CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
"How do you like it?" Margaret turned, looking back over her shoulder to Gregory. Her fair hair and white shoulders rose from a swathing of cloudy fabric that showed now palest pink, now mauve, now faintly blue.
"It's ripping!"
Waltzing slowly the length of the dusky room, she moved with a flower lightness, a spirit-like unreality that touched the artist in him.
"You look like an orchid come to life in the depths of a forest."
Margaret stopped and swept him a curtsey.
"Thanks. To affect one's own husband like that is an achievement."
Gregory smiled. This new manner of Margaret's, half flirtatious, half cynical, amused him.
"Then what will happen to old Burnham? He'll be downright dizzy."
"Don't be coarse, Gregory. I don't like it. Besides, you know I do it for you."
"Oh, I'm not jealous. Not a bit."
"You may laugh, but itisgood business. Weren't you asked to join The Meadow Club after our last dinner?"
"I was."
"Well?"
"I thank you." Gregory doffed an imaginary hat and swept a bow. "What have you in mind this time?"
"Don't be silly. Besides, it's every hostess's duty to look as well as she can."
"You've done that. Maybe Burnham will resign in my favor and I'll be president of the Architectural Society of America."
"There's no reason that you shouldn't be some day, if you go about it right. It has to have a president, doesn't it?"
"Absolutely essential." Gregory chuckled and switched on the lights. In this mood of helping-wife Margaret was delightfully naïve.
"Well, I'm doing my part. If you do yours——"
"There's no knowing to what heights I may not climb."
"But you can't get anything without some trouble in this world. You've got to work for it, in every way." Margaret spoke as if she were enunciating a divine decree, and moved with stately coldness to the door.
"Very well. I'll work to-night. You've put me next to Phyllis Henshaw, haven't you?"
"Yes. And it's Gothic Cathedrals. She's mad about them lately. That ought to be easy for you."
"I can take that trick with my eyes shut."
"But don't make her feel that you know more about it than she does. Let her talk. She loves to."
"I'll remember."
"And please get dressed. The Phillips always come too early and you're not even shaved yet."
Margaret floated away and Gregory went into his dressing-room.
This was to be the last and most important of the Allen dinners which Margaret had begun early in the winter. The guest of honor was to be James Burnham, President of the Architectural Society, with eight lesser luminaries. It would be a success because these dinners of Margaret's always were a success. Sitting beside some eminent man, whose conversation she could not follow, Margaret reached her climax. As wife and companion, she was one being, as hostess another. In the act of presiding over a dinner table, Margaret found a clarity of vision that kept her in safe paths. Men whom Gregory admired and for whose good opinion he was anxious, never refused an invitation to one of Margaret's dinners.
As he dressed Gregory smiled to think what a chasm lay between the first dinner and this. Graceful and surefooted, Margaret had scaled the social cliffs, picking with unerring instinct the right spots. The dinner to-night was to mark the apex.
And it did. Looking about the table, at the soft lights, the exquisite flowers, the well-gowned women and alert men, Gregory felt that only a sketch of the Taj Mahal would do it justice. While he talked Gothic Cathedrals he drew one mentally and sent it to Jean. The subdued abundance, restrained success, the perfect balance of personal accomplishment and concealed consciousness of it, rose in delicate spires and minarets against a background of inexhaustible possibility, Eastern in its opulence.
On Margaret's right sat James Burnham, white-haired and charming, but knowing to a hair's weight what it meant for any hostess to secure him. Yankee in the shrewd appreciation of his own value, Southern in the charm of its concealment, and Latin in his attitude to all women, the famous man bent to Margaret with undivided attention. Margaret vibrated in harmony to his note. Her eyes sparkled and she had the manner of a beautiful woman withholding an advance she perfectly understood and had full power to reciprocate. Gregory looked on amused, while he followed instructions and let Phyllis Henshaw rhapsodize among the Gothic arches. He speculated about Margaret as if she were a stranger, and wondered why men with wives like that were ever jealous of them.
Coffee was served in the living-room, a method of Margaret's for redistributing her guests. By the new adjustment, Phyllis Henshaw fell to James Pelham and Gregory could not help smiling at Margaret when he caught her eye. Skill like this amounted to an art. From time to time he glanced at the white-haired president, listening with a mechanical smile to the Gothic ravings and wondered whether any man, except perhaps a Jesuit diplomat, could have achieved his purpose better. At the first opportunity, Gregory edged his own partner to the rescue, and then realized that he, too, was weaving a pattern of the evening to Margaret's design. He had an almost irresistible impulse to call across the room to her:
"Is this the way you want it? Or have I made a mistake?"
There was neither bridge nor music, and yet most of the guests stayed until almost twelve. It was even a little after before Phyllis Henshaw kissed Margaret effusively and assured her that it had all "been simply perfect." When the front door closed behind them, Margaret dropped into a chair and yawned.
"People can say what they like, but there's absolutely no other way to do it. A dinner is the only thing."
"Q. E. D."
"But next winter I'm going to do it a little differently. We won't begin quite so early in the season—now that I know who's who. We won't give more than six either. That's enough to cover all the people that really matter."
"A kind of inverse ratio? In time, at that rate, we'll have to eat alone."
"I suppose that's awfully clever; but, really, I'm too tired to follow."
Gregory realized that he was being petty. For the evening had been just as much of an accomplishment, in its way, as Bobby Phillips' engineering miracles in the Orient, or the Auditorium itself, for that matter.
"It was all right, Margaret, and I'm sure if Burnham wrote sonnets he'd be sitting up at this minute."
A dreamy smile touched Margaret's lips. "He's perfectly fascinating. I don't wonder women fall for him." She moved toward the door. "I let Nellie go to bed, Gregory, so you put out the lights. And please don't make your usual racket in the morning. I'm all in."
Gregory finished his cigar and then went upstairs. He stopped for a moment in Puck's room as he always did. She was sound asleep. Lady Jane sat stiffly on a chair. Of late, Puck often forgot to take Lady Jane to bed. Puck was growing up. Gregory laid Lady Jane softly on the coverlet and tiptoed out.
Bunched on the dresser was the last mail that he always had sent up from the office when he left too early to get it. He tossed it aside, picked up Jean's with a thrill of pleased surprise, for Jean usually wrote once to his twice and he had not yet answered the last, and made himself comfortable to enjoy it.
Gregory read the letter from the abrupt beginning, "I want to talk to you, dear," to the ending "that's all," and laid it down. There was no haze to be cleared away by a second reading, no doubt of Jean's meaning, no possible misunderstanding. Into the three pages Jean had compressed the wonder of their love, the nuances of its beauty, the impossibility of continuing like this. She made no claims nor recognized any on her own part. Only, she could not go on. She stated it as simply as she might have said: "I cannot meet you to-morrow. I have a meeting."
Before the simplicity of Jean's mind, Gregory was helpless. With one clean blow, Jean had cut away all the elaborate superstructure of ordinary human intercourse. The scaffolding was stark before him.
Step by step, Gregory went back over the past year. There had been hours of longing that not even his work had stilled. Days when Jean had moved beside him, enjoying his triumphs, memories that had helped him through temporary difficulties. She was always there, more or less vivid, according to his need. The visits to New York he had planned weeks ahead. The Christmas dinner he had snatched at the risk of business loss. The perfect walk through the snow to Madam Cateau's; the tenderness of Jean's tears; the gay meal and Jean's cheery smile as the train pulled out; his pride in Jean's courage; desperate moments of his own rebellion, stifled in shame before her greater strength.
And all the time, Jean had been beating against this "ugliness." It had been one thing to him, another to her. He did not know her. Perhaps he had never known her.
He went back to the night he had come in with Puck to find Jean standing by the living-room window, and the storm that had raged in him through that intolerable hour of Margaret's chatter and the need that had driven him to leave the house with Jean. Again Gregory felt the silence of the street about them, then the clatter of the taxi as it stopped at his signal; and the dizzy moment when Jean had said quietly: "Gramercy Park." It was Jean who had said it. Again Gregory felt the reverence and gratitude that had stilled his passion through that dark, silent ride.
Love had meant to her what it had meant to him and he had gloried in her honesty. She had brought back the courage that the weary round of years with Margaret had almost killed, and kept it alive. She had been glad of his success. Again he felt her leaning to him across the table and heard her say:
"It is only eighteen hours away."
It was Jean who had said it, just as she had said: "Gramercy Park."
And now she said, just as quietly and simply: "I can't go on."
Cold damp broke out on Gregory's forehead.
She could not go on.
She wanted it to stop. She would fill her days without reference to him. He would fill his with no thought of her. He would make no more flying trips to New York. Never again. Not even once more, unless——
Gregory rose. If he did not get up now and move he would always sit there, staring at the three pages covered with the clear black writing, on the table beside him.
Jean with a child. A child of hers and of himself. She had weighed the price and was willing to pay. The fences that society had put up, Jean was willing to throw down. The conventions they had scorned in secret, Jean would scorn openly. Unconfused by all the little noises of the world, Jean heard the clearest call and answered.
"She doesn't realize what it would mean. She——"
The last sentence of the letter moved before him.
"I have thought it all out, dear, and I know. It's the one thing against everything else, the one thing that counts against all the things that don't."
Gregory's chin dropped to his breast and he walked up and down like an old man.
Jean with a child. A child of hers and his. Jean and their child, alone, one thousand miles away. Another human being, part of himself, just as Puck was a part.
Another Puck. The best of Jean and of himself, a fearless little Puck, whom he would see at long intervals, scarcely know, whom he could not acknowledge, but who would always be near, tearing at his heart, claiming his love. Gregory's lips went white.
"My God," he whispered, "I wish I had never seen you."
Then he began walking again, up and down, up and down.
The stars were white in the morning sky when he went back and sat down once more beside the table. He put the three sheets of Jean's letter carefully together and tore them across many times. Then on a single sheet he wrote:
"I am not brave enough. I haven't the courage. I cannot pay the price."
He took the torn bits of Jean's letter and his own and went out. He dropped his into the green box on the corner. The chill wind of dawn seized Jean's and carried them away.
He closed the front door softly and went slowly up the stairs, past Puck's door and Margaret's, back into his own room. The pen was still wet with ink. Gregory opened the window and threw it into the street. In a few moments an early milk wagon clattered along and scrunched it into the dust.