Cytherea Part 21

"The end," she echoed, in a strange and smothered voice. "Is this it?

But not yet."

Lee's gaze rested on the magazine lying spread half on the Eastern symbolism of a rug and half on the bare polished flooring. "Your story is far more interesting than any in that," he commented, with a gesture.

"It's a pity you haven't turned your imagination to a better use." This, he recognized, could not go on indefinitely. f.a.n.n.y added:

"But I was wrong--you'd kiss her before you said Savina. That, I believe, is the way it works. It is really screaming when you think what you went to New York for--to protect Claire, to keep Peyton Morris out of Mina Raff's hands. And, apparently, you succeeded but got in badly yourself. What a pair of hypocrites you were: all the while worse than the others, who were at least excused by their youngness, ever could dream of being. What was the good of your contradicting me at first? I knew all along. I felt it."

"What was it, exactly, that you felt?" he asked with an a.s.sumption of calmness.

"I don't understand," she acknowledged, for the moment at a loss. "It was inside me, like lead. But, whatever happened, it will come out; it always does; and you'll be sorry."

Did the truth, he wondered, always appear, and triumph over the false; was that precept of morality secure for those who depended on it? And, as f.a.n.n.y threatened, would he be sorry? But most a.s.suredly he would, for three reasons--Savina, f.a.n.n.y, and himself; there might, even, be two more, Helena and Gregory; yes, and William Loyd Grove. What a stinking mess it was all turning out to be. Why wasn't life, why weren't women, reasonable? But he could not convince himself that anything final--a separation--threatened them. f.a.n.n.y couldn't force an admission from him, nor speak of this, investigate it, anywhere else. Savina was well able to take care of herself. There was nothing to do but wait. In the process of that he once more picked up the magazine. f.a.n.n.y said unexpectedly:

"I ordered your Christmas present. It took all the money I had in the Dime Savings Bank." He muttered a phrase to the effect that Christmas was a season for children. This recalled his own--they wouldn't be asleep yet--and, to escape temporarily from an impossible situation, to secure the paper knife, he went up to see them.

They greeted him vociferously: before he could turn on the light they were partly out of the covers, and the old argument about whose bed he should sit on in full progress. Helena's was by the door, so, returning her to the warmth of her blankets, he stopped beside her. The room, with the windows fully open, was cold, but he welcomed the white frozen purity of its barrenness. More than ever he was impressed by the remoteness of the children's bed-room from the pa.s.sionate disturbances of living; but they, in the sense f.a.n.n.y and he knew, weren't alive yet. They imitated the accents and concerns, caught at the gestures, of maturity; but, even in the grip of beginning instincts, they were hardly more sentient than the figures of a puppet show. Or, perhaps, their world was so far from his that they couldn't be said to span from one to the other. Gregory, in mind, was no more like him than a slip was like a tree bearing fruit--no matter how bitter. Helena more nearly resembled her mother; that had never occurred to him before.

It was undoubtedly true--her posturing recalled the feminine att.i.tude in extreme miniature. In that he felt outside her sympathy, she belonged with her mother; to Gregory he was far more nearly allied. Gregory, anyhow, had the potentialities of his own dilemma; he might, in years to come, be drawn out of a present reality by the enigma, the fascination, of Cytherea. Lee Randon hoped not; he wanted to advise him, at once, resolutely to close his eyes to all visions beyond the horizon of wise practicability. Marry, have children, be faithful, die, he said; but, alas, to himself. Gregory, smiling in eager antic.i.p.ation of what might ensue, was necessarily ignorant of so much. Something again lay back of that, Lee realized--his occupation in life. There he, Lee, had made his first, perhaps most serious, mistake. While the majority of men turned, indifferent, from their labor, there were a rare few--hadn't he phrased this before?--lost in an edifice of the mind, scientific or aesthetic or commercial, who were happily unconscious of the lapsing fretful years.

That was the way to cheat the sardonic gathered fates: to be deaf and blind to whatever, falsely, they seemed to offer; to get into bed heavy with weariness and rise hurried and absorbed. Over men so preoccupied, spent, Cytherea had no power. It was strange how her name had become linked with all his deepest speculations; she was involved in concerns remote from her apparent sphere and influence.

"Gracious, you're thinking a lot," Helena said.

"What are you thinking about?" Gregory added.

"A doll," he replied, turning to his daughter.

"For me," she declared.

"No, me," Gregory insisted.

Lee Randon shook his head. "Not you, in the least."

"Of course not," Helena supported him. "I should think it would make you sick, father, hearing Gregory talk like that. It does me. Why doesn't he ask for something that boys play with?"

"I don't want them, that's why," Gregory specified. "Perhaps I'd like to have a typewriter."

"You're not very modest." It was Helena again.

"It's father, isn't it? It isn't you."

"Listen," Lee broke in, "I came up here to be with two good children; but where are they?"

"I'm one." Helena, freeing herself definitely, closed her arms in a sweet warmth about his neck. "I'm one, too," Gregory called urgently.

"No," his father pressed him back; "you must stay in bed. They are both here, I can see."

He wondered if, everything else forgotten, his children could const.i.tute a sufficient engagement; but the sentimental picture, cast across his thoughts, of himself being led by a child holding each of his hands defeated it. He was turned in another direction.

Yet, tonight, they were remarkably engaging.... He had lost a great deal. For what? He couldn't--as usual--answer; but the memory of Savina, stronger than f.a.n.n.y, metaphorically took Helena's arms away from his neck and blurred the image of Gregory. "Have you said your prayer?" he asked absent-mindedly making conversation. Oh, yes, he was informed, they did that with Martha. "I'll say mine again," Gregory volunteered.

Again--a picture of a child, in a halo of innocence, praying at a paternal knee to a fresco of saccharine angels!

"Once is enough," he answered hurriedly. "I am sure you do it very nicely."

"Well, anyhow, better than Helena," Gregory admitted. "She hurries so."

Lee instructed him to confine his observations to his own performance.

Now was the time for him to deliver a small sermon on prayer to Helena.

He recognized this, but he was merely incensed by it. What could he reply if they questioned him about his own devotions? Should he acknowledge that he thought prayer was no more than a pleasant form of administering to a sense of self-importance? Or, at most, a variety of self-help? Luckily they didn't ask. How outraged f.a.n.n.y would be--he would be driven from the community--if he confessed the slightest of his doubts to his children. If, say at the table, when they were all together, he should drop his negative silence, his policy of nonintervention, what a horrified breathlessness would follow. His children, Lee thought, his wife, the servants in the kitchen, none knew him; he was a stranger to his own house.

If he had still, quite desperately, instinctively, looked to Helena and Gregory for a.s.sistance, he had met a final failure. Brushed with sleepiness they were slipping away from him. He was reluctant to have them go, leave him; the distance between them and himself appeared to widen immeasurably as he stood watching them settle for the night. He wanted to call them back, "Helena and Gregory, Gregory!" But he remained quiet, his head a little bent, his heart heavy. The tide of sleep, silent, mystical, recompensing! It wasn't that, exactly, he was facing.

Switching off the light he went into their playroom, scattered with bright toys, with alphabet blocks and an engine, a train of cars and some lengths of track, and a wooden steamboat on wheels gaily painted.

Already these things had a look of indifferent treatment, of having been half cast aside. Gregory had wanted a typewriter; his jacket, at dancing-school, had been belted like his, Lee Randon's. They each had, in the lower hall, a bicycle on which they rode to and from school and to play. "Will he need me later?" Lee asked himself; "or will it be the same till the end?" But he had already decided that the latter was infinitely better.

He lingered on the second floor, putting off from minute to minute the unavoidable taking up of f.a.n.n.y's demands. She was, he knew, waiting for his appearance to begin again energetically. In their room it struck him forcibly that he must make some mental diagram of his course, his last unshakable position. Certainly in admitting that he had called Savina Grove by her first name he had justified f.a.n.n.y's contention that he had kissed her. f.a.n.n.y should have asked him how many times that had occurred. "A hundred," he heard himself, in fancy, replying. By G.o.d, he would like to say just that, and have it all over, done with. Instead he must lie cunningly, imperturbably, and in a monumental patience. Why? He hadn't, pointedly, asked that before. Things here, his life, the future, must be held together.

After he had descended, he lingered in the hall: in the room where his wife was sitting not a sound was audible, there wasn't an indication of her presence. Lee turned away to the mantel-piece dominated by Cytherea.

Here, he addressed himself silently to the doll, you're responsible for this. Get me out of it. I'll put it all in your hands, that hand you have raised and hold half open and empty. But his, he added, in an embittered lightness, was an affair of matrimony; it was a moral knot; and it had nothing to do with Cytherea, with the shape, the sea, the island, of Venus. She was merely disdainful.

f.a.n.n.y was seated in the chair, the exact position, in which he had left her. And when he returned to the place he had deserted, she took no notice of him.

Her eyes were fixed in thought, her lips pinched. Was it only now, or had he never noticed it before, that her hands resembled her face, bony with a dry fine skin? Perhaps, heroically, she was thrusting the whole subject of Savina Grove from her mind; he couldn't tell; her exterior showed Lee Randon nothing, He waited, undecided if he'd smoke. Lee didn't, he found, want to. She shook her head, a startled look pa.s.sed through her eyes, and f.a.n.n.y sighed deeply. She seemed to come back from a far place. It was, of course, the past, her early aspirations; herself, young; but what, out of her remembrance, had she brought with her?

Nothing.

Her first words instantly dispelled what had many aspects of his last hope for peace. "It is surprising to me that you could go up to the children; but I suppose we must all be glad to have you pay attention to them at any time." This minor development he succeeded in avoiding. "I have been thinking hard," she continued, "and I have made up my mind about you; it is this--you just simply have to be different. I won't let you, us, stay like this. It is hideous."

"You are quite right," he admitted; "and I have already agreed that the change must princ.i.p.ally be in me. If you'd explain it to me, what you have decided on, we'll find out, if possible, how to go about it."

"At least you needn't be sarcastic," she replied; "I am not as impossible as you make out. You will have to be different at home--"

"I thought it was outside home you objected to."

"It's one and the same," she went on; "and I won't have them, it, a minute longer. Not a minute! You have got to behave yourself."

"You haven't been very definite yet."

"Mrs. Grove--Savina," she flung back at him.

"That is a name and not a fact."

"It's a fact that you kissed her." f.a.n.n.y leaned forward, flushed and tense, knocking over her stool. "And that you put your arms around her, and said--oh, I don't know what you did say. Did she mention me?"

"Only indirectly," he replied with a gleam of malice; "neither of us did."