pink, the colour of afterglow in summer—
Such girls were always kind, of course, gentle but not docile, spirited but not shrewish. Such girls should be protected and befriended—
He believed it. So much so that a few days later, blessing the legal business which still brought him to the Seacoast Building, he waited at noontide, impatient as a boy, just outside the doors of her office, in the crowded corridor. And when she came out, brave in a spring suit as gray as her eyes, but with a small scarlet hat for gaiety, as bright as her lips, he said, feeling tremendously young and highhearted and excited, “Well, how about lunch?”
She was glad to see him; said so. Said, also, with a delicious small of scowl of indecision, “I haven’t much time. I have to be out of the office this afternoon. I’ve made an appointment”—she looked at her watch—“in just an hour.”
“We’ll go downstairs to the Gavarin then,” he suggested. “That will give us more time, won’t it? She hesitated, nodded. Tom came by, seeing no one but herself, taking her arm in his firm, unconsciously hurting grasp.
“Lunch, honey?”
She said, a little embarrassed, “I’m sorry, Tom, I didn’t know you were going to be free.”
Then he recognized David Dwight, standing there beside her, so sure of himself, so infernally well dressed—smells of money, said Tom to himself with considerable heat—damned fop!
“That’s all right.” He spoke to Dwight; he said, “Good morning, sir,” in accents that endowed Mr. Dwight with a long gray beard, a limp, and a rheumy eye. Then he was off, ahead of them, saying over his shoulder, “See you tonight, Lynn,” and swinging that shoulder and its mate with some self-consciousness.
Dwight looked after him. “Good-looking boy,” he commented. “I’ve seen him before, haven’t I? I don’t exactly place him.”
Lynn explained, as they moved toward the elevators. “Tom Shepard, he’s Mr. Norton’s private secretary.”
“Oh, yes,” recalled Dwight in a tone of complete dismissal.
She was annoyed. She was annoyed at herself for being annoyed. What right had David Dwight, no matter who he was, or any other man for that matter, to take that tone toward Tom—her Tom? On the other hand, why shouldn’t he? Tom was, of course, nothing to him. She was somewhat bewildered by her small, sparkling flare of anger, like a little rocket; and by the bleak, blank commonsensical stick it immediately displayed, burned out, falling to the ground.
They lunched well if not elaborately; and talked a great deal about nothing in particular.
They had reached the salad course, and Dwight was lighting a cigarette, when Lynn took her eyes from his vivid face for a moment and looked up to see a girl whom she knew through Jennie, slipping between the tables, smiling slightly, followed by a tall, thin, stooped young man with a sensitive weak mouth and fine eyes.
Why, it’s Mara Burt, said Lynn to herself, and called out, “Oh, Mara!” and the other girl stopped a moment to smile and wave. She indicated with a gesture to her escort that she preferred a table farther back in the room. They moved on and sat down.
“That’s an attractive girl,” Dwight commented. “Rather the baby-faced type, but what lovely red hair. Bank employee?”
“No, but she works in the building, in a branch insurance office on the thirtieth floor,” Lynn replied. “I haven’t seen her for some time.”
“I wish I could persuade a pretty girl to look at me as she is looking at her companion,” Dwight sighed, “all ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’ and big eyes. She is certainly making a play for that young man—lucky devil.”
Lynn said abstractedly, “I don’t think so, she’s married, you know.” And Dwight shouted with laughter.
“That’s classic. Speaking of young me—and pretty girls—what about this Shepard boy?”
His eyes were intent on her own. Kind eyes, she thought, quizzical, understanding. Her own fell to the modest diamond on her right hand. He probably knew about her and Tom now; possibly Sarah had told him. She answered honestly, “We—we can’t get married. Not now, that is.”
A bald little statement. He understood it in all its implications. His eyes did not change, his face was impassive, but a little rat of anger sharpened its teeth in his brain. Of course! It would happen. He looked at Lynn with coldness veiled by an impersonal friendly interest. She was not nearly so pretty as he had thought her. A quite ordinary little girl, like millions of others, like hundreds, right in this suddenly oppressive building. And a quite ordinary boy, who had an average job and wouldn’t get any further ahead, whose build was football, but whose brains were ping–pong. Two very commonplace little people planning a wedding day and a walk-up flat, dishes and babies, slippers, radio, the movies—
He said gently, “You’re very young—”
“I know it”—she looked at him, grey eyes black, the pupils dilated—“and so is he. We—we’ve left each other free. It’s better that way. I want to keep on with my job, I like it awfully. I’m crazy about it.” Her small firm chin was set, held a little high; she made a funny, hopeless little gesture with the hand which wore the ring. “Tom won’t hear of my marrying him until—until he gets ahead. He doesn’t want me to work. So there we are!” Her face was grave, even a little melancholy. Then she laughed up at him. “Sarah doesn’t approve at all,” she admitted. “Sarah doesn’t believe in marriage. She’s all for careers. I don’t believe Sarah’s ever been in love, ever in all her life!” said Lynn with
unconscious brutality and patronage.
Ah, had she not? He knew, he knew very well. His heart tightened.
“How old is Tom?”
She told him.
“And you? You told me once. Tell me again.”
She obeyed. He laughed, suddenly, very much relieved.
“Infants!” he mocked her.
Twenty-two and twenty-three; not planning to marry yet; tomorrow was another day. How had he ever thought her ordinary, even for a moment? How had he ever fancied her like anyone in the world, even so briefly? She was unique.
Competition is the life of several trades.
He sad happily, “Never mind Sarah—suppose you bring Tom—and that model girl with whom you live—Joan? Betty?
“Jennie,” Lynn corrected, laughing.
“Jennie, then. Bring her and Tom to the house; we’ll throw a party—for you. A very young party—not, perhaps, altogether in years. Whom would you like to meet? Gossip rehashers, otherwise columnists, stage or motion-picture folk, artists, writers? Or just people?”
Her eyes danced. She said, “Anyone you say. It will be fun.”
“We’ll make it so. We’ll dispense with Sarah, I think,” he decided, without regret. “She’s not as young as we are,” he said cruelly. “Yes, we’ll dispense with her. That is, if you don’t mind. We’re old enough friends by now, are we not, to get along without the tertium quid?”
“The what?”
“Sarah,” he said, smiling, “and, besides, that was a cockeyed allusion.”
He set the date; and later, paying the check, murmured, “You’ll telephone me if the evening’s all right?”
“Of course it will be,” she told him happily.
Leaving, she looked back at Mara Burt and her companion, so evidently engrossed in each other. She wondered a little uncomfortably. She had met Mara in the rest room with Jennie. Jennie had given her Mara’s history with a characteristic brevity. “Married, see, and Bill’s out of a job. So she has to hold hers. She generally holds it by her knees.”
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