She continued thinking about the call, twisting and turning in her mind until she was wide awake with nervous exhaustion. She rose and went to her medicine chest and prepared a sedative. Soon her nerves became quiet and back in bed she began to feel a sensation of drowsy lassitude.
In the morning she awoke tired. After breakfast she went to High Mass and afterwards waited for confessional. The confession booths were all occupied and she sat and waited for a vacancy listening to the dull whispers which came from behind the latticed doors. A creased woman sat beside her waiting her turn. The woman was poorly dressed and apparently was eager to escape from the splendor of the church into the boxlike booth where she could unburden her pent-up heart in confession.
When Ruth entered the booth, it was hot and still retained the odor of the previous penitent. She heard the heavy wheezing of the priest and hoped he was not sleeping. Suddenly it all became dreadful, prosaic. Panic seized her and she wanted to leave. This was not what she wanted. It was different when she was a girl. The convent confessional was different. It was fresher, there was an air of mystery, of murky gloom about the ritual. She was on her knees.
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned … ”
“ … lewd company; have you read immodest books?”
“No, father.”
“Talked, gazed, or laughed in church?”
“No, father.”
And so it went. She had been absent from mass.
“Ten Hail Marys and pray to the Holy Mother of God for forgiveness.”
This act seemed meaningless, the old savor was gone. In the street men and women were coming out of the church or were standing about in groups on the pavement. They seemed quite contented. Why had she come? She hadn’t felt an inner necessity. Habit? Surely not that. Then what?
—Perhaps to get the feeling of the old chapel again. Something has gone out of it, maybe out of me. I’m not sure. There was a time when I felt greatly moved. It is flat now, quite flat.
LVII
For no apparent reason everything suddenly became pointless. There seemed to be no reason why she should continue living in New York, why she should have allowed Guy to be taken to England, why her life in Montreal should have gone to pieces. Other women managed to live quiet peaceful lives, undisturbed by doubts. She felt as if she alone had been singled out for unhappiness and torture by uncertainty. So many millions of women, she thought, are born, pass through childhood and adolescence, marry and bear and rear children and pass on to old age tranquilly, without shattering events. They were the ceaseless cotillions of sisters whom she now came to envy. She saw them walking with their husbands and children in the park, in the streets, happy and smiling, untroubled. Some were poor, most were harassed by life, but in nearly all the faces she saw a placidity which she envied. They were couples.
And yet, upon analysis, her life differed in few respects from that of a more contented woman. Her childhood had given every promise of happiness. Her eyes filled with tears when she thought of her convent days. The kindly sisters, the flowering gardens, the silently moving lips in prayer, the certainty! Had they taught her serenity in a world where tranquility was impossible? What she wanted desperately now was assurance and peace. But, somehow, this was denied her. She tortured herself with searching. Had she been at fault? Had her demands on life been unreasonable? Was there a flaw in her character that made it impossible for her to live at peace with the world? What were the virtues which the convent had taught? Piety, honesty, fidelity, simplicity, faith. She had observed the letter and the spirit in all these and still her life had gone from defeat to defeat.
Had she been poorer, perhaps things would have gone differently. The war did not wreck every life. She remembered seeing the joyous reunion of couples after the war was over as they promenaded on Fletcher’s Field and on the bypaths of the mountain. Perhaps the common struggle with poverty and for the daily necessities of life would have left little time for prying introspection. Perhaps she should have taken Edgar—after all, prostitutes have always existed—nursed him back to normality again.
—There is no escape, it seems. I am no happier now that I am living alone from men. I have lost a home, a husband, I am separated from my son. Perhaps the ugliness from which I have fled is part of life, just as beauty, great music and pain are part of life.
As the days passed this mood remained. She did not see or hear from Sprague. She remained indoors and sat at her piano for many hours.
—You are a fool. The face of a strange man, the ring of a fresh voice, and all your resolutions stand at the point of dissolution.
And now quite suddenly she found that she played with greater ease, with a warmth and facility which seemed inexplicable. One afternoon as she sat playing a Schumann sonata (she had always found the piece tantalizingly difficult, a maze of technical obstacles), she discovered it was going with surprising ease.
—Why this sudden flow of beautiful music? Why don’t my fingers tangle as they did two weeks ago?
She rose from the piano with a feeling of disgust and tossed the printed music to the floor with a gesture of childish anger. There was no peace for Ruth that afternoon. She paced the floor of her living room restlessly and when Marie came to announce dinner a few hours later, she found her mistress standing at the windows in the unlighted room, staring out at the serpentining headlights of the cars as they sped through the Park.
LVIII
The late afternoon Autumn breeze puffed the curtains of Walter Sprague’s bedroom and chilled his naked, sprawling body as he slept. He stirred, turned, and suddenly opened his eyes. The sun slanted across the room and the copper-colored light lay in a bright pool at the foot of his bed.
—God, another day. It’s late, four o’clock, maybe.
He stretched lazily and surveyed the hard, flat muscles of his legs, saw his chest recede precipitately toward the level of his abdomen.
—Great. Thank God I’m not flabby yet.
He drew a deep lungful of air, forced his chest out, exhaled and stretched back lazily like a well-fed tomcat. He reached back to the end-table, drew a cigarette from his case and lit it, blowing clouds of smoke into the yellow shaft of sunlight. He was still only half-awake and thoughts crawled lazily through his mind.
—I wonder if anyone can see me from that hotel across the street. Strange, can’t describe a man’s body in a novel. It isn’t done. Now with the female body it’s different. All novelists do it. But the nearest most novelists come to undressing a hero in a love scene is to have him in his shirtsleeves. The modernists go so far as to have him in pajamas—the most shapeless garment in all the world—but rarely naked. When the French illustrate a novel—perhaps for Anglo-Saxon consumption—the lady is all but completely exposed, but her lover is drawn in braces, shirt-sleeves, curled mustachios and tight-at-the-waist trousers. I remember the drawings in a French edition of Nana; the woman was almost nude, half-covered by a kimono. That was all right. But the man who stood over her was fully clothed except for his coat, which hung over a nearby chair; it seemed to make the woman’s nakedness more complete. Yes, I guess clothes do help to create the impression of indecency. The same with the illustrations of the novels of Paul de Kock. What a name for a French novelist!
Walter sat up in bed, extinguished his cigarette, and, rising, prepared to make his toilet. From somewhere in the building there issued the odor of coffee which entered his room and sharpened his appetite. He dashed into the bathroom, hurriedly brushed his teeth, got under the shower and in a few minutes was vigorously rubbing himself dry. He slipped into a rough gray tweed suit bought in London that Spring and then stood before his mirror carefully knotting his blue polka-dotted bow tie. Then he went to the restaurant on the street level, leisurely took his orange juice and coffee and returned to his rooms and read the afternoon papers.
He wondered what he should do that evening and looked through his engagement book in the hope
that there was a possible dinner appointment he had overlooked. There was none. There were many names, of course, and a ring on the telephone would bring a ready dinner guest, but he was tired of that sort of thing. Ever since he had returned from Europe that Summer his life seemed thin and pointless. Somewhere in his background there was an extremely wealthy banker-father who lived in Chicago and saw to it that there was always a balance to Walter’s credit in his New York bank. He had graduated from Harvard a few years before full of honors and with predictions of a brilliant career. But the post-war world seemed exhausted and weary—there was nothing he particularly cared to do.
Two years were spent wandering in Europe. He saw the occupation of the Ruhr, saw the Senegalese troops billeted in the Rhine towns, observed the defeated German faces after the Treaty of Versailles. In Poland he was cut off from Warsaw for two whole days while Trotsky and the Red Army played havoc with the French and the Polish. Then back to New York a full-fledged radical. The revolution seemed just around the corner. He supported with funds various radical undertakings: magazines, defence organizations, and political groups.
But nowhere did he find a niche into which he fitted completely. And now his father was writing letters suggesting that he enter business; there was a question of a New York branch office—stocks, bonds, investments, things like that. It was a mistaken notion, Sprague senior wrote, that there was no room in business for a man of culture. His associate, General Dawes, was a musician, “a damned fine one, too,” one of his partners was a well-known collector of first editions and it was known to everyone that old man Morgan had the finest collection of manuscripts in the world. But Walter was not convinced and replied to his father with evasive letters, postponing the day.
Walter felt depressed—lonely. He dreaded another night of talk with a group of Greenwich Village radicals. He was tired of taking his amusement and recreation en masse. Again he thumbed through his address book and after a minute’s perusal put it aside in disgust. He walked to the window which faced west and looked out towards the Hudson River. It was late Autumn and cold. Down in the streets below people walked rapidly, half-running in the sudden chill. In the sky over the river to the west, the submerged sun still gave off a faint orange glow. Above the tinted horizon there were great vistas of cold, streaked clouds, like enormous slabs of slate and above these was a gunmetal, heartless sky. The bleak sky, the hurrying people in the streets, filled Walter’s heart with an inexplicable longing which demanded easement.
—This is a good day to get drunk. No, no women, well, perhaps one, a very special one. The sort of woman you think of when you hear the César Franck symphony, an emotional, understanding woman. Understanding in the sense that she might comprehend a mood such as this.
The sun dipped lower and lower until finally the pale orange afterglow disappeared altogether, leaving a black void like the dark, silent sea over a sunken ship. In the darkness Walter lit a cigarette and continued looking out of the window. From the apartment across the hall came the sound of a piano, the music came faint and indistinct.
—Ruth Courtney. I wonder who she is. Didn’t seem glad to see me. She has an expression of sorrow as though she has suffered much. Some man, I suppose. There is a hurt look in her eyes which does not mar her beauty. Rather enhances it. Kind of aristocratic. Burne-Jonesish. A sad Victorian beauty walking within the sight and clamor of the skyscrapers. What an anomaly! Sad times, these, for aristocrats. The new era of tumbrils. I saw plenty of them in Berlin, Paris, Vienna. Russian émigrées: princesses, duchesses, the cream of Czarist Russia. Now tickled to death to be waitresses, many of them whores. Take me, sir. I am princess, Russian princess. Fifty thousand marks—two dollars in American money. A German professor before the war worked all his life to save fifty thousand marks—now the price of a night with a Russian princess. I wonder why the thought should give me such pleasure, when heads roll maybe mine will be among them. Maybe I am like some of the French nobility who preached the teachings of Voltaire and Rousseau and made it possible for members of their own family to be guillotined or sent into exile. Radical, hell! Harvard, good connections, a checking account, an apartment on Central Park South. It’s easy to be a radical with plenty of bail money in the family. Wonder if our women will ever be driven from the country to wait on tables in foreign countries. Never, maybe.
The sound of the piano persisted, broke into the stream of his thought.
—I wonder how well she plays. I’ve only heard snatches of music coming through the walls.
Walter rose and without switching on the lights moved towards the door leading to his foyer.
LIX
The morning mail brought Ruth a letter from England. Mrs. Throop enclosed a photograph of Guy, and Ruth looked at the picture with sentimental longing. The lad wore a smart striped blazer with his school crest sewed on to it and on the crown of his head a cocky school cap perched a little to one side. The boy had enclosed a note in his grandmother’s letter.
“Dear Mater,” he wrote, “I am in the third form now and have been ragged only once. I get along well with the other fellows. I play cricket which is more fun than baseball and I am well hoping you are the same. Your loving son, Guy. P.S. Please send me a camera.”
Ruth read and re-read the few school-boy clichés over and over again. She must go out this very afternoon and get him a camera.
—Heavens! What a lad! Tall for his eight years and with the same uncertain serious expression which his father always had. I shall buy him the best camera in New York this very afternoon.
She turned to her mother’s letter with the familiar JMJ in the left-hand corner. It was full of family gossip, devout expressions and admonitions not to forget holy communion and confession. “To this day I have the greatest difficulty in explaining to our relatives why you continue to remain away from your husband. A good Catholic wife, my dear child, overlooks many things and finds strength and courage in prayer. Lately I have been feeling very apprehensive about you. I sense that you are in great danger and I have been wanting to come and spend a few months with you but my health has been failing lately and I do not feel strong enough to make the sea trip. Remember that you always have the Church to lean upon in your hour of doubt and never forget that your strongest weapon is prayer. I pray for you every night. Your brokenhearted mother … ”
—Let me see! Mother must be about sixty-three years old and Guy is eight. I am thirty years old.
Ruth put the letter down and rose from her chaise longue and walked to the full-length mirror in her boudoir. She looked into the glass, peering anxiously for signs of age. There were none. The hollow line under the cheek-bone which betrays the woman of thirty was not there. Her hair still held its color and luster, not a sign of graying hair. She smiled as she looked at herself.
—I think that perhaps my sorrows and struggles with life have not been as devastating as I have been imagining. It seems that I always acted without reason. Why did I suddenly decide to send Guy to England? Was it that I wanted to be free and unbound so that it would be easier to meet another man? Perhaps, after all, I am not a good mother. Surely a good mother would have kept her only child by her side no matter what happened. Two years have now passed since the boy left for England and you have not gone to see him. It would be different if you were poor and lacked the means to travel. All that separated you was six days on a luxury liner. Why did you come to New York? Would you not have been as happy, or unhappy, in London? My life has been a senseless thing, unguided by reason or logic. In the Spring I will go to England and live with my son. I will take a house somewhere on the London-Portsmouth road, not far from the city—perhaps I will find peace and happiness there. I do not want this young man, I do not want any men. A life of mistakes. Still, it is easy to condemn after the heat of the moment is past. Life is not lived in retrospect. On the spur of the moment, under the press of circumstances, one does things and they are not always the wisest. It is easy to
sit in an arm chair afterwards and say “this was foolish,” or “this was wise.” Other women would have done otherwise. It is hard to say. I have acted in a way that always seemed the most decent and honorable, still mother thinks I am a poor wife and the world, I am sure, will uphold her. Supposing someone were to ask me why I had suddenly sent Guy abroad and gone off by myself, how could I justify myself? That night at the cinema when I saw the young soldier lean over and hold his stomach and the people applauded as the troops rushed forward, I ran home to little Guy—he was only two years old then—and took him up out of his cot and kissed his sleepy little eyes. And then, without reason to go off alone to New York and send him to school, why? Are these the actions of a good mother? At the time I thought he would be happier without me—that I would be happier, is that what you meant? Never mind. In the Spring I will go to England and live close by his side. We will take long walks in the summer on the green rolling Sussex downs, we will motor through the Lake country and visit the ruins of old castles. We will be happy.
But when she rose and walked to her windows and looked out upon the gay hurrying people in the streets below, the feeling of restlessness, of wanting to go away and live with Guy left her.
—Perhaps it will be best if I were to visit him for the Summer only when he is on vacation. I will spend July and August with him. We will go to Brighton and stroll on the Marine Parade and stop at the Metropole Hotel and in the Autumn he will go back to school and I will return to New York.
Ruth stood at her window and looked into the Park and at the outline of the buildings over towards Fifth Avenue. She had become accustomed to the lively, ceaseless tempo of this city, its reassuring hum of traffic, its museums, concerts, theaters. She was in love with its smart shops. She had adapted herself to its ways. A visit to England, yes, but to go away forever perhaps, that would be foolish, she felt.
There Are Victories Page 15