She had to face it cold. It is much nicer if you are able to supply a pretty phrase for what you've done. Elective affinities, Goethe called it. But you really can't call a rumrunner an elective affinity. Goethe didn't make any phrases either about settling down with his kitchen maid. The less said the better. We can't be anything but what we are. With a husband and children and a living to earn, there certainly isn't much time to be anything but what you are. She had sold two stories recently, and moved to a three room apartment—the landlord had to let her break her old lease since she simply couldn't pay him—and Leonard still had his twenty dollar a week job, though one couldn't be sure how long it would last. In sum, they were back where they began. That didn't matter in itself; only she did not dare look ahead; what kind of a world would the children grow up into? She had to be cheerful, for Leonard; she would, literally, rather die than hurt Leonard. She didn't care how much Matt might suffer; anyhow, he wouldn't. He could pick up plenty of women; he couldn't be anything but what he was either. And she didn't care about the other women; the thought caused her no pang; only she was puzzled by the—the unrelatedness of life. That nothing should come of an emotion so powerful and complete; that they should have it for each other, being what they were. . . . Already it seemed to her that it had happened a long time ago.
"Maybe we can't be anything but what we are," said Thea, "but circumstances may cramp our style. In my opinion, there are a lot of men at present miscast as financiers and politicians. They ought to be pimps."
"Such language!" said Mysie.
"I'm old-fashioned," said Thea. "Yesterday I got two letters by the same mail. One was a statement of what happened to a bond I bought; it was highly recommended by all sorts of prominent names. I may get ten per cent out of the wreck; but the lawyers get ten thousand dollars for foreclosure proceedings and the trustees get a management fee just the same. For what, I ask you? The other letter was from my sister-in-law, burbling about how she had turned in her gold teeth to save the country. Of course if she didn't a lot of able-bodied men would fine her as a hoarder. I could stand it if they didn't talk such drivel, but it wears on me."
"Young men must live," said Mysie.
"I do not perceive the necessity," said Thea. Neither did Charles, she thought. ... He shouldn't have done it, but she could not blame him now. Fifteen years ago, her husband, Charles Ludlow, shot himself, after losing his last cent in the stock market. He left a note asking her to forgive him. His health was broken, and his insurance would provide for her. No, he shouldn't have left her; she could have supported both of them; but that was what he feared. He had always been reckless, but till then he had been lucky. They used to quarrel wildly and make it up laughing. She had no heart to patch up the broken bits of the life she had had with him. Nothing could give her back her youth, when she had been brilliant and happy—and Charles thought her beautiful. She wouldn't touch the insurance money; how could he imagine such a thing? Her daughter Drusie accepted it gladly. When she heard Drusie say it was fortunate father was insured, Thea knew she was really alone. Let Drusie have it then; it enabled her to marry a prudent young man who might otherwise have jilted her. But Thea never wanted to see either her daughter or her son-in-law again. No doubt that was unjust; Thea did maintain indifferent conventional relations with them; Drusie never knew what her mother felt. What was the use of talking? . . . Charles had gambled and lost and taken the consequences. Thea forgave him.
My love he built a bonny ship and set it on the sea, And the name of the ship was the Golden Vanitie; And he sailed it to the Lowlands low. . . . Jake and Mysie had compromised on a book of old ballads unearthed from an immense miscellaneous stack of music which belonged to Thea. Years ago she had made a general collection, partly a joke, ranging from the best to the worst. Charles had shocking bad taste in music; he went to sleep at concerts, Thea thought, and dragged me to musical comedies, and made me play the most terrible popular trash to him —and I did! I was flattered, because my talent meant nothing to him; he loved me as a woman—whatever that means. Perhaps he'd even have loved me now, as I am— but I wouldn't be like this if he had lived. I'd have loved him still. I do. Dear Charles. He's dead, but he must be somewhere. It was wrong of him, so I have to pay for both, by waiting. It doesn't hurt any more, it's only watching the clock.
"Aren't you going to the Siddalls this afternoon?" she asked Mysie.
"We are not. We did our duty last Sunday. Now there's what I mean; your odd-job man says Arthur has lost all his money, but they are living in that awful marble mausoleum the same as before, and they're going abroad in a few days. And Gina is going to have a baby."
"Did the odd-job man tell you that too?" Geraldine asked, roused to professional curiosity.
"No, the grocery boy did. He knows that Wop chauffeur, and the chauffeur probably heard it from Gina's maid. You can't have any private life if you have servants," Mysie said. "We're learning all about how the other half lives. How the Stukeleys are letting their thirty servants stay and work for their board; and the Averys have moved into their gate lodge and make the gardener's wife do their laundry for nothing; and the Van Eycks filled up their wine cellar with canned spinach and stuff a year ago in case of revolution; and young Jelliffe Pearson goes around in person to collect his rents in New York; he's one of the stingy kind. At first I thought we were hearing mythology in the making, but it's all true. And after last Sunday I can believe anything. Dean Hervey told me that none of his parishioners come to him with spiritual problems any more; they bring him their financial problems. Asking for the miracle of the loaves and fishes. But when I said so he was shocked. And I had a long conversation with Bill Brant; he told me how disappointed he was over having to give up an expedition to Greenland. Apparently his idea of the good life is to sleep in a furlined sack on a pile of rocks and ice; he showed me a snapshot of himself in that blissful situation. But it's beyond his means at present; fate has condemned him to spring mattresses and steam-heated houses. It's pretty sad. They say those things and nobody finds anything funny about it. I don't know what Jake and I were doing in that galley, but I'll be darned if I'll put in another day off with our best people."
Of course she did know what they were doing there; but that was strictly private. They were doing their duty. It was an act of oblivion. Arthur had asked them, and Gina could give no reason for objecting. Mysie would have evaded the invitation, when it occurred to her that Gina might be easier in her mind if she met Jake once more. Jake was absolutely inadaptable to ordinary human relations; but he had a genius for the impossible. How else had he shared the same roof with his aunts for forty years, and contrived to build an indestructible friendship out of the wreck of a marriage and a divorce? . . . Mysie had watched Gina's terror at the meeting change, within the space of fifteen minutes, to simple bewilderment and then to condescension. Nobody but Jake could have turned the trick. By assuming the rôle of a humble, discreet and rejected adorer, he convinced Gina that she was a kind but inflexible goddess. Mysie thought, Gina has to have her lines and cues. It was perfectly silly of her to run off with a man. None of the conventions will cover such a situation in actuality; you have to improvise; and that's where she's lost. I can imagine what Jake's shack looked like to her; it looked exactly as it is. Perhaps that's what's extraordinary about Gina. She sees everything literally. As if the world were an immense department store—
Being what we are, we must each have a separate world.
They tell us we are going through enormous changes, that everything will be different. But it will last our time; it must, for you create and hold your own world around you, so it can end only when you die. And none of us can know what the other's world is or looks like. .. .
"How did you ever happen to hear the songs of Thomas Haynes Bailey?" Thea asked suddenly, for no reason.
"Oh, there was an old songbook that had belonged to my grandmother. And a parlor melodeon. She died before I was born; but Grandfather Brennan kept the
things. The Young Ladies Album of Musical Selections."
"Was that the dance hall girl?" Jake asked.
"The dance hall girl? No, the dance hall girl was grandfather's first wife. Gina's grandmother. Georgie Gay. I don't suppose that was her real name; she was the family scandal. Gina was shocked pink when she found out who she'd been named for. My grandmother was a New England schoolteacher. I must have inherited my Puritan conscience from her." "Yes, you did," said Jake, cryptically. He wasn't in a position to argue the matter.
Thea went on with her accounts, Geraldine turned the page of her magazine. Jake continued to strum gently on the piano. Mysie leaned out of the open window with her elbows on the sill. It was November, but a lovely sunny day, steeped in an exquisite melancholy. Probably the last fine day of the year. . . . The weary winds began to blow and the sea began to rout, And my love and his bonny ship, Turned withershins about—Mysie thought, I daresay I'll never meet Arthur again. . . . His father and mother were drowned at sea. . . .
She was looking at the rise of land which gave the little house its individual charm. It was lovely in its bareness, with one small evergreen against the brown slope. And as she was absorbed in the scene and thinking of Arthur, she didn't see him drive up to the gate until he stopped and was stepping out of his roadster.
"I thought I'd stop by and make sure you were coming over this afternoon," he said.
"I am glad to assure you," said Mysie, "that we are not. You are witnessing the revolt of the middle classes. Come in."
"I can't stay," said Arthur; whereupon he came in and stayed half an hour. There you are, Mysie thought, smiling at him; and he smiled back. He doesn't know what amuses me, and I've no idea what is in his head. But I was just saying good-by forever to him, when he appeared at the gate; and he couldn't stay, but he walked in while he was saying it. We have to make the gestures, but they practically never coincide with the occasion; we say good-by ten thousand times, every time except the last, because we don't know it's the last, not till afterward.
She walked with him to the gate when he left. Returning to the livingroom, she broke into the middle of a story Jake was narrating to Geraldine. Some misadventure with a motor launch, floating in darkness and mist without direction; the motor had broken down. Icy water and darkness. "Where was this?" Mysie interrupted. She hadn't heard of his encountering any such perils of the deep. And what started him telling it now, chiming with her thoughts? Perhaps the song was what summoned the same images to both of them.
"In South Bay, last winter," Jake replied.
"How were you saved?" Mysie asked.
"By wading ashore," said Jake.
He gazed at Mysie with intense solemnity. "We bumped onto a sandbar," he amplified. "We must have been within a few yards of the beach all the time."
Mysie said: "You damn fool!" And shouted with mirth. She rocked to and fro, held her sides, and slid from her chair to the floor. Jake continued to regard her with deep sadness for about thirty seconds; then the spirit moved him also; they were disarmed, dissolved, destroyed with laughter.
But Mysie thought, we'll never touch our shore again. That landfall is lost forever, down under.
THE END
Table of Contents
Title page
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The Golden Vanity Page 28