Forsome time after Polly’s departure Gita lay still, with her brows drawn together. Her usually clear brain felt chaotic. A dog in the manger? Nice rôle for her. She couldn’t have—didn’t want—Geoffrey Pelham. Why had she alternated sympathy and noble resolutions with a desire to tear Polly’s eyes out?
And she was really devoted to Polly—hadn’t even ceased to love her when she’d felt like flinging the truth in her face. . . . Vanity? No . . . something else. . . . Her brain began to flash once more. Geoffrey Pelham loved her and that in a way made him hers. Her sense of possession was outraged. It was as if Polly had made off with her best seventeenth-century sunflower chest. . . .
Well, not exactly, perhaps. If she hadn’t inherited the essential endowment of her lady ancestresses she’d found room somewhere for a few female characteristics. Must have been lurking even when she thought she’d turned herself into a boy. She had a moment of poignant regret for the complete loss of that old manufactured—and protective—self. Pity they hadn’t let her alone. This mess wouldn’t have come about.
She shook her head. No intention of fooling herself. Life had been too pleasant and full of surprises since Elsie took her in hand. After all, what she had wanted was drama, and she seemed in a fair way to get it—although one act was over. But it was something to have been kept awake by a man and to have inspired a hopeless passion. Also quite a new sensation to want to strangle one of her three best friends.
She sprang to her feet. “Damn fools, all of us. And I’m no better than the rest.”
She tore off her negligée and hurried into a tweed suit and thick shoes. Problems always sent her on a long walk.
Whenshe returned she found Eustace smoking in what she called her ark. He rose with a curtsey as yet unsubmerged by domesticity and shook hands with her.
“Your cheeks are as red as pippins,” he said. “Been having a tramp?”
“Up to Harlem and back. Polly is going to marry Dr. Pelham and may have to live there. Thought I’d see what it looks like.”
She flung her hat on the floor, ruffled her hair, and threw herself into an easy chair. Eustace was staring.
“Polly and Geoff——I don’t grasp it. You must be mistaken.”
“You mustn’t breathe it. But legally we are one, and there’s no harm in telling you. I think it’s serious with both.” She had no intention of betraying Polly further, but the desire to talk of the momentous possibility was irresistible and Eustace was safe.
“ ‘Legally we are one.’ ” He repeated the words automatically; then recovered himself and drew on his pipe. “I never heard of a more brilliant example of mismating. Last about a year, I should think.”
“You don’t know Polly. She can be anything she likes. And love does wonders.”
“Oh!” He almost dropped his pipe. “That’s an odd statement to come from you. What do you know about it?”
“My mind works. And I’ve seen a good deal of life, first and last.”
“Possibly. But the word ‘love’ sounds queer on your lips. And I don’t believe it’s anything but a word to you. I doubt if you have any conception of the meaning of it.”
He watched her intently. Most of her old inhibitions and prejudices had dissolved. She was more adaptable, more tolerant, more responsive, more what she might have been had destiny been kinder. But how deeply had the new life changed her? She was remarkably like the old Gita still.
She looked at him with a brilliant smile. “Some stylists say you should never use a long word when a short one will serve, nor a derivative if you can find a Saxon. Don’t agree with them, as I’ve always thought Swinburne’s ‘Chastelard’ as cold and dry as a bone. But hack words are convenient, that’s all, though one may be bored to death with them. I wonder the word ‘love’ has any meaning left in it. You’re so clever, I should think you’d invent a new vocabulary.”
“I write to be read. . . . I remember you once said that love was merely preference raised to a higher degree than like. But as your experience has grown perhaps you are willing to admit there are different degrees in the temperature of love itself?”
“Looks like it.” Gita drew her black brows together. “I merely accept the fact because I have to.”
Bylant had laid down his pipe and was twisting his short pointed beard. He eyed her speculatively, but not coldly. She looked warm and rosy and alluring in the deep chair, with her tumbled hair and bright eyes, and he would have given his new novel to kiss her; he half believed the time of his probation was shrinking. He had intended to wait for the woods and summer, but there was no harm in putting out an antenna or two.
“Don’t you ever feel you’re missing something?” he asked.
“I? What? Oh, you mean because I can’t make a fool of myself like other women. No, I don’t.” But she blushed unaccountably.
Eustace interpreted the blush as an uneasy response to a fact long ignored. “Gita!” he exclaimed, suddenly illuminated by a brilliant idea. “Let’s play a game. We can’t discuss intellectual subjects forever. We’d dry up. It’s time to strike a lighter note. Suppose we pretend we are not married and I’ve come wooing. And you are rather interested, but uncertain; willing to lead me on; curious to see if I could make an impression on your hard little heart. Pretty certain you’ll throw me over, but curious enough to give me a chance.”
Gita stared at him with mouth open. “What a perfectly ridiculous idea!”
“Not at all. Scientific matrimony. A science more married people would do well to study, and the keynote is variety. Besides, I’ve been working so long I feel in the mood for play.”
Gita dug the toe of her boot into the rug. “I don’t think I could play up. You see, I know I couldn’t fall in love with you.”
Bylant turned cold, but he answered steadily: “It would be a part of your end of the game to make yourself think you might. You have imagination, if you would consent to use it. You’re not nearly so matter-of-fact as you like to think.”
“I’m no actress, anyhow.”
“Every woman is an actress. As safe to bet on as that no woman knows the sort of man she’ll fall in love with. Look at Polly. Love, for that matter, is often due to the planting of a suggestion on one side or the other.”
“Polly says Dr. Pelham told her that love is——Oh, lord! Can I remember all that? Matter of over-secretion of hormones in cells next door to some kind of follicles.”
Eustace burst into a roar of laughter. “Sounds like old Geoff. Is that the sort of diet he feeds Polly on? She must be in love with him if she can stand it!”
“Polly’s up on endocrines. Every once in a while she and Elsie get going on the subject, but I always shut them up. Never did like the idea of knowing too much about my inwards. Don’t know which side my liver is on and always dodged physiology at school. Suppose it’s because I never was ill in my life. Besides, as far as I can make out, they wouldn’t take much interest in endocrines if one set didn’t happen to be stocked up with sex and made the others dance to its tune more or less. That’s enough for me. By the way, what do you think Elsie told me the other day—said she thought the time had come when I could stand it——” She paused abruptly and jerked her shoulders, her brows an unbroken and twisted line.
“I’d be interested to know.” His eyes narrowed to conceal a smile.
“I hate to repeat it and she made me so furious I could have thrown something at her. Said the reason I never could look like a boy was because I had no male cells in some place or other—that if I had, with the morbid psychology induced by my early experience and hatred of your sex, nothing could have ‘saved’ me. I wonder if people were always sex-mad!”
“Probably. Today they are more verbally interested because for the first time they know something of cause instead of merely taking effect for granted, and romanticizing it. But Elsie was quite right. You have an uncommonly balanced endocrine constitution and you may be thankful——”
“I prefer not to think about it.”
“Don’t. Forget it by all means.”
“I shall, now that I’ve unloaded it on you. . . . I should think that knowing too much would be the death of romance.”
“Quite. And far better for the race. But you’re the last person I should expect to set up a wail over the death of romance.”
“Not I. Jolly good thing it’s out of date. Merely made an observation. You’ve taught me to look all round a subject.”
“And you’re the aptest of pupils. But I’m tired of playing schoolmaster—for the present—and I should think that in time it would corrode the vanity of a beautiful and highly intelligent woman to sit constantly at the feet of a man. Do let us play for a while.”
Gita looked hard at him, but he returned her stare unflinchingly.
“You said yourself that love was a matter of suggestion, and you might come to fancy you were really in love with me,” she remarked. “That would be simply horrid and spoil everything.”
“My imagination never runs away with me even when I am writing fiction. And I assure you I shall never be in doubt of my true sentiments for a moment.”
Gita smiled. “You do play rather well. I’ve often watched you at parties.”
“Whole-heartedly.”
He looked prosaic enough with that beard and those rather plump cheeks. And if she could simulate interest in him it would help her to be noble with Polly. If Geoffrey Pelham looked on, so much the better. Another act in her play—more unreal than the stage itself!
“All right.” She caught her hat by the crown and stood up. “What’s the first move? How do I do it?”
“Leave it to me. Just be the flying princess for a time.”
She grinned widely. “Good title for a musical comedy. And I’ll like that rôle well enough.”
Eightor ten of the guests were up in Bylant’s rooms playing poker and refreshing themselves at will. Extravagantly as they admired Gita they were a little in awe of her in her own house, and when under her eye assuaged their thirst discreetly. Bylant had a wide bed and a divan, if they were forced to remain for the night, and he could sneak them downstairs in the morning before his wife was awake.
Gita had given several parties during the winter but refused to ask more than forty at a time. She disliked crowded rooms, where the selfish appropriated the chairs and sofas permanently, while the others were forced to stand about or wander. A few always retired to her ark, those who liked to hear themselves talk and two or three who had formed the habit of listening. A mutually interested couple generally migrated to the ecclesiastical chest in the hall. In the large drawing-room and connecting dining-room the rest of the guests sat comfortably, drank the cocktails and whisky and soda passed by the host and gave a divided attention to the spontaneous performances of the livelier members of the company. There was a good deal of music tonight, a diseuse was convulsing and brief, there were impromptu little plays and much staccato talk. One distinguished exponent of bald realism untempered by art, too swiftly susceptible to synthetic gin, stole upstairs early in the evening and appropriated the divan for the night. A dark young actress, famous as a stage adventuress, who barely tolerated any man but her husband and drank nothing stronger than root-beer, curled up in an easy chair and went to sleep; her invariable habit. Polly had steered Dr. Pelham into a corner behind the piano and kept him there, and Elsie, who was helping Gita play hostess, watched her brother out of a corner of her eye. Many celebrities were present: Gora Dwight, a novelist both popular and important; Lee Clavering, whose play had been a Broadway sensation since September; Marian Starr Darsett; De Witt Turner and his wife, Suzan Forbes; Potts Dawes; Max Durand; Fellowes Merton; Helen Vane Baker, of two worlds, and Peter Whiffle.
While a young musical-comedy actress was giving the convolutions of a skirt-dance, spontaneously invented, Gita found an empty chair behind a door and indulged in a yawn. She suddenly felt bored with New York and parties. And clever people could be as monotonous in time as the more stereotyped society to which Mrs. Pleyden had introduced her. What did it all amount to? They went on like this winter after winter and not one of them looked blasé, not even Marian Starr Darsett, who was reputed to be entering upon her hundred-and-ninth love-affair. But they all had some gift, or used their brains otherwise to a definite purpose. Hers was like a whirlpool, careering round and round in circles and to no purpose whatever. The simile stopped at the vortex; she never got as far as that!
Next winter? And next? And next? The prospect was appalling. . . . However, after six months in the country—reactions were automatic. . . . She had arranged for several house-parties—and felt disposed to withdraw the invitations. But that would leave her alone with Eustace. He bored her less than anyone, but if he kept up that ridiculous game she’d explode before they’d been isolated in the manor a week. His “wooing,” tentative so far as became the first stage, had shown him to be possessed of more charm than she had suspected, but she preferred him without it. How could they ever get back to their old relationship when the game was given up as a bad job? She hated make-believe anyway. She was made for realities. . . . Realities? What were they? In this sort of life, anyhow? Perhaps, after all, she’d have been better satisfied with life if she had been forced to take a job in San Francisco.
Although she had had spasms of restlessness and dissatisfaction of late, not to mention certain abrupt flights of imagination, she had felt nothing of the sort when she had stood before her mirror a few hours earlier and put the finishing touches to her toilette. Her gown was white and silver and vastly becoming. She wore all her pearls, and had applied a light touch of powder. But as she sat there behind the door, almost concealed from her guests, she lost all interest in her beauty. Polly was far prettier than she and always looked her most dazzling in red. Tonight she wore a quaint flaming head-dress and little gold curls escaped everywhere. She hadn’t left Pelham’s side for a moment since they entered at nine o’clock, and it was now a quarter to twelve. And he looked anything but bored.
“Why are you hiding, Miss Carteret?” De Witt Turner was looming over her, his great bulk encased in loose tweed. If he possessed evening clothes he never wore them. “Your party is a stunning success as usual. I hope we haven’t tired you out.”
“Not a bit of it. Do sit down.”
The only unoccupied chair was one of the small upright contributions from Brittany, and Turner disposed himself carefully; then finding it more secure than most ancient furniture, hunched down and lit a cigarette. “Do you know what I’ve been wondering?” he continued. “If by any chance you brought over those ancestral costumes of yours? We might all dress up again and improvise a sort of Colonial farce. I rather yearn for my flounces.”
Gita smiled up at him without effort; he was one of her favorites. “Too bad. They’re down at the manor.” And then she surprised herself by announcing: “I’ve locked them in their chests for good and all. They’ll never be worn again in my time. You see . . . it would be a pity to cheapen the first impression. Don’t you think so?”
“Artistically you’re right, no doubt. But it seems rather a pity—sort of waste. Perhaps that’s rather hypocritical of me. We all enjoyed looking like bloods for once, to say nothing of imagining ourselves handsome. The men, I mean. I think I prefer women in their modern frocks and short hair. But Dr. Pelham, for instance, will never look like that again unless you relent.”
To Gita’s annoyance she felt herself blushing, a new and ridiculous habit of hers. There had been a time when she prided herself upon a fine static red and laughed at girls whose color changed with every passing emotion. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to,” she replied tartly. “Surgeons are scientists, you know, and scientists have no use for anything so frivolous as fancy dress. About the most matter-of-fact men in the world, I should think.”
“Um. Science requires imagination of a certain sort and surgery is nervous work. The most temperamental man I know is a surgeon.” His glance traveled to the corner behind the piano. “Scientists have even been known to fall in love. I should say Pelham had some use for Miss Pleyden. What do you think?”
“Isn’t Polly lovely!”
“She is, indeed. No wonder he’s bowled over.” But like Mrs. Pleyden, he had seen certain straying glances from Pelham’s unambiguous eyes. He had also noted the blush. Gita was a puzzle to him and he sometimes suspected she was still a puzzle to his friend, known as her husband. As a novelist he would have liked to solve it. His fiction, although it dealt with the prosaic realities of life, and he handled sex without tongs, was pervaded by a haunting almost poignant beauty, which drove from his inner being not from his theme. He was in no danger of falling in love with Gita, being quite satisfied with “Miss Forbes,” and, like musicians, preferring to find beauty on the abstract plane; but he never saw this particular beauty with her lofty “springing” little head, her black flashing eyes that seemed to carry back no farther than her mind, her curious aura of virginity, her contradictory magnetic personality and undeviating aloofness, and a certain checked sweetness with it all, without the sensation that some musical instrument within him was vibrating to new harmonies, and he longed to grasp and immortalize them. In other words he would have liked to make her the heroine of a novel.
But the music was too elusive. He only faintly guessed what she suggested. She looked one thing and was so indisputably something else. Once he had tried to pump Elizabeth Pelham, but that loyal friend had laughed at his assumption of mystery. Gita was just Gita. One answer to the riddle, no doubt, was that the girl didn’t know herself. Something had arrested her development, and the man she had married that night when she came down the stairs and made himself nearly bawl outright with her astounding beauty, had as yet taught her nothing. He had met her several times before the wedding and many times since, and although she no longer treated every man as a possible enemy, she had changed not at all in essentials.
But was she on the verge of a change of some sort? He noted that she looked tired and rather melancholy for the first time since he had known her . . . less assured. An ardent feminist, he believed in women taking precisely the same liberties with orthodoxies as men had done since the beginning of time; and if this entrancing creature had found she was mistaken and contemplated throwing over poor old Eustace, why not? Men were pretty philosophical these days—taking a leaf out of the age-old Book of Woman—and although it would come hard on Bylant, no doubt, if he found she preferred another man, he’d renounce her without whimpering. . . . But . . . would she? . . . did she? . . . or, why not? He felt there was a key to the riddle somewhere and wished he knew her history. But he knew nothing beyond the bare facts that she had been born and brought up in Europe, had lived for a time in California, and arrived in New Jersey shortly before her grandmother’s death.
“What are you thinking of?” asked Gita, smiling. “You haven’t said a word for five minutes.”
“You. I was wondering how long we’d have you with us.”
“What an idea. You’ll probably sit with me in this room at precisely the same hour next year.”
“The slight bitterness of your accent confirms my misgivings. I doubt if you’ll be in this house.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, frowning.
“Well, that you’ve been fumbling, so far—not even experimenting, like most women.”
“I don’t like either word.”
“Neither really should apply to you. You’re extremely clear-sighted about most things, but there’s a catch somewhere. I can’t get it. I’d like to, and I too am fumbling, just now. At all events that is the way you impress me, and I’ve a hazy idea that you’ll come out of the fog before long.”
“Come out of the fog?” Gita stared at him under lowered brows and then jerked her head. “I forgot you were a maker of phrases.”
“Only when I’m sweating at the typewriter. I assure you that was spontaneous—and seems to fit you.”
“ ‘Out of the fog.’ ” Her voice sounded dazed. “Do you mean I don’t know where I am?”
“Something like that. You’re a riddle to yourself, as you are to other people.”
“That is not true! I know myself perfectly.”
“Then you dwell in another dimension from the rest of us.”
Gita colored angrily. “By that, I suppose, you mean I am even more conceited than the rest of you. Quite a feat!”
He laughed good-naturedly. “Quite, indeed. And you’re not. But you’re very honest. Do you really believe you’ve explored yourself thoroughly—made a complete chart of all the subterranean streams, and peaks—sort of magnet for fogs? Now, do you?”
Gita moved uneasily. “Yes, I do. I’ve had a very wide and varied experience of life that you know nothing about. No one has ever had an opportunity to gauge herself more exhaustively than I.”
“Ah! I’m not surprised to hear you say that. . . . You suggest a play in four acts with a prologue and epilogue. . . . But I can’t make even a guess. Have you ever been in love?” he asked bluntly.
Gita drew herself up haughtily. “That question was in excessively bad taste.”
“We’ve abandoned taste with other old clichés.” But he took the edge from this announcement of an unassailable fact with a disarming smile. “And if you haven’t, you will, you know. You’re not in the least in love with Eustace, and you’ve got it coming—when the fog lifts.”
He was angling, and had hoped for a minnow, but was by no means prepared for a whale. Gita turned white, then almost purple; her eyes shot red sparks and her mouth drew back until it made an ugly grimace. For a moment he thought she was going to strike him. A curious devastating force seemed to emanate from her and he turned hot all over, as if his skin had been seared. He was almost terrified but had the presence of mind to move forward; if his face were slapped his ignominy would not be too public at least.
The expression lasted but an instant and her face settled into a mask of fear; he had the impression that she was no longer aware of his presence. “If I thought that,” she articulated, “I’d go out and kill myself. It is the most hideous fate that can befall a woman, the most loathsome and degrading. But—thank God!—I’m not capable of it.”
There was another lightning change and he was staring, almost open-mouthed, at the Miss Carteret to whom he was so agreeably accustomed. “You psychological novelists,” she said complainingly, “with your everlasting probing, get on my nerves. And your assumption that you can make a fashion of bad taste even more. The radical is not in the saddle yet, and even when he is, there will be groups in which manners and codes will survive and become the standard once more when the same old wheel has finished the same old revolution. Look at France.”
He smiled amusedly. “Perhaps. But freedom of speech and of thought seems to me of more consequence than taste. . . . But I wouldn’t offend you for the world,” he added hastily. “Nor, for a jugful, have you other than you are.”
“Thanks.” She rose, and smiled as he rose also. “Odd, you never forget your own manners. What a lot of self-posers we are! I see that supper is being brought in and I’m sure you want yours.”
“Whew!” Turner almost whistled as he stood where she had left him. “Whew!” And he wondered if he had had a glimmer. . . .
“I’mgoing down to the manor tomorrow,” announced Gita as she and Eustace lingered for a moment in the drawing-room after the last guest had departed.
“Tomorrow? But we were not to go until Tuesday.”
“You needn’t go. In fact I’d like to be alone for a while. Tired out. Don’t want to open my mouth for a week.”
“Oh! As you please, of course. I’ll be detained until Tuesday. You do look tired,” he added solicitously. “But I shall miss you abominably. Couldn’t you shut yourself up here and rest?”
“I want my old manor more than anything in the world!” she said passionately. “And I must be alone.”
He stifled both astonishment and curiosity. “Then you shall have it, or anything else you want. Sit down for a moment and have a cigarette.” And Gita, who had no desire for the solitude of her bed, obeyed him.
“I shall have to sleep on that davenport,” he said humorously. “Three of my friends are dead to the world upstairs.”
“Beasts.”
“ ’Fraid it’s bootlegger gin.” And then he slipped on the harness of his new rôle. “I saw you hidden in a corner with De Witt Turner for at least a quarter of an hour,” he said with a nice assumption of jealousy. “Women fall for him very hard, you know.”
“Do they? They must be fools. I hate him.”
Bylant raised his brows in genuine surprise. “Hate old Witt? He’s about the least hatable man in New York, I should think.”
“Well, I can’t endure him and I’m not going to ask him to one of the house-parties.”
“Did he make love to you?”
“I should think not. He wouldn’t dare. He merely says anything that comes into his head, and he’s a boor.”
“Oh, no, not that. He’s a gentleman, with deliberately applied excrescences. He dresses like a farmer to reconcile his income with his moral approval of socialism, and if he berates old codes and standards to which he was born, that is but one phase of this attempt to coördinate a new and militant fact with the ancient instinct of self-preservation. The new man is having as hard a time of it as the new woman had a quarter of a century ago—trying to be something he isn’t. At least men of Witt’s breeding. They’ve got to shake down, that’s all. You’re too clear-visioned to take this particular phase of social evolution for anything but what it’s worth. . . . Perhaps,” hopefully, “he merely bored you.”
“That’s it, probably.” But she knew it was not. She hated Turner because he had for some inexplicable reason infuriated her with the mere use of a word of four letters which for months she had bandied about with the rest. She had behaved exactly as she would have done a year ago, while she was still inside her “fort,” as Elsie had so aptly expressed it. No doubt that ridiculous suggestion of drifting in a fog had a good deal to do with it. But she knew she had betrayed something, she hardly knew what, to the enterprising eye of that novelist, and she wished never to see him again.
“Let us forget him,” said Eustace softly. “May I tell you that I never saw you look as lovely as you do tonight?”
“Your compliments sound exactly the same as they did before you set about trying to be somethingyou’renot!” Gita, glad of the diversion, laughed merrily.
“And you promised to play up! Let us imagine we are guests who have lingered down here for a few last words while our hosts have gone decorously to bed——”
“Instead of three drunks.”
“They are not worth remembering. I have persuaded you to linger on for a little talk.”
“Well, here I am.” Gita stifled a yawn. “Rather sleepy, but I’ll do my best. Anyhow, I never like you so much as when I’ve been with a lot of tiresome people.” And she hoped her smile was bewitching.
His own was spontaneous. “Don’t you think you could like me a little?” he murmured.
“Like you a lot——Oh, no, I mean—what the devil do girls say? I suppose I ought to know as I’ve read that question five hundred times in novels. Wish I could remember the answers.”
“Say what you think you would say if you really were a girl rather interested and I were trying to make you more so.”
Gita raked her mind. This little comedy with Eustace often amused her. “I—think—I’m rather beginning to,” she faltered, and batted her eyelashes as she had seen Eva Le Gallienne do on the stage a few nights since.
Eustace drew up his chair and bent over her. He had begun to turn off the lights before they fell into conversation and in the soft dimness he looked rather handsome to Gita’s critical eye. Distinguished he always looked. Perhaps she had been wrong—hadn’t known her personal predilections so well, after all . . . if it were in her to “love” any man it should be this one, who combined so much, and whom, her sharp eyes had long since informed her, other women found so attractive. She smiled indulgently and repressed a desire to say: “Go ahead.” She would play up.
Bylant himself was a little at a loss. He had never set out deliberately to “woo” a woman, and although he had more than once fallen into step without visible effort, he had, on the whole, accepted casually and briefly what was offered him. He felt resentfully that he would know how to handle the situation in a novel, and wondered why pen-experience should avail him so little when it came to his own vital concerns. Possibly because he was so confoundedly in earnest, and detachment annihilated.
“Beginning?” He laid his hand on hers.
Gita patted it amiably. “Nice hands. Strong, but well-shaped. Not too artistic to be manly. And always warm, and not too soft—or white. That’s your golf and tennis——”
“Oh, Gita!” he said despairingly. “Lovers—would-be lovers—don’t. . . . You should either draw your hand away shyly or turn it over and give mine a slight pressure.”
“All right. Let’s begin over. I think I’ll do the last. You often make me feel you’re here to hang on to——”
“You’re not worried about anything?” In the dim light he had caught a fleeting expression of fear in her eyes—or fancied it?
“What have I to worry me? But that’s the kind of question a husband or accepted lover would ask. You’ve whirled too far ahead on your merry-go-round. Get back to the starting-point.”
“I never seem to get beyond it. Will you give me a kiss?”
“I’ve often kissed you.”
“I don’t mean a peck. And you’re out of your rôle. It’s what any man would ask a girl, you know, who had let herself be persuaded to stay on with him downstairs at two in the morning. She’d think him a chump if he didn’t.”
“But that’s going rather fast—for some girls. Others kiss any man any old time. I’m the great exception or you wouldn’t think I’m the one and only. And I don’t think I care for that part of the program.”
“It’s bound to come sooner or later.”
“Not at all. You talked a lot about wooing but there was no understanding you were to win—not by a long sight——”
“Please stay in your rôle. I am begging for a kiss.”
Gita looked at him reflectively. There wasn’t so much to kiss between that mustache and beard. She didn’t altogether like his mouth but she was used to it. And if it was the thing to do—she moved her head forward; and then she encountered a disturbing gleam in his half-closed eyes, and drew back; restraining an impulse to hiss and flee. She had seen that gleam in men’s eyes before. Carnalites. Eustace!
At the same moment she became conscious of a resource that was offering its timely aid. “Not yet,” she murmured with soft coquetry. “It’s too soon. Talk to me for a little while first. Talk to me about yourself,” she added with inspiration. “Tell me when you first began to find me attractive. After—later——”
She leaned her elbow on the arm of the chair and covered her eyes with her hand. Eustace, drawing a long breath, but admiring this astonishing adaptability to a rôle so foreign to her, leaned back in his chair and began to talk on a low and vibrating note; expressing his hopes and fears, his longings and doubts, with considerable art; for, he told himself, he said not a word too much nor too little. At the end of ten minutes he asked her a question. There was no answer. He bent over her. She was fast asleep.
He refrained from shaking her roughly, but shake her he did.
She sprang to her feet and yawned in his face. “Oh, Eustace, how rude of me! But your voice was so soothing and I was nearly dead with sleep. Hated to be so impolite as to tell you—we’ll have to continue on page 181 from page 2. Good night, dear Eustace, and forgive me.”
And she slipped by him like a trout under water and up the stair.
Gitaarrived at the manor in time for dinner and spent the greater part of the night wandering about the house, which she had ordered to be lit from drawing-room to attic. She was so glad to be there—and alone—that she felt no inclination to sleep, and even the haunting terrors of the past week were banished for the moment.
She had a quite personal species of humor that she could invoke at will, and a large surface-tract in her mind upon which she had lived abundantly during the past year. But, always ruthlessly honest with herself, she had begun to suspect, even before that remarkably odd outbreak under the goading of De Witt Turner, that something had been going on underneath that broad and fertile surface which it was time for her to tweak to the light and examine. She had turned from it in terror, almost in horror, and had permitted herself a respite until she was alone at her manor.
But on this night of her return she felt only happiness and content. This was hers, her own domain, memoried, beautiful, and intensely personal; so personal that she had at times the impression she had lived in this house consecutively for two hundred and sixty-three years. It seemed to return her passionate devotion, to enfold her, to promise her peace, possibly happiness. She exulted in every stone of it, and drew her hand lovingly across the old pieces of furniture, less sensible of their value than of their intimate association with the past.
She could remain here for the rest of her life if she chose, denying even Eustace hospitality, and she had a sense of freedom, of buoyancy, vastly different from the superficial enjoyments of the past winter in New York. They had been novel and entrancing, but both novelty and charm had worn thin; and they had served their purpose. No woman is complete until she has had her experience of the lighter pleasures of life; barely conscious of the depths underneath until frivolities turn into débris and balance is established.
She had long suspected that she knew a good deal more than she admitted to herself, both apart from her personal ego and inextricably entangled with it, and it was time to find out what it was. She was uneasy, frightened, but determined.
Well, in a day or two she would take the lid off, but tonight she would play with the idea that she had lived her life at the manor and that no serious problems had ever knocked at her consciousness for solution.
A storm raged during the night and showed no sign of abatement next morning. She put on a raincoat and stout boots and went over to the deserted Boardwalk. The chain of shops looked like an abandoned village. But the waves thundered in almost to the high promenade, and she took a fierce pleasure in battling with the wind, clinging only occasionally to the rail. She felt as if she were charging an elemental enemy and chose to take it as a portent, that although she might for a moment be forced to clutch at something stronger than herself, she could neither be blown over nor forced to retreat.
That night she slept twelve hours, and when the broad sunlight awakened her, her brain was as clear as the sky and she knew that her respite was over; or would be when the day itself was over. She had decided that the night, when she would be free of interruption from even her docile servants, was the time to “have it out.”
Topper had received instructions to admit no one and to bring her no telephone messages. Eustace had promised not to return to the manor before Friday, nor attempt to communicate with her. Her isolation was complete.
After breakfast she took a long walk on the hard roads, and spent the afternoon answering an accumulation of letters from her California friends. Ann Melrose had spent the winter in New York and written home reports both astonishing and amusing; the result had been a revival of correspondence with the girl they had “given up as a bad job.”
But the hands of the clock, made for the first American Carteret, in Connecticut—a province that would seem to have been so completely occupied during the seventeenth century building historic furniture for twentieth-century collectors the wonder is it found time for the making of Puritanical history—moved relentlessly on, and at nine o’clock the house was as silent as the vault in the churchyard.
Early in the day she had brought down from the attic the gown of gold tissue she had worn the night of the party, and she went up to her bedroom and put it on. The wigs had been returned, but she powdered her hair and even put a patch on her cheek. She had a whimsical idea that in capturing the outward semblance of the old Gita Carterets she would banish the last of those inhibitions which had made her so different not only from them but from all other girls, and, with her saner knowledge of life, help her to that exact understanding of herself she had fancied she possessed in the past.
She locked the doors of the drawing-room, lit several candles, and established herself in one of the few comfortable chairs a century, singularly indifferent to comfort, had produced.
“Now!” she said aloud, “off with the lid.” And she routed a last moment of shrinking.
Nature had endowed her superlatively, and a neurosis, inevitable in a sensitive aspiring fastidious girl, had given her a rabid hatred of a sex designed, among other purposes, to complete her own. Her abhorrence of sex in all its manifestations had been, in a measure, a subtle protest against thwarted romance: an invention of the Teutonic-Nordics, to be sure, but none the less potent when rubbed in by the centuries. Nor had modernism killed it. Realists were not so much realists from reaction or conviction as from resentment at their own inability to realize it. They were in the same class with radicals who hated a society in which they were incapacitated by natural equipment to achieve success.
Life, literature, nor history would be sufferable without the glamour of romance, however personally immiscible. The invention and constant use of the word “love” was proof of that. Mere decency ordained that a certain enchantment be shed over a function as native as hunger, where personal selection, imposed by civilization, was concerned.
Well, she accepted the fact. Also the fact that what her three friends called a sound endocrine constitution had saved her from becoming one of those semi-outlaws so freely discussed in her new circle. That was a phase she had no desire to dwell on, but she faced it squarely. Such women, she had been told, had sometimes the most idealized relationships, a mental and spiritual harmony seldom found with men; being rarely fools. Through this ominous lack of balance in the ductless glands and an arbitrary gift from Nature of cells which had no legitimate place in their anatomy, they were not only enabled but compelled to love their own sex; and as faithfully, protectively, and self-sacrificingly, as those that were fitted with normal response to man. Often more so. They were by no means mere sensualists. Nature here was as inexorable as elsewhere and she had not waited upon the decadence of civilizations to develop the type. It had existed since the dawn of history. No doubt since the dawn of time.
What Nature’s purpose was no man could guess. But that she had a purpose, methodical creature that she was, no intelligent man could doubt.
But she had passed over one Gita Carteret, even refusing to unbalance those cells, with everything working in her favor. The result was that Gita Carteret had been isolated high and dry. A rock in mid-ocean. A capacity for agreeable friendships, but about as emotional as an unhatched egg.
Well, that was that. She’d never think of it again if she could avoid it. But insularity had its compensations!
She felt as if something resistant in her brain were straining and creaking as she swung it ruthlessly to that strange moment when De Witt Turner’s words—uttered more or less at random—had turned her mind into a cauldron. But that frenzied moment had not only been a revelation but a deliverance. She had experienced a sensation of exhaustion when it was over, during which she felt that something had exploded, then taken wing. That such an access of hatred for a side of life still unexplored would never come again. She had been delivered—and for what?
Not for Eustace Bylant. Her recoil from that gleam in his eyes when he bent forward to kiss her was conclusive. No need to be asexual to be revolted at the thought of kissing a man she did not love and never could love. Even his light and frequent touch, of which she had barely been conscious as long as the lid was down, would be unendurable hereafter.
He “loved” her, of course. Always had. She had kept the lid down with a vengeance! She must have known from the first that he was in love with her in the orthodox male fashion—known it down in that, automatically recording invisible register; but that censored mind of hers had turned its back blithely; kept its conscious part suspended in that rarefied ether she had chosen as her habitat, peopled with queer eidola of her human acquaintance.
Too bad! It would have been the ideal solution to love Eustace, who had so much to offer, with whom she could live her life in a companionship found by few women with the men of their choice. But she did not. She almost hated him. He must never return here. She’d write and tell him so at once. If he hadn’t loved her she’d be willing to go on. But she had had one of her illuminating flashes. She knew he had reached the limit of his endurance.
But she had no intention of making him ridiculous. She had liked him too well for that, owed him too much. They could give out they were starting for Europe or South America—which he often talked of visiting—and he could travel while she lived in secrecy at the manor. The manor was her best friend. A friend, it seemed to her, and not only last night, that had schooled and soothed and strengthened her for centuries. A part of her. Even the blood that had come down to her had stained its boards. There had been a duel out there in the hall. And, in another century, an unbridled Carteret, who loved the wife of his guest, had been stabbed in his bedroom—the one her imperturbable grandmother had chosen for her own. . . .
Poor Eustace! What irony! Years of seeking for the one woman who exteriorized his secret fixation, to find her only to learn that the shell had deluded him, that there was nothing within it for him. Worse. To train her, to wear down her defenses, to deliver her from her accumulated obliquities, for another man. What was the matter with life? Controlled it would seem, not by a Beneficent Power, but by what Poe had called the Imp of the Perverse. . . .
The only thing she hated to give up was Bladina’s pearls!
And the Brittany set. But no doubt she could buy that from Eustace. . . .
She told herself harshly that she was twisting and turning from that final probing, and after a moment of real terror, in which she felt an impulse to flee from the room, tearing off that whispering old gown as she ran, she set her teeth and went to the brink and peered down once more.
She was in love with Geoffrey Pelham. She said the words aloud to steady her nerves with their finality. Then shrugged her shoulders and settled back in her chair, although she kicked a stool across the room.
Well, what did it mean? What was she to do about it? He had been obsessing her conscious mind since the night at the Pleydens’, possibly her unconscious since they had sat together in this room. Now that she had hauled him out into the light he would probably obsess every waking moment and haunt her dreams.
She felt that no caged eagle could be more resentful than she at this moment. Her pride had been as abnormal as her existence. Her ego could hardly have been more extended if she had been a heroin addict. That old dream of herself, solitary on a solitary peak had been more than an escape-fulfillment; it had been a reveling of the ego in its complete independence. And there was no independence in the surrender of one’s ego to another, even in this latter-day pretense of fifty-fifty. Women were exactly the same fundamentally as they had always been. Their instinct was surrender—blind instinct of the race to survive.
But she hadn’t got as far as that yet! If loathing had been exorcised in that final explosion under that detestable novelist’s goading, and she had been ejected out of the fog into a dazzle of light—mercifully blinded for the moment to the fact of Geoffrey Pelham—she was conscious of no sexual discomfort. She had never discussed that subject with anyone, but modernists in fiction were remarkably frank, and while they deadened the imagination of the reader, they left little to be learned by mere experience. She knew all about it!
But although her blood traveled its accustomed gait, she knew that Geoffrey Pelham’s image was sunken deep in that unpicturesque pump of hers called heart, and probably forever. She was not the woman to be able to love twice. She recalled the definition of love he had given to Polly, and concluded it was more likely to be correct than anything heretofore advanced. Science was explaining one mystery after another, psychical as well as physical, and she for one liked to know what was the matter with her.
She analyzed her sensations toward this man who had torn her old theories about herself up by the roots. Eustace had once told her that analysis was fatal to love, but that was an old delusion that surprised her in a man uncommonly clear and precise of vision. She felt exactly the same whether she analyzed or not.
Polly had said she felt thrills, turned hot and cold, lost her breath. Well, so far, she had felt none of that. But there was a piercing sweetness, moments of intolerable aspiration, of a desire to wing upward with him to unimaginable heights, dwelling in spiritual contact with him forever. Another trick of elemental sex, no doubt, preliminary to the desire for surrender. . . .
Hacking her way through what was left of the fog she arrived at the conclusion that if she were still insensible to passion it was because, after her long lethargy, mortared with violent repulsion, she was dependent for that upon his physical contact.
But here she would have kicked another stool across the room had there been one within reach.
This piercing sweetness was all right, this divine consciousness that uplifted and exalted her—but did she want anything more? She doubted it. One indelible lesson life had taught her: that realities were disillusionizing and commonplace. Often hard and ugly. Moreover——Yes, moreover! One inhibition appeared to be still firmly planted.
She knew she could marry Geoffrey if she chose. Eustace would never stand in her way. He would be bitterly disappointed, wretched, mortified, angry, but he was not the man to hold a woman to a hollow alliance. When he realized that she was inexorable he would wrap himself up in a mantle of philosophy and retire from the field.
And if she did not marry Geoffrey Pelham, Polly would. She’d make herself as intimate and necessary as his coat and button herself round him in some moment of hopeless depression. After that, of course, he would love her. No man could help it.
She emitted a low growl. Then beat her hands on the arms of her chair. What did it matter? Why deprive the poor man of what consolation he could get? He had given her something Polly could never take from her (what Polly would be forced to content herself with was what she herself rejected) and she could continue to love him and fulfill her soul more completely than if she entered into prosaic—and hateful—matrimony with him. No pleasures, when all was said and done, could equal those of the imagination. She had always despised stories with happy endings. And shrunk from ultimates. After flowers weeds. No soil left for imagination or the psyche. Happy marriages? Oh, yes, plenty of them. She had even seen several in advanced sophisticate circles, although they were always informing you they gave each other complete liberty, and would not shed a tear over a passing infatuation. Or else worrying if it could last, and exactly how they would act if it didn’t. Commit suicide or look round for someone else? But with all their febrile self-consciousness they were happy enough. And outside of that limited circle, where people did not bother about being modern and took life as it came, no doubt there were thousands of happy marriages.
But life had not educated her for happiness of that sort, however she may have scrambled to the top of her old pit. She could love, but not in duality. She had found something very wonderful and precious and inspiring, but there was only one way to keep it.
To be jealous of Polly was monstrous, unworthy of her. She was, of course, but she’d dig it out by the roots.
And what was she to do with her life? She must make something of it. She wanted no more of society of any sort. She took no interest—beyond that of any intelligent person—in politics, and she certainly would associate herself with nothing that led to being constantly surrounded by masses of women. She had no artistic gift; active work in the cause of charity would merely bore her. . . . It might be amusing to adopt a dozen children. . . . Well, that decision could wait. She had enough on her hands for the present——
Herexcogitations came to a sudden end. The bright color left her cheeks, and she stood up, rigid, her head bent forward. The heavy doors were closed but her ears were very keen. She had heard a light footfall on the stair. Stealthy?
She had a high courage and had seldom felt fear; physical fear, at least. But the servants never returned to this part of the house at night and were in bed and asleep shortly after nine o’clock. And the house was set far back from the road. And it must be nearly midnight. For a moment she lost her breath and shivered. Then she jerked her head angrily and shook her nerves into order. Her jewels had been sent to the bank and the pearls were in the safe. That hiding-place behind the panel in her grandmother’s room was known only to herself, Topper, Elsie, Polly, and Eustace.
She blew out the candles, removed her slippers, and stole to the door leading into the hall. It opened without a sound and she hid behind it and peered out through the crack. The hall was dimly lighted. She saw no one, but again she heard that light footfall. It stopped as if in doubt, and she held her breath. Then it moved toward the library. She heard a door open, close.
She tiptoed across the hall and up the stairs. Her bedroom door was open. She had closed it to shut in the warmth of the fire. She lit the gas and glanced about swiftly. Nothing, apparently, had been disturbed.
Elsie, who was timid, had made her buy a pistol and keep it in the drawer of the table by her bed. She took it out, examined it to make sure it was still loaded, then crept down the stairs and listened at the door of the library. Soft light steps were pacing up and down. What on earth could the man want? There was no safe in the library. . . . The silver? She stole over to the dining-room. The silver was locked every night in safes concealed behind false doors in the lower part of two immense sideboards. She closed the door and lit the gas. There was no evidence that the room had been visited since Topper had put it in order for the night.
She returned to the library door. The man was still pacing. He must be after the furniture and was awaiting the signal of a confederate. She had found little time for detective stories but she had read a few. And the furniture in the manor house was worth a small fortune.
She flung open the door and raised the pistol. “Stick up your hands!” she commanded, recalling the formula.
The room was in complete darkness but she saw a detached shadow move suddenly forward.
“Don’t advance another step,” she cried, and hoped he would be too startled to perceive that her arm wabbled; she must be outlined against the faint light of the hall. “One step more and I’ll fire.”
The man made a sudden bolt to the right and then a rush at her. She fired, and thought the house was crashing about her ears. But the man came on, and she darted to the other side of the room, realizing her mistake at once; she should have retreated to the hall.
The man’s ears were as keen as hers and it was evident he had been neither hit nor deafened. He came straight for her, and she could only hope he would trip over some piece of furniture. She was safe from that danger for she had arranged the furniture herself.
She dodged behind the center table and fired again, hoping that if she could not hit that agile shadow the servants would be roused by the noise. But they slept in a wing and were cut off from the main house by massive doors. This time she hardly noticed the sound, she heard nothing but the man’s heavy breathing.
The shadow was on the opposite side of the table. She was about to fire, confident that this time he could not escape her, when he disappeared. A second later a hand caught her ankle and she was tripped and thrown flat. She had the presence of mind to give a violent lurch and roll behind a chair. But she had no time to rise, for the man had emerged from under the table and was feeling about the floor. She still clutched her pistol.
She heard him rise to his feet and move about uncertainly. She held her breath, no longer terrified. She was too angry. The back of the chair was very high. She dared not raise her head. If he would only come round the corner. She felt a cold desire to kill, and would not fire again until he was so close it would be impossible to miss him. But he was standing still, his breath coming in short gasps. Then his breathing stopped altogether, while her own released breath sounded like a wind in her ears. An instant later he had flung the chair aside and was upon her.
She managed to struggle to her feet but he had his arm about her and was groping for the pistol. His hot breath was on her face and she exerted herself frantically. She kicked him, and regretted her slippers. She tried to bite him and was tempted to drop the pistol and use her free hand to scratch his eyes out. But the pistol was her only hope, and even in that iron embrace she managed to duck and writhe and fling herself back. She was as strong as he was! Not for nothing was she an out-of-doors’ girl.
She held her right hand rigidly behind her, twisting him about as well as herself as he tried to reach her hand. They revolved in absurd gyrations, breathless, speechless. Suddenly his hand grasped her right shoulder and tried to wrench it. She bent down her head and bit him. He gave a hard gasp, then jerked her still more firmly to him, put his hand over her face, forcing back her head, and rained kisses on her neck and throat.
For a moment she had an illusion of paralysis. Not for an instant had she imagined the man was after anything but loot. He had come for her! Or was this revenge? Or a desperate attempt to shock her into submission? What difference? She knew that her skin was soft and sweet and the man virile. And she was almost at his mercy.
She was possessed by such a fury of rage as she had never believed even she could experience. Her exhibition to De Witt Turner had been but a pale umbra of what she felt at this moment when her sacred virginity was threatened.
The man was panting. He took his hand from her face and she felt his lips approaching her own. She butted him in the chest with her head, gave a violent wrench that half freed her, swung round her pistol and fired. The man dropped without a groan.
For a moment she could not stir, her legs were sinking under her. Then she staggered to the table, felt for matches, and lit the lamp. She stood gasping and panting, not daring to turn her head.
Courage ebbed back. Something must be done. Police. Ambulance. Topper. She started to leave the room. The man groaned, very faintly.
Perhaps she’d better put a pillow under his head. She tiptoed back to her fallen assailant, intending to approach him from behind. The word “malingering” occurred to her. And no doubt he had a pistol of his own.
And then she stopped and screamed twice. The man lying in his blood was Eustace Bylant.
Some time later she was wondering if she had fainted. She was sitting on a chair, shaking from head to foot, her teeth chattering. Hours seemed to pass.
Slowly her blood resumed its even flow, her limbs obeyed her will, and suddenly she laughed.
“So! Caveman stuff! Eustace! And he would have committed hara-kiri before he would have introduced such a scene into one of his novels. And a rotten psychologist after all.”
She felt not the slightest remorse, nor stab of pity. She would have shot him as deliberately if she had guessed who he was.
But something must be done and at once.
She slipped a pillow under his head and went out to the room under the stair where the telephone was concealed. She took down the receiver, but stood in doubt. He must have a doctor—but whom? Her grandmother’s old physician had retired. She literally did not know the name of a doctor in New Jersey. Eustace had one in New York, for he suffered at times from dyspepsia. But here—what on earth should she do? She must consult Topper.
She was starting for the wing, when she turned suddenly and ran back to the cupboard.
Elsie! Of course!
It was five minutes before she could rouse Central, who had probably eaten too many chocolates and fallen asleep. Three more before anyone in the house on States Avenue could be awakened. But finally a man’s voice demanded drowsily:
“Well, what is it, this time of night?”
Gita nearly dropped the receiver. “Dr. Pelham? It can’t be you! Is it you?”
The voice sprang to life. “Is that you, Gi—Mrs. Bylant?”
“Yes. Come quickly. Don’t ask any questions. Bring Elsie. Bring—other things.”
The voice became cool and alert. “We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”
Gita replaced the receiver on its hook. “What luck! What luck!” But she was trembling once more.
She knew nothing of first aid and she felt she never wanted to look at Eustace again. She hoped she hadn’t killed him, as she had no desire to be a murderess, even in self-defense. But the violence of that embrace and those kisses had turned her heart into granite. She could feel its weight.
And then she was aware of a certain grim humor in the situation. Her would-be defiler was her legal husband!
She walked up and down the hall until she heard a car racing up the avenue. She unbarred and unlocked the door. As she opened it Dr. Pelham and Elsie sprang out of the car and ran up the steps.
“I’ve shot Eustace,” she announced briefly. “Thought he was a burglar. He’s in the library.”
Dr. Pelham, bag in hand, went swiftly down the hall without a look at Gita. He was a surgeon on his way to a serious case, nothing more.
Elsie grasped Gita’s hand and stared at her. Her face was white and quivering.
“I did,” said Gita defiantly. “Couldn’t see who it was in the dark. Didn’t expect him till Friday.” Never would she breathe a word of that horrible scene to anyone.
Hand in hand the girls walked reluctantly to the library. Dr. Pelham had cut out the arm of Bylant’s coat and shirt and was packing the wound with sterilized gauze.
“Is he dead?” gasped Elsie.
“No. Wounded in the shoulder, luckily. Is there a strong man about the place? We must get him upstairs to his room. Elsie, telephone for a nurse.”