Cytherea Part 6

"Now, we are beginning," he told her with emphasis; "we never had an argument that didn't degenerate into this; and I'm sick of it."

"I thought I was the one who was sick of it," f.a.n.n.y complained; "I wonder that I don't just let you go."

"I wish you would," he said, rising; "I give you my word, I'd rather be d.a.m.ned comfortably than have this endless trouble." In a position of una.s.sailable quiet behind his papers he told himself that the scene with f.a.n.n.y had been particularly vain because, underneath, he agreed with her opinion about the casual expression of small emotions; he no longer wanted it any more than she did. Yes, at last they were one there. And yet he felt further from her even than before--whatever his marriage hadn't satisfied, that he had stilled in minor ways, was now without check. The truth was that it had increased, become more serious, insistent.

The tangible facts, the letters and memoranda, before him, retreated and came back to his consciousness. Tobacco worms had been boring through his cigars, and destroyed a third of the box. Helena pa.s.sed, affecting a grievance out of any proportion to its cause in him. Outside, the country was flooded with a deceptive golden radiance; and he remembered, suddenly, that Alice Lucian had told him to bring f.a.n.n.y to the Club and a tea that afternoon, which she was giving for Mina Raff. He repeated this to his wife, in a conciliatory regret at his forgetfulness; and she replied that if he cared to go she would come over later for him in the car. Lee, standing at a window, thought he wouldn't; but, adding that Peyton would be there, he decided that, in view of the possible developments, his presence might be wise.

The early gloom gathered familiarly in the long main room of the clubhouse; the fire cast out fanwise and undependable flickering light upon the relaxed figures; it shone on tea cups, sparkled in rich translucent preserves, and glimmered through a gla.s.s sugar bowl. It was all, practically, Lee Randon reflected, as it had been before and would be again. How few things, out of a worldful, the ordinary individual saw, saw--that was--to comprehend, to experience: a limited number of interiors, certain roads and streets, fields and views. He made his way through life blinded to the customary and unaware of the strange; summer was hot and winter, usually, cold; the spring became green under rain; winds blew and the leaves fell in fall--of how much more was he conscious?

It was the same with regard to people; he, Lee Randon, knew a great many, or rather, he could repeat their names, recognize their superficial features at sight. But to say that he actually knew them--that was nonsense! Why, he was almost totally ignorant of himself.

How much could he explain of f.a.n.n.y's late state of mind? She had done all that was possible to make it clear to him; with little result. f.a.n.n.y was an extraordinarily honest person; or, d.a.m.n it, she seemed to be. He had a reputation for truthfulness; but how much of what was in his mind would he admit to his wife? The discrepancy between what he appeared and what he felt himself to be, what he thought and what published, was enormous, astounding.

There, as well, was Peyton Morris; Lee would have sworn that he understood him thoroughly--a character as simple, as obvious as f.a.n.n.y's.

But here was Morris seated with Mina Raff on the stairs to the upper floor, beyond the radius of the fire; and, though they were not ten feet away, he could not hear a word of what they were saying. At intervals there was an indistinct murmur, nothing more. Claire, at Lee Randon's side, was sitting with her chin high and a gaze concentrated on the twisting flames: talking generally had fallen into a pause.

The door from without opened, f.a.n.n.y entered, and there was a momentary revival of animation. "Is Lee here?" she demanded; "but I know he is.

The fire is just as attractive at home, yet, even with nothing to do, he'll hardly wait to give it a poke. Where's Peyton?"

"On the stairs," someone answered casually.

There was a movement, and Mina Raff approached. "It's so hot here," she a.s.serted.

"It is warmer out," f.a.n.n.y informed her; "I wonder what the weather is in New York?"

"I can't say, I'm sure; but I shall discover tomorrow morning. I have to be back as early as possible. Then--work, work, work."

"Mina has been made a star," Peyton Morris announced. But he stopped awkwardly, apparently conscious of the warmth, the largeness, in his voice. f.a.n.n.y whispered to Lee that it was quite too outrageous. In return, he asked, "What?" and, indignant, she drew away from him.

The conversation died again. Lee Randon could see Mina Raff's profile, held darkly against the glow; her lips and chin were firm. "Where,"

Anette asked her, "shall you stay when you get back--at Savina Grove's?"

No, Mina replied, her hours would be too long and uncertain to allow that; probably she would be at the Plaza. Lee had heard the Groves' name mentioned before in connection with Mina Raff; and he made an effort to recall the reason. The Groves--it was the William Loyd Groves--were rather important people, financially and socially; and one of them, yes, that was it, was related to Mina, but which he didn't know.

More came back to him: Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves'

opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their support had been withheld from her through the period when it had been most needed.

Yes, the girl had a determined mouth. If he, Lee Randon, had followed his first inclinations--were they in the way of literature?--how different his life would have been. Mina Raff had been stronger, more selfish, than her environment: selfishness and success were synonymous.

Yet, as a human quality, it was more hated, more reviled, than any other. Its opposite was held as the perfect, the heavenly, ethics of conduct. To be sacrificed, that was the accepted essence of Christ; fineness came through relinquishment. He didn't believe it, he told himself fiercely; something deep, integral, in him revolted absolutely.

Mina Raff had been wholly justified; the very people who had thrown all their weight against her admitted it fully. It was only when such a self-belief was without compensating result, value, that it was wrong.

But who could say what any outcome would be? Some people took the chance and others didn't; he had not. Then the question came up of whether he had not failed as it was? No one would agree with him that it might be failure; he hadn't called it that. Suddenly, vehemently, he wished that he could grow old at once, in a second; anything to quiet the restlessness at his heart.

Lee had a conviction that he ought to decide the case of the individual against the world, the feeling that it was of the greatest importance to him; but for centuries men had considered, without answer, just that.

The thing to do was to live, not to think; for it was possible that those who thought, weighed causes and results, hardly lived at all in the sense he meant. All the people he knew were cautious before they were anything else; they existed primarily for their stomachs. The widely advertised beauty of self sacrifice was golden only when it adorned like a halo the heads of others. That was natural, inevitable to the struggle for survival; it didn't answer Lee's question, which, he felt, was of the spirit rather than the body.

"It's getting late," f.a.n.n.y said briskly. There was a general movement, sighs and the settling of skirts. The lights were switched on, and the fire, that had been a source of magic, became nothing more than ugly grey charring logs with a few thin tongues of flame. Lee, with his wife, stopped to say good-bye to Mina Raff; f.a.n.n.y's manner was bright, conventional; as palpably insincere to the other woman, Lee was certain, as it was to him. He said:

"I hope your new picture will go well."

"Thank you," she responded, her slight hand lingeringly holding his; "perhaps you will like me better on the screen than in reality."

"Could you tell me which was which?"

She hesitated. "Three months ago, yes, but not now; I'm not sure of myself."

"That was positively indecent," f.a.n.n.y observed afterward; "she is as bold as bra.s.s. I hope I am not as big a fool as Claire."

"Claire and you are very different," he told her; "I have an idea that she is doing whatever is possible. But then we don't know what we are talking about: it's fairly evident that Peyton and Mina Raff are interested in each other, they may be in love; and, if they are, what does that mean? It isn't your feeling for the children or mine for you; they are both love; yet what is it?"

"It is G.o.d in us," f.a.n.n.y said gravely; "and keeps us all, Helena and Gregory and you and me, safely together."

She seldom spoke to him of religion, but it dwelt closely, vitally, within her, and not as an inherited abstraction or correct social observation, but definitely personal in its intercommunication. Lee Randon had none at all; and in her rare references to it he could only preserve an awkward silence. That had always been a bar between his family and himself, particularly with the children: he was obliged to maintain an endless hypocrisy about the miracles, the dogmas and affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of reason discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities, nothing had been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and h.e.l.l, the loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of the unrepentant, only earth remained.

He could recall in gloomy detail his early impression of Paradise: it was a sombre plain floating cloud-like in air, with, doubling through it, an unspeakable sluggish river of blood; G.o.d, bearded and frowning in the severity of chronic judgment, dominated from an architectural throne a throng of the saved in straight garments and sandalled feet; and, in the foreground, a lamb with a halo and an uplifted cross was intent on the baptism of individuals issuing unaccountably white from the thickly crimson flood.

Yet his children, in a modified Episcopalian form, were being taught the same thing: the Mosaic G.o.d; Christ Jesus who took unto Himself the sin of the world; the rugged disciple, St. Peter and the loving disciple, St. John. The sky, they learned, was the habitation of light-winged angels. The ark was still reported on its memorable voyage, with its providential pairs of animals gathered from every zone, but there was a growing reticence about Jonah. The persistence of such credulity, Lee thought, was depressing; just as the churches, leaning on the broken support of a charity they were held to dispense, were a commentary on the poverty of the minds and spirits of men.

Yes, the necessity of charging Helena and Gregory with such a.s.surances, their rigid bending into mental forms, large and small, in which he had no confidence, put Lee outside the solidity of his family. In the instruction, the influences, widely held paramount in the welding of polite Christian characters, f.a.n.n.y was indefatigable--the piece of silver firmly clasped in the hand for collection, the courtesy when addressed by elders, the convention that nature, birds, were sentimentally beneficent. When Gregory brought out these convictions, lessons, in his indescribably fresh eager tones, Lee listened with a helpless disapproval.

Everything, it seemed to Lee Randon, increased the position of self-delusion at the expense of what he felt to be reality. His doubts, for example, were real; with no will, no effort on his part, they invaded his mind ceaselessly. Cytherea's disturbing charm was real, as definite as f.a.n.n.y's quiet actuality. However, he wasn't interested in an abstract arraignment of life, but intent only on the truth about himself. Lee wanted to discharge fully his duty to existence--in the more inglorious phrase, he didn't want to make a fool of himself--and yet it was growing more difficult all the while to distinguish folly from sense.

This affair, if it did exist, of Peyton's with Mina Raff wasn't so easily determined as f.a.n.n.y insisted. Perhaps, like his own, Peyton Morris' life had been restricted by artificial barriers thrown about the rebellious integrity of his fundamental being. Few children could stand out against the combined forces of the older world; but it was conceivable that, later, like a chrysalis, they might burst the hard, superimposed skin and emerge triumphant.

That d.a.m.ned problem of self-sacrifice!

How much claim had men upon each other? What did children gain who sacrificed their lives for their parents? It was supposed to bring them n.o.bility; but, at the same time, didn't it develop in the parents the utmost callous selfishness; didn't the latter, as their needs were exclusively consulted, grow more exacting, unreasonable? Was not love itself the most unreasonable and exacting thing imaginable?

Once surrendered to it, the tyranny of a beloved subject was absolute: Lee told himself that the emotion he was considering--the most sacred of earthly ties--ignominiously resembled the properties of fly paper. He turned abruptly from that graceless thought: it was a great deal warmer, and a mist, curiously tangible in the night, was rising through the bare branches of the maple trees.

"I am going to talk to Claire," f.a.n.n.y said firmly.

"It would do both of you no good," he informed her; "besides, you'll have to take so much for granted."

"Claire will tell me."

"I wonder?" They were in their room, preparing for bed; f.a.n.n.y, with her hair spread in a thin brown tide over the chaste shoulders of her nightgown, was incredibly like a girl. The mechanical sweep of her hand with a brush kept a brief sleeve falling back from the thinness of her arm. How delicately methodical she was--an indispensable quality in the repeated trying contacts, the lost privacy, of marriage. So much depended upon the very elusiveness which the security of possession, habit, destroyed.

"This love," he continued his speculations aloud, "isn't at all understood--we are ignorant about it in spite of endless experience and reports and poetry. Take us," he had one of his dangerous impulses of complete honesty, "before we were married, while we were engaged, we had an impracticable romantic attraction for each other. I know that I thought of you all the time, day and night; and, just because you existed, the whole world was full of prismatic colors; it was as though an orchestra were playing continually and I were floating on the finest music. You were like a figure in heaven that drew me up to you.

"Well, that lasted quite a while into our marriage; at first I had an even greater emotion. Then, as Helena and Gregory were born, it changed." Midway in the brushing of her hair f.a.n.n.y was motionless and intent. "I don't say it decreased, f.a.n.n.y, that it lost any of its importance; but it did change; and in you as well as me. It wasn't as prismatic, as musical, and there's no use contradicting me. I can explain it best for myself by saying that my feeling for you became largely tenderness."

"Oh!" f.a.n.n.y exclaimed, in a little lifting gasp; "oh, and that tenderness," her cheeks were bright with sudden color, "why, it is no more than pity."

"That isn't just," he replied; "unless you want to speak of pity at its very best. No, that won't do: my affection for you is made of all our experiences, our lives and emotions, together. We are tied by a thousand strings--common disappointments and joy and sickness and hope and pain and heaven knows what else. We're held by habit, too, and convenience and the opinion of society. Certainly it is no smaller than the first,"

he argued, but more to himself than to f.a.n.n.y; "that was nothing but a state of mind, of spirit; you can't live on music."