Susy considered. "I don"t suppose she did; and perhaps I shouldn"t have been, a year ago. But you see"--she hesitated--"Nick"s so awfully good: it"s made me look; at a lot of things differently...."
"Oh, hang Nick"s goodness! It"s happiness that"s done it, my dear.
You"re just one of the people with whom it happens to agree."
Susy, leaning back, scrutinized between her lashes his crooked ironic face.
"What is it that"s agreeing with you, Streffy? I"ve never seen you so human. You must be getting an outrageous price for the villa."
Strefford laughed and clapped his hand on his breast-pocket. "I should be an a.s.s not to: I"ve got a wire here saying they must have it for another month at any price."
"What luck! I"m so glad. Who are they, by the way?"
He drew himself up out of the long chair in which he was disjointedly lounging, and looked down at her with a smile. "Another couple of love-sick idiots like you and Nick.... I say, before I spend it all let"s go out and buy something ripping for Clarissa."
The days pa.s.sed so quickly and radiantly that, but for her concern for Clarissa, Susy would hardly have been conscious of her hostess"s protracted absence. Mrs. Vanderlyn had said: "Four weeks at the latest,"
and the four weeks were over, and she had neither arrived nor written to explain her non-appearance. She had, in fact, given no sign of life since her departure, save in the shape of a post-card which had reached Clarissa the day after the Lansings" arrival, and in which Mrs.
Vanderlyn instructed her child to be awfully good, and not to forget to feed the mongoose. Susy noticed that this missive had been posted in Milan.
She communicated her apprehensions to Strefford. "I don"t trust that green-eyed nurse. She"s forever with the younger gondolier; and Clarissa"s so awfully sharp. I don"t see why Ellie hasn"t come: she was due last Monday."
Her companion laughed, and something in the sound of his laugh suggested that he probably knew as much of Ellie"s movements as she did, if not more. The sense of disgust which the subject always roused in her made her look away quickly from his tolerant smile. She would have given the world, at that moment, to have been free to tell Nick what she had learned on the night of their arrival, and then to have gone away with him, no matter where. But there was Clarissa--!
To fortify herself against the temptation, she resolutely fixed her thoughts on her husband. Of Nick"s beat.i.tude there could be no doubt.
He adored her, he revelled in Venice, he rejoiced in his work; and concerning the quality of that work her judgment was as confident as her heart. She still doubted if he would ever earn a living by what he wrote, but she no longer doubted that he would write something remarkable. The mere fact that he was engaged on a philosophic romance, and not a mere novel, seemed the proof of an intrinsic superiority. And if she had mistrusted her impartiality Strefford"s approval would have rea.s.sured her. Among their friends Strefford pa.s.sed as an authority on such matters: in summing him up his eulogists always added: "And you know he writes." As a matter of fact, the paying public had remained cold to his few published pages; but he lived among the kind of people who confuse taste with talent, and are impressed by the most artless attempts at literary expression; and though he affected to disdain their judgment, and his own efforts, Susy knew he was not sorry to have it said of him: "Oh, if only Streffy had chosen--!"
Strefford"s approval of the philosophic romance convinced her that it had been worth while staying in Venice for Nick"s sake; and if only Ellie would come back, and carry off Clarissa to St. Moritz or Deauville, the disagreeable episode on which their happiness was based would vanish like a cloud, and leave them to complete enjoyment.
Ellie did not come; but the Mortimer Hickses did, and Nick Lansing was a.s.sailed by the scruples his wife had foreseen. Strefford, coming back one evening from the Lido, reported having recognized the huge outline of the Ibis among the pleasure craft of the outer harbour; and the very next evening, as the guests of Palazzo Vanderlyn were sipping their ices at Florian"s, the Hickses loomed up across the Piazza.
Susy pleaded in vain with her husband in defence of his privacy.
"Remember you"re here to write, dearest; it"s your duty not to let any one interfere with that. Why shouldn"t we tell them we"re just leaving!"
"Because it"s no use: we"re sure to be always meeting them. And besides, I"ll be hanged if I"m going to shirk the Hickses. I spent five whole months on the Ibis, and if they bored me occasionally, India didn"t."
"We"ll make them take us to Aquileia anyhow," said Strefford philosophically; and the next moment the Hickses were bearing down on the defenceless trio.
They presented a formidable front, not only because of their mere physical bulk--Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were equally and majestically three-dimensional--but because they never moved abroad without the escort of two private secretaries (one for the foreign languages), Mr.
Hicks"s doctor, a maiden lady known as Eldoradder Tooker, who was Mrs.
Hicks"s cousin and stenographer, and finally their daughter, Coral Hicks.
Coral Hicks, when Susy had last encountered the party, had been a fat spectacled school-girl, always lagging behind her parents, with a reluctant poodle in her wake. Now the poodle had gone, and his mistress led the procession. The fat school-girl had changed into a young lady of compact if not graceful outline; a long-handled eyegla.s.s had replaced the spectacles, and through it, instead of a sullen glare, Miss Coral Hicks projected on the world a glance at once confident and critical.
She looked so strong and so a.s.sured that Susy, taking her measure in a flash, saw that her position at the head of the procession was not fortuitous, and murmured inwardly: "Thank goodness she"s not pretty too!"
If she was not pretty, she was well-dressed; and if she was overeducated, she seemed capable, as Strefford had suggested, of carrying off even this crowning disadvantage. At any rate, she was above disguising it; and before the whole party had been seated five minutes in front of a fresh supply of ices (with Eldorada and the secretaries at a table slightly in the background) she had taken up with Nick the question of exploration in Mesopotamia.
"Queer child, Coral," he said to Susy that night as they smoked a last cigarette on their balcony. "She told me this afternoon that she"d remembered lots of things she heard me say in India. I thought at the time that she cared only for caramels and picture-puzzles, but it seems she was listening to everything, and reading all the books she could lay her hands on; and she got so bitten with Oriental archaeology that she took a course last year at Bryn Mawr. She means to go to Bagdad next spring, and back by the Persian plateau and Turkestan."
Susy laughed luxuriously: she was sitting with her hand in Nick"s, while the late moon--theirs again--rounded its orange-coloured glory above the belfry of San Giorgio.
"Poor Coral! How dreary--" Susy murmured
"Dreary? Why? A trip like that is about as well worth doing as anything I know."
"Oh, I meant: dreary to do it without you or me," she laughed, getting up lazily to go indoors. A broad band of moonlight, dividing her room onto two shadowy halves, lay on the painted Venetian bed with its folded-back sheet, its old damask coverlet and lace-edged pillows. She felt the warmth of Nick"s enfolding arm and lifted her face to his.
The Hickses retained the most tender memory of Nick"s sojourn on the Ibis, and Susy, moved by their artless pleasure in meeting him again, was glad he had not followed her advice and tried to elude them. She had always admired Strefford"s ruthless talent for using and discarding the human material in his path, but now she began to hope that Nick would not remember her suggestion that he should mete out that measure to the Hickses. Even if it had been less pleasant to have a big yacht at their door during the long golden days and the nights of silver fire, the Hickses" admiration for Nick would have made Susy suffer them gladly.
She even began to be aware of a growing liking for them, a liking inspired by the very characteristics that would once have provoked her disapproval. Susy had had plenty of training in liking common people with big purses; in such cases her stock of allowances and extenuations was inexhaustible. But they had to be successful common people; and the trouble was that the Hickses, judged by her standards, were failures.
It was not only that they were ridiculous; so, heaven knew, were many of their rivals. But the Hickses were both ridiculous and unsuccessful.
They had consistently resisted the efforts of the experienced advisers who had first descried them on the horizon and tried to help them upward. They were always taking up the wrong people, giving the wrong kind of party, and spending millions on things that n.o.body who mattered cared about. They all believed pa.s.sionately in "movements" and "causes"
and "ideals," and were always attended by the exponents of their latest beliefs, always asking you to hear lectures by haggard women in peplums, and having their portraits painted by wild people who never turned out to be the fashion.
All this would formerly have increased Susy"s contempt; now she found herself liking the Hickses most for their failings. She was touched by their simple good faith, their isolation in the midst of all their queer apostles and parasites, their way of drifting about an alien and indifferent world in a compactly clinging group of which Eldorada Tooker, the doctor and the two secretaries formed the outer fringe, and by their view of themselves as a kind of collective re-incarnation of some past state of princely culture, symbolised for Mrs. Hicks in what she called "the court of the Renaissance." Eldorada, of course, was their chief prophetess; but even the intensely "bright" and modern young secretaries, Mr. Beck and Mr. b.u.t.tles, showed a touching tendency to share her view, and spoke of Mr. Hicks as "promoting art," in the spirit of Pandolfino celebrating the munificence of the Medicis.
"I"m getting really fond of the Hickses; I believe I should be nice to them even if they were staying at Danieli"s," Susy said to Strefford.
"And even if you owned the yacht?" he answered; and for once his banter struck her as beside the point.
The Ibis carried them, during the endless June days, far and wide along the enchanted sh.o.r.es; they roamed among the Euganeans, they saw Aquileia and Pomposa and Ravenna. Their hosts would gladly have taken them farther, across the Adriatic and on into the golden network of the Aegean; but Susy resisted this infraction of Nick"s rules, and he himself preferred to stick to his task. Only now he wrote in the early mornings, so that on most days they could set out before noon and steam back late to the low fringe of lights on the lagoon. His work continued to progress, and as page was added to page Susy obscurely but surely perceived that each one corresponded with a hidden secretion of energy, the gradual forming within him of something that might eventually alter both their lives. In what sense she could not conjecture: she merely felt that the fact of his having chosen a job and stuck to it, if only through a few rosy summer weeks, had already given him a new way of saying "Yes" and "No."
VII.
OF some new ferment at work in him Nick Lansing himself was equally aware. He was a better judge of the book he was trying to write than either Susy or Strefford; he knew its weaknesses, its treacheries, its tendency to slip through his fingers just as he thought his grasp tightest; but he knew also that at the very moment when it seemed to have failed him it would suddenly be back, beating its loud wings in his face.
He had no delusions as to its commercial value, and had winced more than he triumphed when Susy produced her allusion to Marius. His book was to be called The Pageant of Alexander. His imagination had been enchanted by the idea of picturing the young conqueror"s advance through the fabulous landscapes of Asia: he liked writing descriptions, and vaguely felt that under the guise of fiction he could develop his theory of Oriental influences in Western art at the expense of less learning than if he had tried to put his ideas into an essay. He knew enough of his subject to know that he did not know enough to write about it; but he consoled himself by remembering that Wilhelm Meister has survived many weighty volumes on aesthetics; and between his moments of self-disgust he took himself at Susy"s valuation, and found an unmixed joy in his task.
Never--no, never!--had he been so boundlessly, so confidently happy. His hack-work had given him the habit of application, and now habit wore the glow of inspiration. His previous literary ventures had been timid and tentative: if this one was growing and strengthening on his hands, it must be because the conditions were so different. He was at ease, he was secure, he was satisfied; and he had also, for the first time since his early youth, before his mother"s death, the sense of having some one to look after, some one who was his own particular care, and to whom he was answerable for himself and his actions, as he had never felt himself answerable to the hurried and indifferent people among whom he had chosen to live.
Susy had the same standards as these people: she spoke their language, though she understood others, she required their pleasures if she did not revere their G.o.ds. But from the moment that she had become his property he had built up in himself a conception of her answering to some deep-seated need of veneration. She was his, he had chosen her, she had taken her place in the long line of Lansing women who had been loved, honoured, and probably deceived, by bygone Lansing men. He didn"t pretend to understand the logic of it; but the fact that she was his wife gave purpose and continuity to his scattered impulses, and a mysterious glow of consecration to his task.
Once or twice, in the first days of his marriage, he had asked himself with a slight shiver what would happen if Susy should begin to bore him. The thing had happened to him with other women as to whom his first emotions had not differed in intensity from those she inspired. The part he had played in his previous love-affairs might indeed have been summed up in the memorable line: "I am the hunter and the prey," for he had invariably ceased to be the first only to regard himself as the second.
This experience had never ceased to cause him the liveliest pain, since his sympathy for his pursuer was only less keen than his commiseration for himself; but as he was always a little sorrier for himself, he had always ended by distancing the pursuer.
All these pre-natal experiences now seemed utterly inapplicable to the new man he had become. He could not imagine being bored by Susy--or trying to escape from her if he were. He could not think of her as an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since accomplices are potential enemies: she was some one with whom, by some unheard-of miracle, joys above the joys of friendship were to be tasted, but who, even through these fleeting ecstasies, remained simply and securely his friend.
These new feelings did not affect his general att.i.tude toward life: they merely confirmed his faith in its ultimate "jolliness." Never had he more thoroughly enjoyed the things he had always enjoyed. A good dinner had never been as good to him, a beautiful sunset as beautiful; he still rejoiced in the fact that he appreciated both with an equal acuity. He was as proud as ever of Susy"s cleverness and freedom from prejudice: she couldn"t be too "modern" for him now that she was his. He shared to the full her pa.s.sionate enjoyment of the present, and all her feverish eagerness to make it last. He knew when she was thinking of ways of extending their golden opportunity, and he secretly thought with her, wondering what new means they could devise. He was thankful that Ellie Vanderlyn was still absent, and began to hope they might have the palace to themselves for the remainder of the summer. If they did, he would have time to finish his book, and Susy to lay up a little interest on their wedding cheques; and thus their enchanted year might conceivably be prolonged to two.
Late as the season was, their presence and Strefford"s in Venice had already drawn thither several wandering members of their set. It was characteristic of these indifferent but agglutinative people that they could never remain long parted from each other without a dim sense of uneasiness. Lansing was familiar with the feeling. He had known slight twinges of it himself, and had often ministered to its qualms in others.
It was hardly stronger than the faint gnawing which recalls the tea-hour to one who has lunched well and is sure of dining as abundantly; but it gave a purpose to the purposeless, and helped many hesitating spirits over the annual difficulty of deciding between Deauville and St. Moritz, Biarritz and Capri.
Nick was not surprised to learn that it was becoming the fashion, that summer, to pop down to Venice and take a look at the Lansings. Streffy had set the example, and Streffy"s example was always followed. And then Susy"s marriage was still a subject of sympathetic speculation. People knew the story of the wedding cheques, and were interested in seeing how long they could be made to last. It was going to be the thing, that year, to help prolong the honey-moon by pressing houses on the adventurous couple. Before June was over a band of friends were basking with the Lansings on the Lido.
Nick found himself unexpectedly disturbed by their arrival. To avoid comment and banter he put his book aside and forbade Susy to speak of it, explaining to her that he needed an interval of rest. His wife instantly and exaggeratedly adopted this view, guarding him from the temptation to work as jealously as she had discouraged him from idling; and he was careful not to let her find out that the change in his habits coincided with his having reached a difficult point in his book. But though he was not sorry to stop writing he found himself unexpectedly oppressed by the weight of his leisure. For the first time communal dawdling had lost its charm for him; not because his fellow dawdlers were less congenial than of old, but because in the interval he had known something so immeasurably better. He had always felt himself to be the superior of his habitual a.s.sociates, but now the advantage was too great: really, in a sense, it was hardly fair to them.
He had flattered himself that Susy would share this feeling; but he perceived with annoyance that the arrival of their friends heightened her animation. It was as if the inward glow which had given her a new beauty were now refracted upon her by the presence of the very people they had come to Venice to avoid.
Lansing was vaguely irritated; and when he asked her how she liked being with their old crowd again his irritation was increased by her answering with a laugh that she only hoped the poor dears didn"t see too plainly how they bored her. The patent insincerity of the reply was a shock to Lansing. He knew that Susy was not really bored, and he understood that she had simply guessed his feelings and instinctively adopted them: that henceforth she was always going to think as he thought. To confirm this fear he said carelessly: "Oh, all the same, it"s rather jolly knocking about with them again for a bit;" and she answered at once, and with equal conviction: "Yes, isn"t it? The old darlings--all the same!"