From the very first she said to herself that this was her city. If it contained within itself all that was symbolical of mechanical heartlessness, yet it also possessed creations of the spirit: art galleries, museums, concert halls, theaters, libraries. Its many and varied contradictions fascinated her; squalid slums and beautiful parks, blistering pavements (it was summer) and cool, shady walks in the Park, cruel indifference and adolescent sentimentality, grinding poverty and unbelievable luxury. And amid all this turmoil and seeming confusion Ruth came and went in happy anonymity.
She rode in the Park of a morning and spent glorious afternoons in Fifty-seventh Street shops indulging herself in mad extravagances: a modernistic cigarette case made of onyx and platinum, a black evening gown, ornamented with silvered flowers to be worn when she took dinner on the hotel roof garden; gloves and shoes, underthings and accessories which would have shocked her mother by their cost and frivolity. She remembered with the feeling of a schoolgirl on a lark how her mother disapproved of ornament in dress. Once when she had pinned a corsage of violets at her waist when going to a party, her mother had said: “My dear, aren’t you a trifle overdressed?” Mrs. Throop had always urged Ruth to bargain and even after she was married she conducted price wars with the tradespeople on her daughter’s behalf. And now Ruth took delight in the sheer spending of money.
Marie thought her mistress had taken leave of her senses. Moreover, the metropolis frightened her. If Montreal with its tens of thousands of Protestants and hundreds of English churches was godless—New York was worse! Here, it seemed, there were no Catholics at all. Everywhere there were Jews and foreigners and when she saw and heard haggling pushcart peddlers, as she did on one occasion, she wavered for a moment in her faith and wondered whether her Lord really had been a Jew. The Irish priest who acted as father confessor at the little Catholic church on Columbus Avenue had difficulty in understanding her halting English.
“Imagine,” she said to Ruth the first time she returned from confession, “imagine a Catholic who does not speak French!”
As far as Marie was concerned, the New York Catholics, with their nasal speech and American ways were just so many worthless godless Protestants. To her mother in a little Quebec village she wrote: “New York is very big. It has as much land as from St. Jerome to St. Marguerite but I am not happy here. It is full of sin, the women dress like bad women and money is as water which is strange because no one seems to work. When I first saw the sinfulness of the people here I was greatly frightened but when I considered that they are mostly Jews and Protestants I said to myself may the Lord have mercy on their souls, it serves them right. But the Catholics here are not much better than les anglais. [To Marie all non-Catholics were les anglais.] I am sure Father Joli would be unable to tell a Catholic from a Protestant on the street … ”
LIII
The leaves began to fall in Central Park, lifeless and crackling. They were swept into piles and burned—quick, sudden puffs of flame and Summer was over. Those who had fled the hot pavements and the stifling air of the city in July were now returning and the streets echoed with the sound of many feet. Another season was beginning. Portraits of popular actors and actresses were hung before Broadway theaters, marquees were lighted up in the evening after the dark months. Broadway roused itself from its dawdling Summer lethargy and once more became a thing of loud, vulgar beauty. Enameled blondes went from booking office to office (“I tell you, my dear, there’s nothing in show business, nothing but one-night stands and rubes in hick towns getting gay for the price of a meal”). Flashily dressed hoofers three-sheeting before the Palace Theatre, dreaming of the gust of fame that would carry them to musical comedy and the pages of Vanity Fair. In the daytime the street was dull and colorless like the pallid face of a vaudeville impresario but at night the street took on a strychninized gayety. The city poured its tens of thousands into Broadway: yellowish, wasp-waisted clerks from shipping rooms and offices, eager stenographers, and robust matrons with fagged-out husbands, all trying to capture some of the wantonness of Broadway.
Towards the end of the month, Ruth rented an apartment on Central Park South; it was a relief to return to the privacy of her own quarters after the seemingly endless months of hotel life. Then followed the deep sense of pleasure which all experience in the creation of a home: there were conferences with decorators, there were hangings to be bought, art galleries to be visited, furniture to be selected and arranged and rearranged.
Outside in the Park the trees were now starkly bare, the last stubbornly clinging leaf had been torn from its branch and swept to the ground. In the November dusk, as Ruth returned from an afternoon of shopping, the city revealed itself as a mad, Gargantuan fantasy.
—The same genius which created the artillery that wrecked Edgar’s life and sent him back to me a broken wreck built this most beautiful of all cities.
She stood sometimes at the French windows of her living-room which opened out to a stone balcony and watched the skyscrapers as window after window lighted up in the late afternoon gloom, and it seemed to her at such times as though the buildings and their serried lights had movements, as if by some incredible dynamics they were escalated towards the darkness which lay above and beyond the tallest structure.
The last purchase for her home had been a piano. She had gone from showroom to showroom testing the various instruments and then finally chose the Baldwin grand piano. The afternoon the instrument was moved into her living room was one of excessive happiness. She spent hours running her fingers over its light-actioned keys, listening with delight to the true tones of the bass and treble, sparkling, but without the harsh brilliance of other instruments. It was months since she had played and at first her fingers were stiff and awkward, but before long she was deep in the droning F-minor étude of Chopin and soon found herself at the memorable ritardando at the close.
That evening she dressed for dinner and afterwards went to the piano again with the eagerness of a child returning to a lost and forgotten plaything.
Now and then she left the piano and moved about the room impatient with the awkwardness of her hands; she hummed snatches of music and returned again to the keyboard and looked through an album for something suitable to the new mood which had now come upon her.
—Chopin: why do people sneer at men who use perfume. Scriabin: you can hear the agony of his diseased body in the woeful tones of his preludes. Bach: he wrote music as though he were fearful that something might remain for those who came after him.
Footsteps sounded sharp and clear outside as heels struck the winter pavements. Women in high-collared fur wraps which partly concealed colorful evening gowns stepped from limousines escorted by men in severe black and white. Laughing youths and girls emerged from the brightly lit lobbies of hotels. The city rang with new life. Ruth had found her niche, she was at home in New York.
LIV
The days were frosty and crisp, Ruth’s apartment was a cloistered retreat. Its atmosphere was reminiscent of the convent; it was asexual, hushed, calm. Her self-imposed ritual was monotonously delightful. In the morning before seven, a shower, a brisk walk or quick ride through the park, breakfast alone, with Marie, quiet and respectful to the point of reverence, waiting upon her. Then a long day of music: Beethoven sonatas, Scarlatti pastorales, Schubert imprompti, Bach preludes. (She cared little for reading, it lacked the quick and immediate emotional release which music gave her. Nevertheless she bought books, and looked through a volume occasionally but was impatient of the tediousness of literary technique. In music it was different; with one chord Bach could force acceptance of his mood.) In the afternoon there was tea which was a solemn rite and before dinner there were letters to be written.
Sir Robert had disposed of the house, some stock in a pulp and paper company had become worthless; the baronet wrote, making suggestions and enclosed papers to be signed. Every three months her income was deposited in a New York bank and she felt that h
er substance came like manna from heaven—and as mysteriously. She understood nothing of business and was grateful to Sir Robert who deftly managed her affairs and kept the golden stream flowing without interruption. She supposed that behind her wealth there were men and women working to produce this income, but the picture was romantically misty and rose-colored: strong-muscled and clean-limbed lumberjacks felling trees and floating them down Quebec rivers to the mills; miners black with honest grime, digging in the Cobalt silver mines (she had once visited Cobalt and had gone down in the shaft with the superintendent). Her notions of industry were as false as the pictures on some of her stock certificates, as distorted as an industrial mural on the walls of a bank. That was how the world was ordered. To be sure, there were injustice and evil: sin, war, moral filth, but this was the creation of something evil in man. She had suffered from these things, but in no way did she directly associate the social tragedy with her own. Things happened and one accepted one’s fate as best one could. The golden stream made the acceptance easier to bear. There were others less fortunate than she … But at this point the picture became confused and involved and she put the thought behind her, passing on to other and more pleasant ideas.
There was about her life now a coolness and cleanliness which she ascribed to the absence of men. There were no more men, no burning atmosphere of irritation which men bring with them wherever they go. Her apartment had beauty without voluptuous feminine luxury, serenity without coldness; it lacked the humidity which is always present when the two sexes are in play and struggle with each other.
—No more men! No more men! Whatever warmth I had in the past is now chilled and dead.
She recalled the high hopes, the taut romanticism of her youth, her engagement to Edgar. And now looking back over the past ten years during which her youth had come to an end and a new aspect of life had unfolded itself before her, she felt that in some way she had been the victim of an enormous fraud in which nearly all the forces of society and some of Nature seemed to have had conspired against her. Marriage had turned out to be a fumbling assault on her wedding night. She had accepted it as a bitterness which she supposed one had to endure, but now she realized the significance of her first sexual relationship with Edgar. The years had been a painful negation of everything she had anticipated during her convent days. And now that she had rejected the spurious bargain and once more lived in peace and solitude she was inordinately happy.
—No more men! I swear it!
But in the passionate statement of her new credo there was a note of doubt and when she sometimes felt that she could not maintain this unnatural attitude forever, she fled to her music for relief and sanctuary. At night when the winter winds howled and rattled the windows of her living room she experienced a monastic delight in her seclusive happiness, and before retiring she took fierce, defensive pleasure in observing her slim, firm body which belonged only to herself.
On such nights, however, her sleep was not wholly cloudless.
LV
Even when Ruth spent an evening at the theater or at a recital, she did so in a spirit of aloofness. It accentuated the feeling of being cloistered to put the last touches to her toilet after dinner, call her car and go to the theater alone. It made the sense of being impervious to men seem more great—more acute, although she would not admit this even to herself. This sequestered solitude became something of a triumph for Ruth; the gesture had in it something in the nature of a taunt to all men.
She chose her clothes with meticulous care and before appearing in public, she spent hours at the hairdresser’s. At such times she noted with cold satisfaction the look of disappointment in the eyes of the attendants of the apartment house as she left the lobby alone, returning unescorted shortly after eleven.
One night, a little before theater time, as she waited for the elevator at her floor, the door facing her own opened and a young man in evening clothes emerged and took his place beside her at the elevator shaft door. He stood a little to her rear, made an almost imperceptible bow and removed his top hat with an air of deference. As the door swung open she hesitated for a moment and she heard the young man say: “Please.” She stepped into the car and he followed, smiling pleasantly. He was tall, dark, and he had an un-Nordic cast of features. He might have been of Latin extraction, perhaps Jewish. Too fine distinctions are impossible in New York.
—A Jew, very likely.
When the car reached the main floor he stepped back and Ruth felt that she was being bowed out. She resented this silent preliminary play of the sexes.
—Why are Jews always either obsequious or arrogant?
There was in his stepping back the implication that all he desired in the world was for her to pass before him. He smiled as she ignored him.
—Always alone. A tragic face but beautiful. Ruth walked through the lobby and out under the striped awning to her waiting car. As she settled back in her seat she saw the young man looking intently at her.
The gears of the Lincoln meshed silently and the car moved west towards Columbus Circle. The man under the awning watched the car pull away from the curb and stood watching the retreating tail lights until they became lost in the traffic. Then he turned and walked in the direction of Fifth Avenue.
LVI
One Saturday evening, some time later, the front-door bell rang. Marie was out shopping and Ruth answered. The bell rang rarely and she hesitated before answering. When she did, the young man with the dark features stood before the door, smiling.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Courtney,” he said. “We are having some cocktails and one of my guests insists upon having a squeeze of lemon in his drink. I’m all out of them. Have you a lemon to spare?”
For a moment Ruth seemed incapable of reply, the man’s air of self-assurance irritated her somewhat.
“Oh,” she said finally. “Lemons? Why, yes, just a moment, please.” She spoke coldly and turned, leaving the door ajar and returned with a few lemons. The young man thanked her with considerable profusion.
“Seems like mother used to do back home—borrowing sugar and things from the neighbors.” He smiled an open, good-natured smile.
“Yes. You are quite welcome.”
There was an awkward pause as the man made no move to go.
“May—may I ask you over for a drink? Perhaps you would like one?”
“No, thank you. Not just now.”
Still he hesitated. He stood there calmly as though he were in a drawing-room, chatting amiably.
“Fine. Any time you like.” He paused for a moment, smiled and then announced: “My name is Walter Sprague.” Ruth nodded at this one-sided introduction and wondered what to say.
—I wish he would go away.
“Perhaps you’ll drop in some other time,” Sprague said.
“Perhaps,” she said—and the conversation was over.
A little later as she left her apartment, sounds of dance music and laughter came from the half-opened door which faced hers. Beyond she saw women in evening gowns and men in dinner jackets standing in groups or dancing in the foyer.
Outside the wind whistled through the naked branches of the winter trees, it blew strongly from the north, caught her breath and whipped the blood to her face. There were winds like this in Canada, she thought. She crossed the street and entered the Park. It was lonely, few persons were in sight, and bending against the wind, she walked north following the winding paved footpaths. The eager face of her young neighbor stood before her eyes and with an effort she dispelled the thought. She was inviolate, she said to herself, she was now beyond that sort of thing. She conjured up pictures of her meeting with Edgar, that horrible night on the train to Gaspé, the war, and her flight to New York.
No more men, she said to herself, I am happy now, no more men.
After an hour’s brisk walking she ceased thinking, taking pleasure in the sheer animal joy of struggling with the insistent w
ind. When she returned Marie was back and had prepared a glass of hot milk for her. She was tired and turned in shortly afterwards.
In bed an indefinite fear took hold of her. She denied to herself with some passion that Sprague had made the slightest impression upon her. She was impervious, she said to herself, to that sort of thing and she thrust him from her mind with such animus that she actually began to hate him.
—He has an arrogant face, an arrogant boy’s face. At home things were done differently. I didn’t meet Edgar that way. It was slower. Things were not thrust upon one.
She found herself actively detesting the dark face, the bright eyes which twinkled almost insultingly. Then she realized the absurdity of her attitude.
—Perhaps I am being unreasoning. Granted that the call was honest. Lemons, of all things! Very well, then, the call was honest. But I want to be left alone. If he calls again I will not answer, I will have Marie tell him that I am out, that I do not care to see him.
There Are Victories Page 14