CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
A week after the concert Catherine gave up hope for Poloff. Mrs. Dalton did not like him. Some reason, connected with an absconding Russian maid who had once stolen some jewelry, had cut all Russians from her interest. She was very gracious about it and very obstinate.
"But Tony's another matter. She's sickening about Tony. If I didn't really love him she would make me hate him. Then, why can't she come out and say what she intends to do? How do I know she won't go off to Europe or Asia or Africa for the summer, and every week makes a difference to Tony."
"Why don't you ring her up?" Jean advised. "She's already spoken about it you say, it wouldn't be like attacking her from the blue. It would be easy to make a reasonable excuse."
"Would it?" Catherine asked in such a suddenly changed tone, that Nan and Gerte as well as Jean stopped eating and stared. Jean flushed, but Catherine had not been herself since the concert and now her sharp face looked almost drawn and her lips were a tight line.
"I think so. I'll do it, if you like, drop the seed anyhow. I used to have to do a lot of indirect managing of her in the old days."
"Thank you," Catherine said after a pause, "but this is my affair. You don't love Tony and I do."
Catherine did not wait for dessert and left the table. As soon as the door closed, Gerte burst out:
"What in the world is the matter with Catherine? She's been like a loaded pistol ever since the concert and now she's just about ready to go off."
"She's tired out," Nan said shortly and then began, in a most unusual fashion for Nan, to talk about her work. Neither Jean nor Gerte paid much attention, but it bridged the gap, and Jean felt, that for some reason, this was all Nan wanted it to do.
But the next day, when Mrs. Dalton rang up and begged Jean to help her manage the Rimaldis, Jean at first refused. It was not until she saw that it was either a question of doing as Mrs. Dalton asked, or having the whole matter dropped, that she at last reluctantly consented to see Giuseppe Rimaldi and force him to reason.
"I'll see him this afternoon and let you know," Jean promised and Mrs. Dalton hung up.
The arrangements took longer than Jean expected and the others were at the table when she came in, a little excited and triumphant, as the contest with another will always left Jean. Giuseppe Rimaldi had been hard to handle, and it was only by threatening him with the law, which would take away from him both Tony and the new violin presented by Mrs. Dalton, that he had yielded and promised to let Tony give up selling papers and have this time for practice. In her success. Jean forgot Catherine's rudeness of the night before, and launched into a picture of Giuseppe Rimaldi, surrounded by wife and children, all except Tony, defending his poverty.
"Like a captain defending a fortress," Jean explained. "No wonder Dalton couldn't handle him."
"It was a miracle thatyouwere on hand to do it," Catherine said in a cold, detached tone, each word like the prick of a knife.
Jean's eyes flashed. "If there had been any other way, I should not have interfered."
Catherine pushed back her chair. "You needn't apologize. But from now on you can have Tony—as well."
Gerte made no comment this time on Catherine's going, but Jean saw Nan's face flush scarlet. As soon as the meal was over, Jean went up to her own room.
What had Catherine meant by that "as well"? What unfounded hurt to her own vanity was she harboring? There was something more than temporary fatigue, or nerves, the matter with Catherine, and whatever it was, Nan knew.
The days passed, a sultry spring moved toward a scorching summer, and Jean did not change her mind. Catherine was different, so different that it was impossible to seek an explanation, even if Catherine had allowed the opportunity. Her wit, always sharp, stabbed now with a venom that penetrated even Gerte's imperviousness. She dipped her slightest remark in a well of hatred, and sent it tipped with personal animosity straight to its mark. Nan alone escaped. It seemed to Jean sometimes that Nan was mentally tiptoeing through this tension, as a nurse moves with a patient.
All the old charm of the winter was gone now. The meals were disagreeable interludes of forced effort that grew more and more difficult to make. The only nights in the least approaching the pleasant dinners of the past, were the nights when Philip came. Then, for some reason that Jean did not seek to analyze, they all united to drag together the tattered shreds of the old gayety to cover this ugliness. Catherine did not help, but neither did she hinder. On these nights coffee was served on the tiny lawn under the full-leafed ailanthus. The lights in the rear tenement shone through the leaves like low-hung stars, the fountain was turned on to the full capacity of its trickle, and there was a definite feeling of relief in the air. But Philip did not come often. Not nearly so often as he had in the winter.
Jerome's three weeks lengthened to four, then five. Jean did not hear from him. The original date of Alice's wedding passed with a hurried note from Alice that her father's return had been delayed, she herself was going to the mountains, and the wedding would take place whenever he got back. Then she, too, dropped into the silence.
Gerte went to the Berkshires. Nan took a cottage with a co-worker at Rockaway; Beth went to Maine. Catherine and Jean were alone. Catherine made no explanation of why she was staying beyond her usual time in town and Jean did not ask her. There was little talk between them. Jean's efforts at meals rebounded from the wall of Catherine's mechanical replies like rubber balls.
At last in mid-June Jean reached the snapping point of her endurance. Either Catherine would have to force a pleasantness she did not feel, or else Jean would take her meals out. She could not eat another dinner sitting opposite Catherine's bitter, cynical eyes and tight lips.
It was a suffocating evening, threatening thunder, and the air, like hot wool soaked in glue, crushed Jean's last scrap of strength to keep up this senseless and annoying pretense. They had finished dinner, and Jean was standing by the French window opening to the garden, while Catherine still sat at the table.
"Suppose we eat out here after this." At least the sky would give a feeling of space and freedom, and the trickle of the fountain and noises from the tenements fill the strained silence. Jean passed into the tiny garden and took the steamer chair by the fountain. Catherine came as far as the window and stood looking at her curiously.
"Why? Do you object to the dining-room?"
"It seems empty for just two—as if the others had died."
Catherine shrugged. "Rather sentimental, mourning three able-bodied women gone on their summer vacations."
"You know very well it's not that." Jean looked at Catherine framed in the window. She was dressed in white and now, in the twilight of the unlit room, her thin face was strained and gray. Jean broke off and turned on the fountain. The little tinkle rested her when she was very tired.
"It's so stupid to care—about anything," Catherine murmured, as if she were not talking directly to Jean. "If you never let any one in—you don't have to drag them out."
"But that's too high a price to pay for anything," Jean said more gently. "It would take such a lot of happiness to pay for such little escapes."
Catherine laughed harshly. "You don't pay for it all at once. You string it out over the years—all through your life—like buying peace on the installment."
The last words she seemed to hurl at Jean and went. Jean watched her disappear through the farther door; heard her go up the stairs and close the door of her room.
Jean sat on alone. The misunderstanding of the last few weeks spread through the heat. Catherine's bitterness saturated the heavy air and it seemed to Jean that mystery and bitterness were pressing down upon her physically. Nothing was the same as it had been. The clean precision of the winter was gone. Motives were no longer clear. Every one and everything was confused and blurred in the water-sogged air. Jerome stayed away, long after the supposed date of his return, without an explanation. Things were piling up in his office and every day his secretary wanted to know if Jean knew when he would return. Catherine was almost ill with bitterness and hatred of something concealed. Philip came rarely and then he, too, was different. And since the others had gone, he had not come at all. Everything was shrouded in a thick mist of misunderstanding, and Jean felt that it was, somehow, all meshed together, Jerome's unexplained delay with Catherine's bitterness and Philip's strangeness with Alice's postponed wedding.
The leaves hung motionless in the breathless night. Jean felt that if she did not get up and out into a wider space, she would be walled forever in that ridiculous garden. As she passed Catherine's room on the way to get her things, she saw that there was no light. The silence reached through the paneling and Catherine's bitterness was a living thing, with which she was closed in alone in the darkness.
Jean passed quickly on her way down again, and opened the front door quietly.
As she stepped out she almost collided with Philip, his hand stretched toward the bell button.
"Why the get-away? Will you divide the loot?"
"Did it really look as stealthy as that? It's this weather, all messy and heavy and silent, a thunderstorm gum-shoeing about, afraid to come out into the open."
Jean stood aside and waited for him to pass. "Catherine's upstairs, but I don't think she's going out."
Philip paid no attention and closed the door behind Jean. At the click, Jean thought she heard a noise at Catherine's window, but when she looked up there was only the white curtain, limp in the heat.
Philip did not ask whether she objected to his coming but strolled along beside her in one of his quiet moods, so that, after a few blocks, she did not mind his being there. From time to time he made some quiet comment, surprising in its keen appreciation of the color and drama about them. He saw none of the squalor and dirt and tragedy in the swarming streets, but like Herrick, long ago on that first walk through Barbary Coast, a beauty, that Jean, too, saw when it was pointed out.
Suddenly, as if they had risen from the litter, a gnarled old man and a woman with an orange handkerchief about her withered brown face came dragging a hurdy-gurdy. The man dropped the shafts and began to turn the handle. "Back To Our Mountains" wailed to the night. As the old woman fawned forward with her tambourine, Philip dropped in a dollar.
"Do you always do things as rash as that?"
"Sometimes," Philip answered quietly, and Jean was ashamed. Perhaps there was some memory connected with this melody for which Philip would pay any price. The man had hidden spots of sensitiveness like this love of music, especially thin, tuneful music, for pictures of simple scenes, and poetry, the lyric poetry of emotion and beautiful sound.
Jean surprised Philip by sitting down on the nearest step. He took a place on the step below; children gathered about them, dirty, dark-eyed children of another race. Philip and Jean were far away in another land. He scarcely heard the tunes wheezed out, one after another, twice around the repertoire. It was a mist through which he moved with Jean. He wanted Jean as he had never wanted anything in all his life, and his hour was come. It frightened him a little.
At last the old man got between the shafts of his cart, the old woman pulling feebly on one. Smiling and nodding to the two on the steps they stumbled away. The children plunged again into their games.
Half an hour later, Jean found herself sitting opposite Philip in an East Side tea-house. The table was covered with dirty oilcloth and the sawdust on the floor reeked with sour dampness. Shabby men with broad Slavic faces drank Russian tea from tall glasses and argued of life and death and government. In one corner a black bearded Russian in peasant clothes strummed a balalaika, and a small boy in flaming red and with a tinsel cap, stamped and writhed in a Cossack dance.
"It's great, isn't it?"
Jean nodded. "I often used to wish that I could draw or paint when I first came to New York." And although she knew that she would have striven to get on canvas the battle in the souls of these aliens and that Philip would have painted the picturesque clothes of the balalaika player, and the tinsel cap of the dancer, she felt nearer to him than she ever had.
"I used to try it, but I could never get it. I'll show you the sketches if you like." Jean knew that Philip was proud of these things and glad to show them. "I should like to see them."
It was after eleven when Philip paid the check and they turned homeward. The air was broken now with little puffs of hot wind. Philip took off his hat, so that the puffs of air stirred his hair, and made him look like a contented baby in a draught. But the evening had been pleasant and Jean was ashamed of noticing how his fine hair, leaping suddenly erect, made him look foolish. As they turned into Grove Street, the first heavy drops splashed, and before they could reach the door, were coming in a steady patter.
Philip followed Jean into the dark living-room, now filled with a mysterious cooling breeze like a presence. In a rush the storm broke, lashing the ailanthus in the garden, beating out the breeze, and the air stung with the smell of rain and the little square of earth. Somewhere above, a window slammed. "Catherine," she whispered, and Philip felt that he and Jean were alone against the world, with all its silly notions, like shutting windows in a thunderstorm.
Jean moved toward the garden and Philip stood beside her. The rain beat like shot poured through the opening between the tenements. A little strip of earth held fast between bricks; thunder, crashing against tenements; a jumble of majesty and squalor.
"I bind the sun's throne with a burning zoneAnd the moon's with a girdle of pearl.The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swimWhen the whirlwinds my banners unfurl."
"I bind the sun's throne with a burning zoneAnd the moon's with a girdle of pearl.The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swimWhen the whirlwinds my banners unfurl."
"I bind the sun's throne with a burning zoneAnd the moon's with a girdle of pearl.The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swimWhen the whirlwinds my banners unfurl."
"I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone
And the moon's with a girdle of pearl.
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim
When the whirlwinds my banners unfurl."
The lines slipped in between the crashes and Jean felt the clouds racing across mountain peaks.
"It would be wonderful," she said in the same low key, as if they alone were articulate in a world lashed to silence. "I have never been in the real outdoors in a big storm and I have always wanted it. It would be glorious——"
"With you," Philip whispered. His face was white, as if the lightning had touched it, and his eyes blazed. Jean stood silent before them. And while she stood looking at him, the thunder broke in a deafening roar that rocked the earth and smashed all subterfuge, all petty social pretense at misunderstanding; so that when the last reverberation died away and Philip said softly: "You know, don't you?" Jean nodded.
"Well?" he said with an effort. The sternness of his lips weakened in nervous twitching, a pitiful betrayal of the thin veneer of his composure. Jean turned to the garden and leaned her forehead against the frame of the window. Weariness weighted her, weariness too heavy to struggle with explanation, too deep to resent this demand so unexpected and unwelcome. Philip did not move. Jean's bowed head was more eloquent than words, the dejection and weakness of her strong body more cruel. In mockery of his momentary hope, a faint echo of the thunder rolled out to sea.
"Never?"
Jean shook her head.
Philip stared at the thick knot of hair, the broad shoulders, the long, strong lines of Jean's body, and the blood rushed into his eyes. His hands clenched on her shoulders and he swung her round, gripping her beyond the power to move.
"You think I'm weak and silly, and you try not to laugh at me. Laugh if you like, you couldn't hurt me, neither you nor any woman like you. You think you're terribly honest and straight, don't you, and you never tell the truth, not even to yourself. You know how I feel when you are near me; you must know it. You've got it in you, the call of a woman to a man and you pretend, you smother it all up under a sham of companionship and interest, and it's a lie."
Jean tried to release herself, but the fingers dug deeper into the muscles of her shoulders.
"I think you'd better go."
"I'll go when I'm ready, not before. Nobody has ever told you the truth about yourself."
"Don't say any more, please," Jean begged.
But the pity in her voice fanned the rage in Philip.
"You're successful in your little fiddling two-by-four job, but if you died to-night, the silly interfering would go on. You haven't got a spot in the whole world that really belongs to you. You've got nothing. Nothing at all——"
Jean shivered. "Don't," she whispered pitifully, "oh don't, please don't!"
Suddenly tears filled Philip's eyes. "I want you so; I want you so. It isn't enough, is it? It's only outside, isn't it, sometimes, now when it thunders, and the earth smells? I'm not worthy of you, Jean. You're the most wonderful thing God ever made. You want it too, don't you, something near and close, the thing in the thunder and the sweet earth, and I can give you that, Jean, even if you can't—give so much to me. But just tolerate me, Jean, I will ask so little, just be kind and——"
The tears ran in tiny globules down Philip's cheeks.
Jean shivered with nausea, and stepped back. Philip's hand clenched and his face became evil in its baffled longing.
"You——" His voice broke in a squeak.
Jean raised her head and looked with white, set face at him. Then she made a motion as if to pass and leave him standing there, but he stepped before her.
"You fool, you poor blind fool. You can draw men now," in his pain his eyes clung to her body, "but in a few years you won't. I'm coarse. I know it. You're so damned honest, but you don't like the truth any better than any one else. For a few years you'll be a woman yet and then—you'll be hungry and furtive like—like—Catherine."
With a quick motion Jean passed him, and without looking back walked out of the room. Philip heard her go quickly up the stairs and then the house was absolutely still. The rain dripped from the ailanthus, and a single light high up on the fifth floor of the tenement went out. Philip took his hat and went slowly, like an old person, from the house.
Staring down from her attic Jean saw him turn the corner and his bent head and sagging, unexercised body made her feel ill.
It was a long time after that when she heard Catherine pad away from her window to her bed.