Cytherea

She hesitated, gracefully lowering her potent gaze.

"Probably," Lee Randon added keenly, "it was to happen because you were so excessively beautiful." There was no reply to this. "I don"t need to tell you," he admitted, "that I did my best to discourage him; and I pointed out that the time must come when you would fancy, no, need, someone else."

"Oh, that was cruel!" she cried softly; "and it isn"t, it won"t be true.

Do you think, just because I happen to be an actress, that I can"t be faithful?"

"It is all a question of degree," he instructed her, "of talent or genius. Talent may be faithful to a number of things--a man or a country or even an ideal; but the only fidelity of genius is to itself."

"I hadn"t thought of that," she reflected, sadly.

"Why should you?" he demanded; "you are being natural; I am the disturbance, the conventional voice sentimentally reading from the call book. But you don"t have those in moving pictures: it would be a sentimentally stupid director. You must believe me: your acting will always be incomprehensible to Peyton: he will approve of the results and raise h.e.l.l--for the comparatively short time he will last--with the means. Tell me this: together with his conviction that you"d carry the stage up into heaven, didn"t he speak of your retiring?"

The faint smile about her lips was a sufficient answer. That smile, he recognized, pensive and unlingering, served a wide and practical variety of purposes. "In the end," he insisted, "Peyton will want to take you to a home in a correct suburb; that conception he"ll never get away from."

She answered:

"And what if I liked that, wanted it? You mustn"t think my life is entirely joyful."

"I don"t," he as promptly a.s.sured her; "but you will never get away from it; you will never sit contentedly through long afternoons playing bridge; you"re cursed, if you want to call it that."

"I saw Peyton"s child," she said at a tangent. "He had hold of the nurse"s ap.r.o.n in such a funny decided fist. I wanted to hug him, but I remembered that it wasn"t the thing to do. She has that," a shade of defiance darkened her voice at her reference to Claire.

"Babies are no longer overwhelmingly important," Lee retorted; "not in the face of emotion itself; they have become a sort of unavoidable, almost an undesirable by-product."

"They won"t be with me," Mina Raff promised.

It was evident to him that she saw herself in the role of a mother; her face had a tender maternal glamour, her eyes were misted with sentiment; a superb actress. "A baby of my own," she whispered; "a baby and a house and Peyton."

"Nothing duller could be imagined." Momentarily he lost his self-restraint. "You have something inimitable, supremely valuable, and you are dreaming like a rabbit. If you must be a mother, be that one on the screen, for the thrilling of millions of limited minds."

"He seemed to like me." She had paid no attention to him, back again in the thought of the Morrises" son.

"If he did," Lee dryly added; "he will very soon get over it; Ira won"t love you conspicuously."

"Why--why that never entered my head," Mina was startled; "but, yes, how could he? And I can"t bear to have anyone, the most insignificant person alive, hate me. It makes me too wretched to sleep. They will have to understand, be generous; I"ll explain so it is entirely clear to them."

Her voice bore an actual note of fear, her delicate lips trembled uncontrollably.

"You can"t blame them, Ira and his mother, if they refuse to listen.

Eastlake as a town will dispense with you; and Claire"s family--it is really quite notable--will have their say wherever they live, in Charleston and London and Spain. When Ira is grown up and, in his turn, has children, they will be very bitter about your memory. However, publicly, I suppose it will do you more good than harm. The public loves such scandal; but, with that advertis.e.m.e.nt, the other will continue. It isn"t logical, I"ll admit; except for Claire I should support you. That is where, and only where, I am dragged into your privacy. And, too, for your sake, it would have been better if you had hit on a different sort of man, one without the background of such stubborn traditions. You will have to fight them both in him--where they, too, may come to blame you--and about you. There is a strain of narrow intolerance through all that blood."

Mina Raff"s eyes fluttered like two clear brown b.u.t.terflies which, preparing to settle, had been rudely disturbed. Then her mouth was compressed, it grew firm and firmer, obdurate; as though an internal struggle, evident in her tense immobility, had been decided against what was being powerfully urged upon her. A conviction that here, too, finally, he had failed, was in possession of Lee Randon, when he saw the determination drain from her face: it a.s.sumed a child"s expression of unreasoning primitive dread. She drew a hand across her forehead.

"I shall have to think," she told him; "I am very much upset. It makes me cold, what you said. Why did you come to New York and talk to me like this? Oh, I wish Peyton were here; he"d answer you; he isn"t a coward like me."

"Since you are so tired, and I"ve been so very objectionable, I think perhaps you had better go back to your hotel," Lee proposed. "It"s after ten." She rose immediately, but had to remain until the waiter was summoned with their account. In her limousine she seemed smaller, more lost in her fate and money, than before. She resembled a crushed and lovely flower; and Lee reflected that it was a shame no one was there to revive her. Mina Raff, at the Plaza, insisted, holding his hand in a mingled thoughtfulness and pictorial misery, on sending him to the Groves"; and his last glimpse of her, over his shoulder, was of a slight figure hurled into upper expensive mansions by an express elevator.

A car not the Groves" was outside their house; and, as Lee was pa.s.sing the drawing-room doors, William Grove called him in. He found there a Dr. Davencott and his wife, obviously on terms of close intimacy with the house. The physician was a thickly-built man with an abrupt manner continually employed in sallies of a vigorous but not unkindly humor.

Lee gathered that his practice was large and select; and he quickly saw the reason, the explanation, of this: Dr. Davencott had carried the tonic impatience of earlier years among inconsequential people into a sphere where bullying was a novelty with a direct traceable salutary effect. But whatever harshness was visible in him was tempered by his wife, who was New England, Boston itself, at its best. She had a grave charm, a wit, rather than humor, which irradiated her seriousness, and gave even her tentative remarks an air of valuable finality.

To this Mrs. Grove contributed little. She practically avoided speaking to Lee Randon; and he was certain that she was, cheaply and inexcusably, offended at him. Then, in moving, her gaze caught his, their eyes held fixed; and, as he looked, the expression he had seen on her face that afternoon in the library, drawn and white with staring black eyes, came upon her. It amazed him so much that he, too, sat regarding her in an intentness which took no account of the others. One of Mrs. Grove"s hands, half hidden in green tulle, was clenched. She breathed in an audible sigh and, with what appeared to be a wrenching effort, turned from him to the general conversation.

Lee Randon, losing his first impression of her att.i.tude, was totally unable to comprehend the more difficult state that had its place.

A possible explanation he dismissed before it had crystallized into thought. At the same time, the restlessness which had left him for the past twenty-four hours returned, more insistent than ever. He felt that it would be impossible to remain seated, calmly talking, for another minute. The conversation of the Davencotts that had so engaged him now only sounded like a senseless clatter of words and unendurable laughter.

He wished they would go; that all of them except Savina Grove would vanish; but why he wanted her to stay, why he wished to be alone with her, and what, in such a circ.u.mstance, he would say, were all mysteries.

Lee determined to rise and make his bow, to escape; he was aware of an indefinable oppression, like that he had often experienced during a heavy electric storm; he had the absurd illusion that a bolt of lightning.... Lee Randon didn"t stir: he sat listening with a set smile, automatic small speech, and a heart with an unsteady rising pound.

The Doctor"s stories, he thought, went on unsupportably; his wife was wise, correct, just, to a hair"s breadth. Good G.o.d, when would they go? Now--there was a break in the conversation--he would rise and say good-night. Probably they wanted to discuss things more personal than his presence allowed and were waiting for just that. He was aware that Mrs. Grove"s gaze, as though against her resolute effort, was moving toward him; but, quite desperately, he avoided it; he gazed up at a chandelier of glittering and coruscating gla.s.s and down at a smooth carpet with Chinese ideographs on a light background. He heard the flexible vibration of the pleasure traffic on Fifth Avenue; and, perhaps because it was so different, it reminded him of the ringing milk cans in the early morning by his house.

Lee Randon made a sharp effort to rouse himself from what threatened to be a stupor faintly lurid with conceptions of insanity; and the result of this mental drawing himself erect was even more startling, more disconcerting, than his previous condition. It came from the realization that what animated Mrs. Grove was pa.s.sion. This was incredible, but it was true; he had never before seen, nor imagined, such an instant sultry storm of emotions held precariously in check. Beyond measure it surprised and baffled and agitated him. He understood now that sense of impending lightning; and, at the same time, he had a sense that a peremptory bra.s.s gong had been struck beside him, and that he was deafened by the reverberations. Mrs. Grove"s still pallid face, her contained, almost precise, manner, took on a new meaning--he saw them, fantastically, as a volcanic crust that, under observation, had hardened against the fire within. Then he was at a loss to grasp why he, Lee Randon, was permitted to see so much.

His thoughts returned to himself--the voices of the Davencotts, of William Loyd Grove, echoed from a distance on his hearing--and he tried to re-arrange his bearing toward his unsought discovery: this was of enormous importance. He must at once regulate his approach to Mrs.

Grove, get himself firmly in hand; the situation, for him particularly, had far-reaching unpredictable possibilities. For all her exactness, Savina Grove had a very exclusive and definite attractiveness; and, faced by such a dilemma, Lee had the best of reasons for doubting the ultimate regularity of his response.

But he was, he thought, mentally halting, racing absurdly to unjustified conclusions; nothing, naturally, disturbing would arise; but that a.s.surance, the heights of reason, soon faded. There could be no doubt of the cause of Mrs. Grove"s blanched staring: just as there was no evasion of the danger created by no more than his scant recognition. Pa.s.sion discovered was a thousand diameters increased; mutually admitted, it swept aside all opposition. Lee Randon, however, had no intention of involving himself there while, ironically, he was engaged in securing for Claire Morris her husband; he didn"t propose to compromise his ease of mind with William Grove"s wife. There was, as well, the chance that she was a little unbalanced; progressing, he might involve himself in a regrettable, a tragic, fix. He would not progress, that was all there was to that! Lee felt better, freer already, at this resolution; he wasn"t, he protested inwardly, a seducer of women; the end itself, the consummation, of seduction, was without tyrannical power over him. Lee wasn"t materially, patiently, sensual in that uncomplicated manner. No, his restlessness was more mysterious, situated deeper, than that; it wasn"t so readily satisfied, drugged, dismissed. The fact struck him that it had little or no animal urgency; and in this, it might be, he was less lucky than unlucky.

Mrs. Davencott rose and resumed her wrap, retained with her on the back of the chair. Lee met the pleasant decisiveness of her capable hand, the doctor grasped his fingers with a robust witticism; and he was replying to the Davencotts" geniality when he had a glimpse of Mrs. Grove"s face turned slightly from him: the curve of her cheek met the pointed chin and the graceful contour of her exposed long throat; there was the shadow of a tormenting smile on the pale vermilion of her lips, in her half closed eyes; her hair, in that light, was black. A sensation of coldness, a spiritual shiver, went through Lee Randon; the resemblance that had eluded him was mercilessly clear--it was to the doll, to Cytherea.

When Dr. Davencott and his wife had gone Lee sank back into his chair, more disorganized by his culminating discovery than by any of the extraordinary conditions that had preceded it. Its quality of the unexpected, however, wasn"t enough to account for the profound effect on him; that was buried in the secret of instinctive recognitions. "Well, the thing for me to do is to go to bed," he said aloud, but it was no more than an unconvinced mutter, addressed to the indeterminate region of his feet. Savina Grove was standing by the door, in the place, the position, in which she had said good-bye to the Davencotts. Her flamboyant tulle skirt, contrasted with the tightly-fitting upper part of her dress, gave her, now, in the sombre crowded furnishings, the rich draped brocades, of the room, an aspect of mid-Victorian unreality.

"It is for me, as well," she agreed, but so long after he had spoken that the connection between their remarks was almost lost. However, neither of them made a movement to leave the drawing-room, Savina Grove returned slowly to her chair. "No one, I think, has ever found it out like that." Her remark was without intelligible preliminary, but he grasped her meaning at once. "How you happened to stir it in me I have no idea--" she stopped and looked at him intently. "A terrible accident!

I would have done anything, gone any distance, to avoid it. I am unable, with you, to pretend--that"s curious--and that in itself gives me a feeling of helplessness. All sorts of impossible things are coming into my head to say to you. I mustn"t." Her voice was brittle.

"There is no need for you to say what would make you miserable," he replied. "I am not in a position to question you; at the same time I can"t pretend--perhaps the safest thing of all--not to understand what, entirely against your will, I"ve seen. I am very much, very naturally, disturbed by it; but you have nothing to worry about."

"You say that because you don"t know, you can"t possibly think, what goes on here," she pressed a hand to her breast. "Why," her words were blurred in a mounting panic, "I have lost my sense of shame with you.

It"s gone." She gazed despairingly around as if she expected to see that restraining quality embodied and recoverable in the propriety of the room. "I"m frightened," she gasped. Lee rose instinctively, and moved toward her with a gesture of rea.s.surance, but she cried, "Don"t! don"t!

don"t!" three times with an increasing dread. He went back to his chair.

"Now I have to--I want to--tell you about it," she went on rapidly; "it has always been in me as long as I can remember, when I was hardly more than a child sitting alone; and I have always been afraid and ashamed.

The nicest thing to call it is feeling; but in such an insane degree; at night it comes over me in waves, like a warm sea. I wanted and wanted love. But not in the little amounts that satisfied the others--the men and girls together. I couldn"t do any of the small things they did with safety: this--this feeling would sweep up over me and I"d think I was going to die.

"All that I had inherited and been told made me sure that I was horridly immodest; I wouldn"t, if it could be helped at all, let anyone see inside me; I couldn"t have men touch me; and whenever I began to like one I ran. It was disgusting, I was brought up to believe; I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was a bad girl; and I struggled, oh, for days on end, to keep it hidden."

It was strange, Lee told himself, that marriage, the birth of her son, hadn"t made her more happily normal; and, as if she had perceived his thoughts, she added, "Even from William. It would have shocked him, sickened him, really, more than the rest. He had to dominate me, be masculine, and I had to be modest, pursued--when I could have killed him." Her emotion swept her to her feet. "But I was, he thought, proper; although it tore and beat and pounded me till I was more often ill than not. Young William nearly grew up and, because of him, I was sure I had controlled it; but he was killed. Still, in five or six years it would be over; and now you, I--"

"Nothing has happened," he heavily reiterated; "nothing has or can happen. We are neither of us completely young; and, as you say, in a few years all will be over, solved. We are both, it seems, happily married."

She interrupted him to cry, "Is anyone happily married? Don"t we fool ourselves and doesn"t life fool us?"

"It"s the best course in a bad affair."

"Bah!" She was infuriated at him. "You are like the others--worms in chestnuts. It is bad because you are contented. I hate life as much as you do, far more; but I am not satisfied; how could anyone be?"

He, too, had risen, and stood close before her. "Don"t make a mistake about me," he warned her; "there are a great many men whom it would be safer to tell this to. If I haven"t had such a sharp struggle as you, I"ve been wondering--yes, when I should have been happiest--about the uselessness of most of living. I"m not safe at all."

"I don"t want to be safe," she whispered.