Chapter VIII: Part II: XIII (4)

It was on the tip of her tongue to flash back: “Oh, if that’s all you care--!” But caring was exactly the factor she wanted, as much as possible, to keep out of their talk and their thoughts. She could not ask him how much he cared without laying herself open to the same question; and that way terror lay. As a matter of fact, though Strefford was not an ardent wooer--perhaps from tact, perhaps from temperament, perhaps merely from the long habit of belittling and disintegrating every sentiment and every conviction--yet she knew he did care for her as much as he was capable of caring for anyone. If the element of habit entered largely into the feeling--if he liked her, above all, because he was used to her, knew her views, her indulgences, her allowances, knew he was never likely to be bored, and almost certain to be amused, by her; why, such ingredients though not of the fieriest, were perhaps those most likely to keep his feeling for her at a pleasant temperature. She had had a taste of the tropics, and wanted more equable weather; but the idea of having to fan his flame gently for a year was unspeakably depressing to her. Yet all this was precisely what she could not say. The long period of probation, during which, as she knew, she would have to amuse him, to guard him, to hold him, and to keep off the other women, was a necessary part of their situation. She was sure that, as little Breckenridge would have said, she could “pull it off”; but she did not want to think about it. What she would have preferred would have been to go away--no matter where and not see Strefford again till they were married. But she dared not tell him that either.

“A little house in London--?” She wondered.

“Well, I suppose you’ve got to have some sort of a roof over your head.”

“I suppose so.”

He sat down beside her. “If you like me well enough to live at Altringham some day, won’t you, in the meantime, let me provide you with a smaller and more convenient establishment?”

Still she hesitated. The alternative, she knew, would be to live on Ursula Gillow, Violet Melrose, or some other of her rich friends, any one of whom would be ready to lavish the largest hospitality on the prospective Lady Altringham. Such an arrangement, in the long run, would be no less humiliating to her pride, no less destructive to her independence, than Altringham’s little establishment. But she temporized. “I shall go over to London in December, and stay for a while with various people--then we can look about.”

“All right; as you like.” He obviously considered her hesitation ridiculous, but was too full of satisfaction at her having started divorce proceedings to be chilled by her reply.

“And now, look here, my dear; couldn’t I give you some sort of a ring?”

“A ring?” She flushed at the suggestion. “What’s the use, Streff, dear? With all those jewels locked away in London--”

“Oh, I daresay you’ll think them old-fashioned. And, hang it, why shouldn’t I give you something new, I ran across Ellie and Bockheimer yesterday, in the rue de la Paix, picking out sapphires. Do you like sapphires, or emeralds? Or just a diamond? I’ve seen a thumping one.... I’d like you to have it.”

Ellie and Bockheimer! How she hated the conjunction of the names! Their case always seemed to her like a caricature of her own, and she felt an unreasoning resentment against Ellie for having selected the same season for her unmating and re-mating.

“I wish you wouldn’t speak of them, Streff... as if they were like us! I can hardly bear to sit in the same room with Ellie Vanderlyn.”

“Hullo? What’s wrong? You mean because of her giving up Clarissa?”

“Not that only.... You don’t know.... I can’t tell you....” She shivered at the memory, and rose restlessly from the bench where they had been sitting.

Strefford gave his careless shrug. “Well, my dear, you can hardly expect me to agree, for after all it was to Ellie I owed the luck of being so long alone with you in Venice. If she and Algie hadn’t prolonged their honeymoon at the villa--”

He stopped abruptly, and looked at Susy. She was conscious that every drop of blood had left her face. She felt it ebbing away from her heart, flowing out of her as if from all her severed arteries, till it seemed as though nothing were left of life in her but one point of irreducible pain.

“Ellie--at your villa? What do you mean? Was it Ellie and Bockheimer who--?”

Strefford still stared. “You mean to say you didn’t know?”

“Who came after Nick and me...?” she insisted.

“Why, do you suppose I’d have turned you out otherwise? That beastly Bockheimer simply smothered me with gold. Ah, well, there’s one good thing: I shall never have to let the villa again! I rather like the little place myself, and I daresay once in a while we might go there for a day or two.... Susy, what’s the matter?” he exclaimed.

She returned his stare, but without seeing him. Everything swam and danced before her eyes.

“Then she was there while I was posting all those letters for her--?”

“Letters--what letters? What makes you look so frightfully upset?”

She pursued her thought as if he had not spoken. “She and Algie Bockheimer arrived there the very day that Nick and I left?”

“I suppose so. I thought she’d told you. Ellie always tells everybody everything.”

“She would have told me, I daresay--but I wouldn’t let her.”

“Well, my dear, that was hardly my fault, was it? Though I really don’t see--”

But Susy, still blind to everything but the dance of dizzy sparks before her eyes, pressed on as if she had not heard him. “It was their motor, then, that took us to Milan! It was Algie Bockheimer’s motor!” She did not know why, but this seemed to her the most humiliating incident in the whole hateful business. She remembered Nick’s reluctance to use the motor--she remembered his look when she had boasted of her “managing.” The nausea mounted to her throat.

Strefford burst out laughing. “I say--you borrowed their motor? And you didn’t know whose it was?”

“How could I know? I persuaded the chauffeur... for a little tip.... It was to save our railway fares to Milan... extra luggage costs so frightfully in Italy....”

“Good old Susy! Well done! I can see you doing it--”

“Oh, how horrible--how horrible!” she groaned.

“Horrible? What’s horrible?”

“Why, your not seeing... not feeling...” she began impetuously; and then stopped. How could she explain to him that what revolted her was not so much the fact of his having given the little house, as soon as she and Nick had left it, to those two people of all others--though the vision of them in the sweet secret house, and under the plane-trees of the terrace, drew such a trail of slime across her golden hours? No, it was not that from which she most recoiled, but from the fact that Strefford, living in luxury in Nelson Vanderlyn’s house, should at the same time have secretly abetted Ellie Vanderlyn’s love-affairs, and allowed her--for a handsome price--to shelter them under his own roof. The reproach trembled on her lip--but she remembered her own part in the wretched business, and the impossibility of avowing it to Strefford, and of revealing to him that Nick had left her for that very reason. She was not afraid that the discovery would diminish her in Strefford’s eyes: he was untroubled by moral problems, and would laugh away her avowal, with a sneer at Nick in his new part of moralist. But that was just what she could not bear: that anyone should cast a doubt on the genuineness of Nick’s standards, or should know how far below them she had fallen.

She remained silent, and Strefford, after a moment, drew her gently down to the seat beside him. “Susy, upon my soul I don’t know what you’re driving at. Is it me you’re angry with--or yourself? And what’s it all about! Are you disgusted because I let the villa to a couple who weren’t married! But, hang it, they’re the kind that pay the highest price and I had to earn my living somehow! One doesn’t run across a bridal pair every day....”

She lifted her eyes to his puzzled incredulous face. Poor Streff! No, it was not with him that she was angry. Why should she be? Even that ill-advised disclosure had told her nothing she had not already known about him. It had simply revealed to her once more the real point of view of the people he and she lived among had shown her that, in spite of the superficial difference, he felt as they felt, judged as they judged, was blind as they were--and as she would be expected to be, should she once again become one of them. What was the use of being placed by fortune above such shifts and compromises, if in one’s heart one still condoned them? And she would have to--she would catch the general note, grow blunted as those other people were blunted, and gradually come to wonder at her own revolt, as Strefford now honestly wondered at it. She felt as though she were on the point of losing some new-found treasure, a treasure precious only to herself, but beside which all he offered her was nothing, the triumph of her wounded pride nothing, the security of her future nothing.

“What is it, Susy?” he asked, with the same puzzled gentleness.

Ah, the loneliness of never being able to make him understand! She had felt lonely enough when the flaming sword of Nick’s indignation had shut her out from their Paradise; but there had been a cruel bliss in the pain. Nick had not opened her eyes to new truths, but had waked in her again something which had lain unconscious under years of accumulated indifference. And that re-awakened sense had never left her since, and had somehow kept her from utter loneliness because it was a secret shared with Nick, a gift she owed to Nick, and which, in leaving her, he could not take from her. It was almost, she suddenly felt, as if he had left her with a child.

“My dear girl,” Strefford said, with a resigned glance at his watch, “you know we’re dining at the Embassy....”

At the Embassy? She looked at him vaguely: then she remembered. Yes, they were dining that night at the Ascots’, with Strefford’s cousin, the Duke of Dunes, and his wife, the handsome irreproachable young Duchess; with the old gambling Dowager Duchess, whom her son and daughter-in-law had come over from England to see; and with other English and French guests of a rank and standing worthy of the Duneses. Susy knew that her inclusion in such a dinner could mean but one thing: it was her definite recognition as Altringham’s future wife. She was “the little American” whom one had to ask when one invited him, even on ceremonial occasions. The family had accepted her; the Embassy could but follow suit.

“It’s late, dear; and I’ve got to see someone on business first,” Strefford reminded her patiently.

“Oh, Streff--I can’t, I can’t!” The words broke from her without her knowing what she was saying. “I can’t go with you--I can’t go to the Embassy. I can’t go on any longer like this....” She lifted her eyes to his in desperate appeal. “Oh, understand--do please understand!” she wailed, knowing, while she spoke, the utter impossibility of what she asked.

Strefford’s face had gradually paled and hardened. From sallow it turned to a dusky white, and lines of obstinacy deepened between the ironic eyebrows and about the weak amused mouth.

“Understand? What do you want me to understand,” He laughed. “That you’re trying to chuck me already?”

She shrank at the sneer of the “already,” but instantly remembered that it was the only thing he could be expected to say, since it was just because he couldn’t understand that she was flying from him.

“Oh, Streff--if I knew how to tell you!”

“It doesn’t so much matter about the how. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

Her head drooped, and she saw the dead leaves whirling across the path at her feet, lifted on a sudden wintry gust.

“The reason,” he continued, clearing his throat with a stiff smile, “is not quite as important to me as the fact.”

She stood speechless, agonized by his pain. But still, she thought, he had remembered the dinner at the Embassy. The thought gave her courage to go on.

“It wouldn’t do, Streff. I’m not a bit the kind of person to make you happy.”

“Oh, leave that to me, please, won’t you?”

“No, I can’t. Because I should be unhappy too.”

He clicked at the leaves as they whirled past. “You’ve taken a rather long time to find it out.” She saw that his new-born sense of his own consequence was making him suffer even more than his wounded affection; and that again gave her courage.

“If I’ve taken long it’s all the more reason why I shouldn’t take longer. If I’ve made a mistake it’s you who would have suffered from it....”

“Thanks,” he said, “for your extreme solicitude.”

She looked at him helplessly, penetrated by the despairing sense of their inaccessibility to each other. Then she remembered that Nick, during their last talk together, had seemed as inaccessible, and wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other’s vision. She would have liked to say this to Streff--but he would not have understood it either. The sense of loneliness once more enveloped her, and she groped in vain for a word that should reach him.

“Let me go home alone, won’t you?” she appealed to him.

“Alone?”

She nodded. “To-morrow--to-morrow....”

He tried, rather valiantly, to smile. “Hang to-morrow! Whatever is wrong, it needn’t prevent my seeing you home.” He glanced toward the taxi that awaited them at the end of the deserted drive.

“No, please. You’re in a hurry; take the taxi. I want immensely a long long walk by myself... through the streets, with the lights coming out....”

He laid his hand on her arm. “I say, my dear, you’re not ill?”

“No; I’m not ill. But you may say I am, to-night at the Embassy.”

He released her and drew back. “Oh, very well,” he answered coldly; and she understood by his tone that the knot was cut, and that at that moment he almost hated her. She turned away, hastening down the deserted alley, flying from him, and knowing, as she fled, that he was still standing there motionless, staring after her, wounded, humiliated, uncomprehending. It was neither her fault nor his....

XXIII.

AS she fled on toward the lights of the streets a breath of freedom seemed to blow into her face.

Like a weary load the accumulated hypocrisies of the last months had dropped from her: she was herself again, Nick’s Susy, and no one else’s. She sped on, staring with bright bewildered eyes at the stately facades of the La Muette quarter, the perspectives of bare trees, the awakening glitter of shop-windows holding out to her all the things she would never again be able to buy....

In an avenue of shops she paused before a milliner’s window, and said to herself: “Why shouldn’t I earn my living by trimming hats?” She met work-girls streaming out under a doorway, and scattering to catch trams and omnibuses; and she looked with newly-wakened interest at their tired independent faces. “Why shouldn’t I earn my living as well as they do?” she thought. A little farther on she passed a Sister of Charity with softly trotting feet, a calm anonymous glance, and hands hidden in her capacious sleeves. Susy looked at her and thought: “Why shouldn’t I be a Sister, and have no money to worry about, and trot about under a white coif helping poor people?”

All these strangers on whom she smiled in passing, and glanced back at enviously, were free from the necessities that enslaved her, and would not have known what she meant if she had told them that she must have so much money for her dresses, so much for her cigarettes, so much for bridge and cabs and tips, and all kinds of extras, and that at that moment she ought to be hurrying back to a dinner at the British Embassy, where her permanent right to such luxuries was to be solemnly recognized and ratified.

The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as with stifling fumes. She stopped at a street-corner, drawing long panting breaths as if she had been running a race. Then, slowly and aimlessly, she began to saunter along a street of small private houses in damp gardens that led to the Avenue du Bois. She sat down on a bench. Not far off, the Arc de Triomphe raised its august bulk, and beyond it a river of lights streamed down toward Paris, and the stir of the city’s heart-beats troubled the quiet in her bosom. But not for long. She seemed to be looking at it all from the other side of the grave; and as she got up and wandered down the Champs Elysees, half empty in the evening lull between dusk and dinner, she felt as if the glittering avenue were really changed into the Field of Shadows from which it takes its name, and as if she were a ghost among ghosts.

Halfway home, a weakness of loneliness overcame her, and she seated herself under the trees near the Rond Point. Lines of motors and carriages were beginning to animate the converging thoroughfares, streaming abreast, crossing, winding in and out of each other in a tangle of hurried pleasure-seeking. She caught the light on jewels and shirt-fronts and hard bored eyes emerging from dim billows of fur and velvet. She seemed to hear what the couples were saying to each other, she pictured the drawing-rooms, restaurants, dance-halls they were hastening to, the breathless routine that was hurrying them along, as Time, the old vacuum-cleaner, swept them away with the dust of their carriage-wheels. And again the loneliness vanished in a sense of release....

At the corner of the Place de la Concorde she stopped, recognizing a man in evening dress who was hailing a taxi. Their eyes met, and Nelson Vanderlyn came forward. He was the last person she cared to run across, and she shrank back involuntarily. What did he know, what had he guessed, of her complicity in his wife’s affairs? No doubt Ellie had blabbed it all out by this time; she was just as likely to confide her love-affairs to Nelson as to anyone else, now that the Bockheimer prize was landed.

“Well--well--well--so I’ve caught you at it! Glad to see you, Susy, my dear.” She found her hand cordially clasped in Vanderlyn’s, and his round pink face bent on her with all its old urbanity. Did nothing matter, then, in this world she was fleeing from, did no one love or hate or remember?

“No idea you were in Paris--just got here myself,” Vanderlyn continued, visibly delighted at the meeting. “Look here, don’t suppose you’re out of a job this evening by any chance, and would come and cheer up a lone bachelor, eh? No? You are? Well, that’s luck for once! I say, where shall we go? One of the places where they dance, I suppose? Yes, I twirl the light fantastic once in a while myself. Got to keep up with the times! Hold on, taxi! Here--I’ll drive you home first, and wait while you jump into your toggery. Lots of time.” As he steered her toward the carriage she noticed that he had a gouty limp, and pulled himself in after her with difficulty.

“Mayn’t I come as I am, Nelson, I don’t feel like dancing. Let’s go and dine in one of those nice smoky little restaurants by the Place de la Bourse.”

He seemed surprised but relieved at the suggestion, and they rolled off together. In a corner at Bauge’s they found a quiet table, screened from the other diners, and while Vanderlyn adjusted his eyeglasses to study the carte Susy stole a long look at him. He was dressed with even more than his usual formal trimness, and she detected, in an ultra-flat wrist-watch and discreetly expensive waistcoat buttons, an attempt at smartness altogether new. His face had undergone the same change: its familiar look of worn optimism had been, as it were, done up to match his clothes, as though a sort of moral cosmetic had made him pinker, shinier and sprightlier without really rejuvenating him. A thin veil of high spirits had merely been drawn over his face, as the shining strands of hair were skilfully brushed over his baldness.

“Here! Carte des vins, waiter! What champagne, Susy?” He chose, fastidiously, the best the cellar could produce, grumbling a little at the bourgeois character of the dishes. “Capital food of its kind, no doubt, but coarsish, don’t you think? Well, I don’t mind... it’s rather a jolly change from the Luxe cooking. A new sensation--I’m all for new sensations, ain’t you, my dear?” He re-filled their champagne glasses, flung an arm sideways over his chair, and smiled at her with a foggy benevolence.

As the champagne flowed his confidences flowed with it.

“Suppose you know what I’m here for--this divorce business? We wanted to settle it quietly without a fuss, and of course Paris is the best place for that sort of job. Live and let live; no questions asked. None of your dirty newspapers. Great country, this. No hypocrisy... they understand Life over here!”

Susy gazed and listened. She remembered that people had thought Nelson would make a row when he found out. He had always been addicted to truculent anecdotes about unfaithful wives, and the very formula of his perpetual ejaculation--“Caught you at it, eh?”--seemed to hint at a constant preoccupation with such ideas. But now it was evident that, as the saying was, he had “swallowed his dose” like all the others. No strong blast of indignation had momentarily lifted him above his normal stature: he remained a little man among little men, and his eagerness to rebuild his life with all the old smiling optimism reminded Susy of the patient industry of an ant remaking its ruined ant-heap.

“Tell you what, great thing, this liberty! Everything’s changed nowadays; why shouldn’t marriage be too? A man can get out of a business partnership when he wants to; but the parsons want to keep us noosed up to each other for life because we’ve blundered into a church one day and said ‘Yes’ before one of ’em. No, no--that’s too easy. We’ve got beyond that. Science, and all these new discoveries.... I say the Ten Commandments were made for man, and not man for the Commandments; and there ain’t a word against divorce in ’em, anyhow! That’s what I tell my poor old mother, who builds everything on her Bible. Find me the place where it says: ‘Thou shalt not sue for divorce.’ It makes her wild, poor old lady, because she can’t; and she doesn’t know how they happen to have left it out.... I rather think Moses left it out because he knew more about human nature than these snivelling modern parsons do. Not that they’ll always bear investigating either; but I don’t care about that. Live and let live, eh, Susy? Haven’t we all got a right to our Affinities? I hear you’re following our example yourself. First-rate idea: I don’t mind telling you I saw it coming on last summer at Venice. Caught you at it, so to speak! Old Nelson ain’t as blind as people think. Here, let’s open another bottle to the health of Streff and Mrs. Streff!”

She caught the hand with which he was signalling to the sommelier. This flushed and garrulous Nelson moved her more poignantly than a more heroic figure. “No more champagne, please, Nelson. Besides,” she suddenly added, “it’s not true.”

He stared. “Not true that you’re going to marry Altringham?”

“No.”

“By George then what on earth did you chuck Nick for? Ain’t you got an Affinity, my dear?”

She laughed and shook her head.

“Do you mean to tell me it’s all Nick’s doing, then?”

“I don’t know. Let’s talk of you instead, Nelson. I’m glad you’re in such good spirits. I rather thought--”

He interrupted her quickly. “Thought I’d cut up a rumpus--do some shooting? I know--people did.” He twisted his moustache, evidently proud of his reputation. “Well, maybe I did see red for a day or two--but I’m a philosopher, first and last. Before I went into banking I’d made and lost two fortunes out West. Well, how did I build ’em up again? Not by shooting anybody even myself. By just buckling to, and beginning all over again. That’s how... and that’s what I am doing now. Beginning all over again.” His voice dropped from boastfulness to a note of wistful melancholy, the look of strained jauntiness fell from his face like a mask, and for an instant she saw the real man, old, ruined, lonely. Yes, that was it: he was lonely, desperately lonely, foundering in such deep seas of solitude that any presence out of the past was like a spar to which he clung. Whatever he knew or guessed of the part she had played in his disaster, it was not callousness that had made him greet her with such forgiving warmth, but the same sense of smallness, insignificance and isolation which perpetually hung like a cold fog on her own horizon. Suddenly she too felt old--old and unspeakably tired.

“It’s been nice seeing you, Nelson. But now I must be getting home.”

He offered no objection, but asked for the bill, resumed his jaunty air while he scattered largesse among the waiters, and sauntered out behind her after calling for a taxi.

They drove off in silence. Susy was thinking: “And Clarissa?” but dared not ask. Vanderlyn lit a cigarette, hummed a dance-tune, and stared out of the window. Suddenly she felt his hand on hers.

“Susy--do you ever see her?”

“See--Ellie?”

He nodded, without turning toward her.

“Not often... sometimes....”

“If you do, for God’s sake tell her I’m happy... happy as a king... tell her you could see for yourself that I was....” His voice broke in a little gasp. “I... I’ll be damned if... if she shall ever be unhappy about me... if I can help it....” The cigarette dropped from his fingers, and with a sob he covered his face.

“Oh, poor Nelson--poor Nelson,” Susy breathed. While their cab rattled across the Place du Carrousel, and over the bridge, he continued to sit beside her with hidden face. At last he pulled out a scented handkerchief, rubbed his eyes with it, and groped for another cigarette.

“I’m all right! Tell her that, will you, Susy? There are some of our old times I don’t suppose I shall ever forget; but they make me feel kindly to her, and not angry. I didn’t know it would be so, beforehand--but it is.... And now the thing’s settled I’m as right as a trivet, and you can tell her so.... Look here, Susy...” he caught her by the arm as the taxi drew up at her hotel.... “Tell her I understand, will you? I’d rather like her to know that....”

“I’ll tell her, Nelson,” she promised; and climbed the stairs alone to her dreary room.

Susy’s one fear was that Strefford, when he returned the next day, should treat their talk of the previous evening as a fit of “nerves” to be jested away. He might, indeed, resent her behaviour too deeply to seek to see her at once; but his easygoing modern attitude toward conduct and convictions made that improbable. She had an idea that what he had most minded was her dropping so unceremoniously out of the Embassy Dinner.

But, after all, why should she see him again? She had had enough of explanations during the last months to have learned how seldom they explain anything. If the other person did not understand at the first word, at the first glance even, subsequent elucidations served only to deepen the obscurity. And she wanted above all--and especially since her hour with Nelson Vanderlyn--to keep herself free, aloof, to retain her hold on her precariously recovered self. She sat down and wrote to Strefford--and the letter was only a little less painful to write than the one she had despatched to Nick. It was not that her own feelings were in any like measure engaged; but because, as the decision to give up Strefford affirmed itself, she remembered only his kindness, his forbearance, his good humour, and all the other qualities she had always liked in him; and because she felt ashamed of the hesitations which must cause him so much pain and humiliation. Yes: humiliation chiefly. She knew that what she had to say would hurt his pride, in whatever way she framed her renunciation; and her pen wavered, hating its task. Then she remembered Vanderlyn’s words about his wife: “There are some of our old times I don’t suppose I shall ever forget--” and a phrase of Grace Fulmer’s that she had but half grasped at the time: “You haven’t been married long enough to understand how trifling such things seem in the balance of one’s memories.”

Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into the labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already dawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in mutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and denial.

“The real reason is that you’re not Nick” was what she would have said to Strefford if she had dared to set down the bare truth; and she knew that, whatever she wrote, he was too acute not to read that into it.

“He’ll think it’s because I’m still in love with Nick... and perhaps I am. But even if I were, the difference doesn’t seem to lie there, after all, but deeper, in things we’ve shared that seem to be meant to outlast love, or to change it into something different.” If she could have hoped to make Strefford understand that, the letter would have been easy enough to write--but she knew just at what point his imagination would fail, in what obvious and superficial inferences it would rest.

“Poor Streff--poor me!” she thought as she sealed the letter.

After she had despatched it a sense of blankness descended on her. She had succeeded in driving from her mind all vain hesitations, doubts, returns upon herself: her healthy system naturally rejected them. But they left a queer emptiness in which her thoughts rattled about as thoughts might, she supposed, in the first moments after death--before one got used to it. To get used to being dead: that seemed to be her immediate business. And she felt such a novice at it--felt so horribly alive! How had those others learned to do without living? Nelson--well, he was still in the throes; and probably never would understand, or be able to communicate, the lesson when he had mastered it. But Grace Fulmer--she suddenly remembered that Grace was in Paris, and set forth to find her.

XXIV.

NICK LANSING had walked out a long way into the Campagna. His hours were seldom his own, for both Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were becoming more and more addicted to sudden and somewhat imperious demands upon his time; but on this occasion he had simply slipped away after luncheon, and taking the tram to the Porta Salaria, had wandered on thence in the direction of the Ponte Nomentano.

He wanted to get away and think; but now that he had done it the business proved as unfruitful as everything he had put his hand to since he had left Venice. Think--think about what? His future seemed to him a negligible matter since he had received, two months earlier, the few lines in which Susy had asked him for her freedom.

The letter had been a shock--though he had fancied himself so prepared for it--yet it had also, in another sense, been a relief, since, now that at last circumstances compelled him to write to her, they also told him what to say. And he had said it as briefly and simply as possible, telling her that he would put no obstacle in the way of her release, that he held himself at her lawyer’s disposal to answer any further communication--and that he would never forget their days together, or cease to bless her for them.

That was all. He gave his Roman banker’s address, and waited for another letter; but none came. Probably the “formalities,” whatever they were, took longer than he had supposed; and being in no haste to recover his own liberty, he did not try to learn the cause of the delay. From that moment, however, he considered himself virtually free, and ceased, by the same token, to take any interest in his own future. His life seemed as flat as a convalescent’s first days after the fever has dropped.

The only thing he was sure of was that he was not going to remain in the Hickses’ employ: when they left Rome for Central Asia he had no intention of accompanying them. The part of Mr. Buttles’ successor was becoming daily more intolerable to him, for the very reasons that had probably made it most gratifying to Mr. Buttles. To be treated by Mr. and Mrs. Hicks as a paid oracle, a paraded and petted piece of property, was a good deal more distasteful than he could have imagined any relation with these kindly people could be. And since their aspirations had become frankly social he found his task, if easier, yet far less congenial than during his first months with them. He preferred patiently explaining to Mrs. Hicks, for the hundredth time, that Sassanian and Saracenic were not interchangeable terms, to unravelling for her the genealogies of her titled guests, and reminding her, when she “seated” her dinner-parties, that Dukes ranked higher than Princes. No--the job was decidedly intolerable; and he would have to look out for another means of earning his living. But that was not what he had really got away to think about. He knew he should never starve; he had even begun to believe again in his book. What he wanted to think of was Susy--or rather, it was Susy that he could not help thinking of, on whatever train of thought he set out.

Again and again he fancied he had established a truce with the past: had come to terms--the terms of defeat and failure with that bright enemy called happiness. And, in truth, he had reached the point of definitely knowing that he could never return to the kind of life that he and Susy had embarked on. It had been the tragedy, of their relation that loving her roused in him ideals she could never satisfy. He had fallen in love with her because she was, like himself, amused, unprejudiced and disenchanted; and he could not go on loving her unless she ceased to be all these things. From that circle there was no issue, and in it he desperately revolved.

If he had not heard such persistent rumours of her re-marriage to Lord Altringham he might have tried to see her again; but, aware of the danger and the hopelessness of a meeting, he was, on the whole, glad to have a reason for avoiding it. Such, at least, he honestly supposed to be his state of mind until he found himself, as on this occasion, free to follow out his thought to its end. That end, invariably, was Susy; not the bundle of qualities and defects into which his critical spirit had tried to sort her out, but the soft blur of identity, of personality, of eyes, hair, mouth, laugh, tricks of speech and gesture, that were all so solely and profoundly her own, and yet so mysteriously independent of what she might do, say, think, in crucial circumstances. He remembered her once saying to him: “After all, you were right when you wanted me to be your mistress,” and the indignant stare of incredulity with which he had answered her. Yet in these hours it was the palpable image of her that clung closest, till, as invariably happened, his vision came full circle, and feeling her on his breast he wanted her also in his soul.

Well--such all-encompassing loves were the rarest of human experiences; he smiled at his presumption in wanting no other. Wearily he turned, and tramped homeward through the winter twilight....

At the door of the hotel he ran across the Prince of Teutoburg’s aide-de-camp. They had not met for some days, and Nick had a vague feeling that if the Prince’s matrimonial designs took definite shape he himself was not likely, after all, to be their chosen exponent. He had surprised, now and then, a certain distrustful coldness under the Princess Mother’s cordial glance, and had concluded that she perhaps suspected him of being an obstacle to her son’s aspirations. He had no idea of playing that part, but was not sorry to appear to; for he was sincerely attached to Coral Hicks, and hoped for her a more human fate than that of becoming Prince Anastasius’s consort.

This evening, however, he was struck by the beaming alacrity of the aide-de-camp’s greeting. Whatever cloud had hung between them had lifted: the Teutoburg clan, for one reason or another, no longer feared or distrusted him. The change was conveyed in a mere hand-pressure, a brief exchange of words, for the aide-de-camp was hastening after a well-known dowager of the old Roman world, whom he helped into a large coronetted brougham which looked as if it had been extracted, for some ceremonial purpose, from a museum of historic vehicles. And in an instant it flashed on Lansing that this lady had been the person chosen to lay the Prince’s offer at Miss Hicks’s feet.

The discovery piqued him; and instead of making straight for his own room he went up to Mrs. Hicks’s drawing-room.

The room was empty, but traces of elaborate tea pervaded it, and an immense bouquet of stiff roses lay on the centre table. As he turned away, Eldorada Tooker, flushed and tear-stained, abruptly entered.

“Oh, Mr. Lansing--we were looking everywhere for you.”

“Looking for me?”

“Yes. Coral especially... she wants to see you. She wants you to come to her own sitting-room.”

She led him across the ante-chamber and down the passage to the separate suite which Miss Hicks inhabited. On the threshold Eldorada gasped out emotionally: “You’ll find her looking lovely--” and jerked away with a sob as he entered.

Coral Hicks was never lovely: but she certainly looked unusually handsome. Perhaps it was the long dress of black velvet which, outlined against a shaded lamp, made her strong build seem slenderer, or perhaps the slight flush on her dusky cheek: a bloom of womanhood hung upon her which she made no effort to dissemble. Indeed, it was one of her originalities that she always gravely and courageously revealed the utmost of whatever mood possessed her.

“How splendid you look!” he said, smiling at her.

She threw her head back and gazed him straight in the eyes. “That’s going to be my future job.”

“To look splendid?”

“Yes.”

“And wear a crown?”

“And wear a crown....”

They continued to consider each other without speaking. Nick’s heart contracted with pity and perplexity.

“Oh, Coral--it’s not decided?”

She scrutinized him for a last penetrating moment; then she looked away. “I’m never long deciding.”

He hesitated, choking with contradictory impulses, and afraid to formulate any, lest they should either mislead or pain her.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he questioned lamely; and instantly perceived his blunder.

She sat down, and looked up at him under brooding lashes--had he ever noticed the thickness of her lashes before?

“Would it have made any difference if I had told you?”

“Any difference--?”

“Sit down by me,” she commanded. “I want to talk to you. You can say now whatever you might have said sooner. I’m not married yet: I’m still free.”

“You haven’t given your answer?”

“It doesn’t matter if I have.”

The retort frightened him with the glimpse of what she still expected of him, and what he was still so unable to give.

“That means you’ve said yes?” he pursued, to gain time.

“Yes or no--it doesn’t matter. I had to say something. What I want is your advice.”

“At the eleventh hour?”

“Or the twelfth.” She paused. “What shall I do?” she questioned, with a sudden accent of helplessness.

He looked at her as helplessly. He could not say: “Ask yourself--ask your parents.” Her next word would sweep away such frail hypocrisies. Her “What shall I do?” meant “What are you going to do?” and he knew it, and knew that she knew it.

“I’m a bad person to give any one matrimonial advice,” he began, with a strained smile; “but I had such a different vision for you.”

“What kind of a vision?” She was merciless.

“Merely what people call happiness, dear.”

“‘People call’--you see you don’t believe in it yourself! Well, neither do I--in that form, at any rate.”

He considered. “I believe in trying for it--even if the trying’s the best of it.”

“Well, I’ve tried, and failed. And I’m twenty-two, and I never was young. I suppose I haven’t enough imagination.” She drew a deep breath. “Now I want something different.” She appeared to search for the word. “I want to be--prominent,” she declared.

“Prominent?”

She reddened swarthily. “Oh, you smile--you think it’s ridiculous: it doesn’t seem worth while to you. That’s because you’ve always had all those things. But I haven’t. I know what father pushed up from, and I want to push up as high again--higher. No, I haven’t got much imagination. I’ve always liked Facts. And I find I shall like the fact of being a Princess--choosing the people I associate with, and being up above all these European grandees that father and mother bow down to, though they think they despise them. You can be up above these people by just being yourself; you know how. But I need a platform--a sky-scraper. Father and mother slaved to give me my education. They thought education was the important thing; but, since we’ve all three of us got mediocre minds, it has just landed us among mediocre people. Don’t you suppose I see through all the sham science and sham art and sham everything we’re surrounded with? That’s why I want to buy a place at the very top, where I shall be powerful enough to get about me the people I want, the big people, the right people, and to help them I want to promote culture, like those Renaissance women you’re always talking about. I want to do it for Apex City; do you understand? And for father and mother too. I want all those titles carved on my tombstone. They’re facts, anyhow! Don’t laugh at me....” She broke off with one of her clumsy smiles, and moved away from him to the other end of the room.

He sat looking at her with a curious feeling of admiration. Her harsh positivism was like a tonic to his disenchanted mood, and he thought: “What a pity!”

Aloud he said: “I don’t feel like laughing at you. You’re a great woman.”

“Then I shall be a great Princess.”

“Oh--but you might have been something so much greater!”

Her face flamed again. “Don’t say that!”

He stood up involuntarily, and drew near her.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re the only man with whom I can imagine the other kind of greatness.”

It moved him--moved him unexpectedly. He got as far as saying to himself: “Good God, if she were not so hideously rich--” and then of yielding for a moment to the persuasive vision of all that he and she might do with those very riches which he dreaded. After all, there was nothing mean in her ideals they were hard and material, in keeping with her primitive and massive person; but they had a certain grim nobility. And when she spoke of “the other kind of greatness” he knew that she understood what she was talking of, and was not merely saying something to draw him on, to get him to commit himself. There was not a drop of guile in her, except that which her very honesty distilled.

“The other kind of greatness?” he repeated.

“Well, isn’t that what you said happiness was? I wanted to be happy... but one can’t choose.”

He went up to her. “No, one can’t choose. And how can anyone give you happiness who hasn’t got it himself?” He took her hands, feeling how large, muscular and voluntary they were, even as they melted in his palms.

“My poor Coral, of what use can I ever be to you? What you need is to be loved.”

She drew back and gave him one of her straight strong glances: “No,” she said gallantly, “but just to love.”