Cytherea Part 19

Lee agreed readily, therefore, when, on Friday afternoon, f.a.n.n.y asked him to bring Helena and Gregory from dancing-school. This was held in the Armory; and, past five o'clock, mounting the wide stone steps in the early gloom and going through the bare echoing hall, he joined the complacent mothers ranged in chairs pushed against the wall in a spirit of interested attention. The Armory, following the general literal interpretation of the sternness of military usage, was gaunt, with a wide yellow floor and walls of unconcealed brick. In a far corner, on a temporary and unpainted platform, the pianist sat with her hands raised, her wrists rigid, preparatory to the next demand upon her strongly accentuated playing. Lee was surprised at the large number of children ranged in an irregular ring about the erect brittle presence and insistent voice of the instructor.

What scant hair he possessed, carefully disposed to cover its meagreness, was grey, and its color permeated, suggested, the tone of his thin face. Surrounded by the cruel exuberance of the children, he seemed incalculably worn, permanently weary, although he was surprisingly sharp-eyed and adequate. It was, Lee thought unsympathetically, a curiously negative occupation for a man; the small graces of the dancing teacher, the bows gravely exchanged with childish bows, the bent dancing with diminutive slips, the occasional fretful tone of his voice, further alienated Lee Randon. But the children were a source of entertainment and speculation.

He saw Gregory at once, short and st.u.r.dy-legged, in a belted jacket and white breeches; his son was standing peaceably, attentive, clasping the hand of a girl smaller than himself with obstinate bobbed hair. This, the high pointed voice in the center of the floor continued, was an Irish folk dance; they would try it again; and the reiterated details were followed by the sounding of a whistle and music. Lee had no idea of the exact number of children engaged, but he was certain that there were just as many totally different executions of the steps before them. Not one had grasped an essential of the carefully ill.u.s.trated instruction; he could see nowhere an evidence of grace or rhythm. But, with a few notable exceptions, all boys, there was an entire solemnity of effort; the swinging of bare short legs, the rapid awkward bobs, were undertaken with a deep sense of their importance.

The Irish folk dance was attempted for a third time, and then relinquished in favor of a waltz. Miniature couples circled and staggered, the girls again prim, the boys stolid or with working mouths, or as smooth and vacuous as chestnuts, little sailors and apparitions in white, obviously enjoying their employment. During this not a word was exchanged; except for the shuffling feet, the piano, an occasional phrase of encouragement from the instructor, himself gliding with a dab of fat in exaggerated ribbons, there wasn't a sound. To Lee it had the appearance of the negation of pleasure; it was, in its way, as bad as the determined dancing of adults; it had the look of a travesty of that. Helena conducted a restive partner, trying vainly to create the impression that he was leading, wherever she considered it advantageous for him to go. The thick flood of her gold hair shimmered about her uncompromising shoulders, her embroidered skirt fluttered over the firmness of her body.

She was as personable a little girl as any present; and, while she hadn't Gregory's earnestness in what he attempted, she got on smoothly enough. Seeing Lee, she smiled and waved a hand almost negligently; but Gregory, at his presence, grew visibly embarra.s.sed; he almost stopped.

Lee Randon nodded for him to go ahead. There were various minor cataclysms--Helena flatly refused to dance with a boy who pursued her with an urging hand. At this conspicuous reverse he sat on a chair until the teacher brought him forcibly out and precipitated him into the willing arms of a girl larger and, if possible, more inelastic than the others. The ring was again a.s.sembled, and the complicated process of alternating a boy with a girl was accomplished.

"Never mind what he does," the instructor directed sharply; "always be sure you are right." A shift was made further around in the line, and the elder wisdom was vindicated. "Now, the chain." The whistle blew.

"Left and right, left and right." In spite of this there was an equal engagement of rights with lefts. The a.s.sumption of gravity acutely bothered Lee Randon: they had no business, he thought, to be already such social animals. Their training in set forms, mechanical gestures and ideas, was too soon hardening their mobility and instinctive independence. Yes, they were a caricature of what they were to become.

He hadn't more sympathy with what he had resolved to encourage, applaud, but less. The task of making any headway against that schooling was beyond him.

The dancing reached a pause, and, with it, the silence: a confusion of clear undiversified voices rose: the face of an infant with long belled trousers and solidified hair took on a gleam of impish humor; older and more robust boys scuffled together with half-subdued hails and large pretentions; groups of girls settled their skirts and brushed, with instinctive pats, their braids into order; and there was a murmur of exchanged approbation from the supporting, white-gloved mothers. Gregory appeared at Lee's side; his cheeks were crimson with health, his serious eyes glowed:

"Well, do you like it?"

"Yes," Gregory answered shyly. He lingered while Lee Randon tried to think of something else appropriate to say, and then he ran abruptly off. His children were affectionate enough, but they took him absolutely for granted; they regarded him very much as they did their cat; except for the conventional obeisance they made him, not so voluntary as it was trained into them, they were far more involved with Martha, their black nurse. Everywhere, Lee felt, they repelled him. Was he, then, lacking in the qualities, the warmth, of paternity? Again, as he was helpless where f.a.n.n.y lately was concerned, he was unable to be other.

It was increasingly evident that he had not been absorbed, obliterated, in marriage; an inst.i.tution which, from the beginning, had tried--like religion--to hold within its narrow walls the unconfinable instincts of creation. It hadn't, among other things, considered the fascination of Cytherea; a name, a tag, as intelligible as any for all his dissent. But cases like his were growing more prevalent; however, usually, in women.

Men were the last stronghold of sentimentality. His thoughts were interrupted by a dramatic rift in the discipline of the cla.s.s: a boy, stubbornly seated, swollen, crimson, with wrath and heroically withheld tears, was being vainly argued with by the dancing master. He wouldn't stir, he wouldn't dance. The man, grasping a shoulder, shook him in a short violence, and then issued a final uncompromising order.

The boy rose and, marching with an increasing rapidity toward the entrance, he struck aside a placid and justifiably injured child, dragged open the door, and slammed it after him with a prodigious and long echoing report. His contempt, holding its proportion in the reduced propriety of the occasion, was like a clap of communistic thunder in an ultra-conservative a.s.sembly. For a moment, together with all the others, Lee Randon was outraged; then, with a suppression of his unorderly amus.e.m.e.nt, he had a far different conception--he saw himself, for no easily established reason, in the person of the rebel who had left behind him the loud announcement of his angry dissent. Helena sought Lee immediately.

"That's his mother," she said in a penetrating whisper, indicating a woman with a resolutely abstracted expression and constrained hands.

The children were gathered finally and formed into a line which, to the drumming piano, moved and halted, divided and subdivided. Led by the instructor it was involved in an apparently issueless tangle and then straightened smoothly out. The dancing cla.s.s at an end, Helena and Gregory, wedged into the seat with Lee in the car, swept into an eager chatter, a rush of questions, that he was unable to follow. A Sara Lane was announced by Helena to be the object of Gregory's affection, and Gregory smugly admitted this to be true. He was going to marry her, he declared further.

"Perhaps," Lee suggested, "you'll change your mind."

"Why, Gregory has four girls," Helena instructed him.

"Well," Gregory retorted, "I can marry them all."

But what, under this reflected chatter, was his son like? What would he be? And Helena! They eluded him like bright and featureless bits of gla.s.s. His effort to draw closer to them was proving a failure; what could he give them safer than their attachment to the imponderable body of public opinion and approval? He had nothing but doubts, unanswerable questions; and a mental, a moral, isolation. It was easier to remain in the dancing cla.s.s than to be sent out in an agony of revolt and strangling shame.

Often, during his conversations with f.a.n.n.y, she returned to the subject of his late New York trip and stay with the Groves. She asked small interested questions, commented on the lavish running of the Grove house; she couldn't, she explained, get nectarines and Belgian grapes in Eastlake; but when she was in the city again she'd bring some out. "Mina Raff's limousine sounds luxurious," she acknowledged. But f.a.n.n.y wasn't curious about Mina; after the first queries she accepted her placidly; now that she had withdrawn from the Morrises' lives, f.a.n.n.y regarded her in the light of a past episode that cast them all together on a romantic screen. What mostly she asked touched upon Savina Grove. "Did they seem happy?" she inquired about the Groves. He replied:

"Very. William Grove was quite affectionate when he left for Washington."

A momentary and ominous suspense followed a sudden stopping of his voice.

"You didn't say anything about that before," she observed carefully.

"When did he go, how long was he away?" She put aside what she was doing, waiting.

"He left unexpectedly; just when I forget; but during the last day I was there."

"Lee, why didn't you say that Mr. Grove had gone to Washington? It seems very peculiar."

"I told you it had slipped my mind," he retorted, striving, in a level tone, to hide his chagrin and an increasing irritation at her persistence.

"When did he come back?"

"I don't know." Suddenly he gave way to a complete frankness. "He may not be back yet."

"Then you had dinner at the restaurant and went to the theatre alone with her."

"If it's possible to be alone with anyone, you are correct. What, in the name of heaven, are you getting at?"

"Only this--that, for some reason I can't gather, you lied to me. I have had the most uncomfortable impression about her all along. Why?" Her demand had a quality of unsteady emotion. "I have been so close to you, Lee, we have had each other so completely, that I have feelings I can't account for. I always know when--when you've been a little silly; there is something in your eyes; but I have never felt like this before. Lee,"

she leaned suddenly forward, her hands clasping the sides of her chair, "you must be absolutely truthful with me, it's the only way I can live.

I love you so much; you're all I have; I don't care for anyone else now.

You have taken me away from my family; you are my family. Ours isn't an ordinary marriage, like the Lucians', but worlds deeper."

Yet, he told himself, in spite of her a.s.surances the truth would ruin them; besides, as he had recognized, it didn't belong exclusively to him; it was, as well, Savina's truth. At any cost he had to protect her. Lee replied by saying that it was useless to tell her facts in her present unreasonable humor. "Why didn't you tell me he had gone to Washington?" she repeated; her tone had a sharper edge. "Was there anything you needed to hide?" Just what, he demanded, did she suspect?

f.a.n.n.y didn't know.

"Only I have had this worrying feeling. Did you go straight back from the theatre or take a drive?" He was amazed at her searching prescient questions; but his manner was admirable.

"New Yorkers are not very apt to drive around their Park at night. They are rather familiar with it. There's the afternoon for that, and the morning for the bridle paths. I won't go on, though, in such a senseless and positively insulting conversation."

"You are not yourself since you returned," she observed acutely. "Sunday night you were too queer for words. You couldn't talk to Mrs. Craddock for more than a minute at a time. Did you call her Savina?" Mrs.

Craddock's name, he responded in a nicely interrogating manner, he had thought to be Laura. She paid no attention to his avoidance of her demand. "Did you?"

"No." His self-restraint was fast vanishing.

"I can't believe a word you say."

"h.e.l.l, don't ask me then."

"You must not curse where the servants can hear you, and I won't listen to such talk, I'll leave the table. I wish you'd look in the mirror and see how red and confused you are. It is too bad that I cannot depend on you after so long, and with the children. You were sitting close to that woman, and--and your arms; you were kissing."

"I have her garter on my bureau."

"Stop." Her anger now raised her above petty sallies. "I have stood a great deal from you, but there is more I simply won't. Do you understand? I've always done my duty and I'll make you do yours. I never have looked at another man, nor been kissed, except that horrid one last July at the Golf Club." While she paused, breathless, he put in that it might do her good. "Oh, I see," she spoke slowly: "you think that would give you an excuse. If I did it I couldn't complain about your nasty affairs. How cheap and easy I must seem. You ought to be ashamed to try to trick me."

"If you are going to fly at conclusions you can sit in the tree alone,"

he protested. "It's amazing where you have arrived from nothing. Let me tell you that I won't be ragged like this; if you think so much of our life why do you make it hideous with these degrading quarrels? You would never learn that way if there was the slightest, the slightest, cause for your bitterness. You have all you want, haven't you? The house and grounds are planted with your flowers, you are bringing up the children to be like yourself. I don't specially care for this," he made a comprehensive gesture; "building an elaborate place to die in doesn't appeal to me. What is so valuable, so necessary, to you, I never think of. You are so full of your life that you don't consider mine, except where it is tied up with your interests."

"Lee Randon," she cried, "I've given you everything, it's all planned for you, here. Nothing comes on the table that you dislike--we haven't had beefsteak for months; when you are busy with your papers I keep it like a grave; and if the house seems cold, and I can't find Christopher, I don't bother you, but slip down to the furnace myself."

"Make me uncomfortable, then," he retorted; "I think that's what I'm sick of--your eternal gabbling about comfort and dinner. Let the G.o.d d.a.m.n furnace go out! Or burn up."

"That's all I have, Lee," she said helplessly; "it is my life. I tried, the last month, to be different, after watching you with gayer women; but it only made me miserable; I kept wondering if Gregory was covered up and if the car would start when you wanted to go home. But I won't be sorry for it." Her head was up, her cheeks blazing. "I know, and so ought you, what being good is. And if you forget it you will have a dreadful misfortune. G.o.d is like that: He'll punish you."