The Unpossessed (32 page)

He felt the twinge of pain go through him that he had felt so many weeks ago on receiving her cablegram, as though he were still not certain that it was between Elizabeth and Denny that the ocean now was stretching. “What do you mean,” he said sharply; “do you really mean you miss him? What kind of brute was he anyway, you've never really told me. I mean, how close did you really come in your mind to marrying him?”

“Everything must wait till after the party,” she said derisively; “my dear Elizabeth, can't you see I'm starting a Magazine, I've got things on my mind?” He watched her with distrust as she preened without him, expertly. She had left him a little girl and now, come back, was a woman who could alter miracles by a deft twitch of a bow, an infinitesimal touch to her hair. She swung round like a conscious mannequin. “How do I look,” she said, standing out in her lettuce-colored dress trimmed with flounces, looking very much, he thought, appeased, as she must have looked when he refused to take her to dancing-school. “How do I look,” she said posing, teasing, swaying like that heart-broken little girl.

“Like a nice little salad,” he said, flung back to the days when his adolescent pride forbade him to give her any satisfaction. “Too thin,” he said, again, touched by the childish collar-bones which rendered M. Poiret's artistry naïve. “But since you refuse to answer the district attorney's questions, we'll go—in fact we've
got
to go. Don't you know I'm making history tonight,” he said with a grimace.

“
Bruno
—no! wait a minute. I'll answer anything.” Again that shrillness in her voice; again the quick change from woman to imp that mocked him. “Prepared to tell all, she stood with her lips trembling bravely, her Poiret gown revealing every line in her slender little body, the earrings from the Galeries Lafayette that
he
had given her shaking with emotion—it was a crime passionelle, she sobbed, and the judges broke down and cried like a baby.”

“Oh you poor damn fool,” he said, admiring her, “will you never grow up and talk sense?”

“Ah, just what they all say,” said Elizabeth sagely, and lifted to her ears the earrings (from the Galeries Lafayette—which “
he
” must have given her, thought Bruno, instantly disliking him). “Just what Denny said when I told him we were all washed up.”

“What made you think you'd marry him, he sounds like an idiot,” Bruno said.

“Oh—I wanted love,” she said, her eyes cast up, teetering demurely with her hands clasped at her throat.

“You wanted what?” he said, incredulous.

“Love,” she answered cheerfully. “L-o-v-e, love.”

“Say, I send you abroad and you come home with a foreign vocabulary,” he said, troubled. “Put it in English—you mean you wanted
amour
?”

“Sure, I know,” she said airily, “when I lie everybody believes me. When I tell the truth they think I'm lying. It's my theatrical technique . . . Maybe I
am
lying,” she said calmly; “how do
I
know.”

“You're drunk anyway,” said Bruno shortly. “Come on, sling a wrap over those shameless naked shoulders, have you forgotten the Hunger Marchers?” He turned to go.

“No, but
you
have.”

“Go to hell,” he said.

“Listen. You haven't asked me why I
didn't
marry Denny.”

He stood puzzled with his hand on the door-knob. “All right. Why? Make it snappy. ‘Intellectuals postpone political party for talmudic discussion of love.' Go on if you have to.”

“Bisecting love,” she said, contemplative. “Do you remember the two boys in Chicago—our heroes, how we read the papers!—who bisected their young cousin to see what he was made of?”

“Are you going to tell me or aren't you? Why didn't you marry the man?”

“Because I wanted love.”

“Well, didn't he love you?” In spite of himself he grew gentle.

“Oh sure, I guess so; à la mode, at any rate. But I wanted to love somebody myself.”

“And the gentleman in question didn't make the grade?” In spite of himself again, he felt pleasure.

“Too weak,” she said nonchalantly; and after framing her face with the weak one's earrings tore them off indifferently and thrust them back in their box.

“What makes you always pick weak men?” he scolded her, relief restoring his superiority.

“I don't pick them, they pick me.”

“You always,” he continued wisely, “land the kind that need mothering, and then they have to put up with your kicking them all around the lot.” He thought with distaste of her procession, the unfortunate Wheelwrights and the Ferrises . . . .

“Kicking is a form of mothering,” she said, considering. “And maybe I don't pick weak men at all,” she said defiantly; “maybe all the men there are weak. Or weaker anyway, than any woman who's strong.”

“What is this,” he said to her quizzically, “an amatory championship?” And what had happened to women, he wondered, looking at her. Once a woman had built up a man, lent him whatever she had; because his glory was hers, because then a woman was only so great as the monument of her man. But these strange days, when women were out in the world, on their own, competing with men on the men's own level, they seemed temporarily to have got ahead, to be going still farther while man, surprised, exhausted in the fight, sat down with open mouth in a stopping-place in the road. But that the women weren't satisfied with their victory he could plainly see, reading something hollow in Elizabeth's pained, triumphant look. Where once they fought their men because the men were stronger, now they seemed sworn to continue the fight in bitterness because the men were weaker. She stood tough and straight as a soldier, a brittle tin soldier sticking defiantly out of some child's Christmas stocking. He felt sorry for her, standing in her lonely strength, wondered why she felt it necessary to tilt her chin at such an angle, why she grew thinner and somehow younger each time he saw her (between her strange adventures) as though the years were giving nothing to her. “I guess it's all right, Betsey,” he said anxiously, “only I didn't raise my girl to be a soldier.”

She returned his look, ironic, and he had the odd impression that himself was looking reproachfully at himself. “ ‘You've got to be free, my dear, free as a man, you've got to play the man's game and beat him at it.' ”

“Check,” he admitted ruefully; “hats off to the elephant's sister; do you remember all the stupid things that everyone has said to you . . . Only,” he said doubtfully, almost to himself, “half the fun to a man is having a woman a little weaker than himself. It's easy enough,” he said, “for a man to grow indifferent to a woman he thinks is his equal; being weak is a woman's strongest weapon in the old sex struggle.” He thought with clarity of Emmett. “Virility, after all, is partly a matter of vanity. Dependence, of a sort, is what endears a man, what binds him. . . .”

“You are thinking of the other part of your
ménage à trois
,” said Elizabeth; and smiled so certainly that he had to take his hand off the door-knob to deny it and in denying it admitted it, and admitting it discovered that he wished he could deny it. “The
ménage à toi
, I should say.” She stood smiling that still smile so awfully like himself, daring him to go in to Emmett and daring him to stay with her, so that in the end he stood there helplessly. His mind was torn as it always was faced with the smallest choice; and he felt inside him Emmett's agony as he must sit staring at that door remaining closed so long before his eyes.

He had caught a glimpse of Elizabeth as Bruno had gone to her room, standing with her dress falling off one shoulder; he had seen with what terrible swiftness Bruno had shut the door. What might go on between a man and woman behind closed doors was still a mystery to him. Afraid to guess, afraid to put his scanty intellectual knowledge into images, the possibilities although remote were infinite and black. He sat drinking from the whiskey bottle and staring at the blankness of the door until suddenly staring at the door (however blank it was) became stupendously indelicate, making him a party to what went on behind it. His blood beat in a terrible way; he pressed his hands over his eyes to shut out the images he had forbidden and on his eyelids as on some awful screen the figure of Elizabeth was repeated, a green dress falling from one shoulder.

“Can I help it,” said Elizabeth, lofty and bitter, “if I have as much guts as most of the men I see about town.”

This Bruno accepted somehow as a personal blow and bowed his head to its validity. He moved nearer to her (feeling he abandoned Emmett with every inch he departed from that door), thinking that what strength she had could complement his weakness, almost as though they must have changed places somewhere until he almost became the woman and she might be the man. He lifted his eyes. She was strong and staunch, suddenly brave before him, like some very truthful, clear-sighted child. Her chin was raised to a forbidding angle like a soldier about to strike or a little girl trying not to cry; but there was also a hardness, a brittle something about her that frightened him back, repellent almost to whatever there was left in him of manliness.

“Guts,” he said. “You've got more guts than any man. You've got so much it's disgusting. When a woman goes in for having guts,” he tormented her (as well as himself), “she has no sense of delicacy, she goes twice as far as any man.”

Her chin went higher, her face went colder with a clear purity of outline that cut through the air like a knife. “Somebody's got to have the guts,” she said, shrugging. They eyed each other across the space that she had rendered crystal-clear and sharp. “I've got plenty of guts,” she said, “guts to endure anything. But I haven't any nerve, I haven't got the nerve to
do
anything about it.” Her face was like a cruel and delicate steel blade.

“We'd better be going,” Bruno said quietly.

“Why yes,” said Elizabeth, “the bottle-baby must be champing at the bit.”

He ignored her, taking out his watch to lend naturalness to their going. “My God! it's almost twelve! Jeffrey will have made a fool of himself before we get there.” He felt miserable and hopeless, as one does in dreams, wandering round in circles and never quite catching the bus. The worst of it was that the party had lost importance in his consciousness; he was a man going mechanically to do his duty. “Will you hurry, Elizabeth,” he said, feeling that he must wait for her, that he could not go out and face Emmett alone.

She collected her gloves and handkerchief with the coolness of a much older woman of the world than twenty-six; it hurt him to see her child's face gaze with no pleasure for a last perfunctory glance at the mirror; to see her childish slender arms swing the wrap about her shoulders with the air of one accustomed to doing things for herself—and a little too as though she were in the habit of leaving places. She stood on tiptoe again in her silver slippers, leaning toward the mirror, running her little finger over the red of her lips; he could see that her eye was not following the finger's journey. “
We are scared till the blood in our veins runs thin and we must hop from one person to the next because
. . .”

“
What?
” he cried, astonished, frightened.

“Oh that,” she said, laughing, turning (and he saw her lips were much too red); “that's a quotation from a musical comedy in good old Paris. Off to the party!” she cried, swinging her long black gloves. “Off in a cloud of dust! My ears hurt,” she said querulously, “there's a ringing in them.”

“Too much alcohol,” he said. He took her arm and felt that her skin was ice-smooth like the icy purity of her face. He went out with her, feeling the comfort that attends walking naturally in step with another person, even though it might be walking to a funeral; and he had the feeling, part relief and partly fear, that they had left something or other in the room behind them.

The third movement, the scherzo, Autumn—the gayest of them all; dry leaves circled by the wind, branches crackling on the violin, birds escaping pianissimo, even the cello grown playful as a cello can, the melody skittish and bright. . . .

“My uncle,” said Mr. Tevander with the defiance of the weak, “was a
very
fine rider and he claimed that he was never run away with.”

“There is no good rider,” said Mrs. Stanhope severely, “who has
not
been run away with.”

“My uncle,” continued Mr. Tevander desperately, “was a very fine rider and he always said that it is not a runaway unless the rider tries to stop his horse; and my uncle,” he met Mrs. Stanhope's eye brazenly, “never tried to stop one.”

“We would have,” said Mrs. Stanhope acidly, “to ask the horse about
that
.”

Miss Ermine-tail's laugh was a hearty yawn, remnant of the days when she had bothered with the whole process rather elaborately. Nowadays she omitted the details, merely opened her mouth wide and gave the concluding yelp. She yelped now and plucked at Mr. Merriwell's sleeve. “Did you hear, G. F., did you hear what Mrs. Stanhope said, we'd have to ask the horse about
that
!” Mrs. Stanhope complacently snorted and Mr. Merriwell who remembered when he had dandled Ermine-tails upon his knee patted her very very kindly. “Oh look,” said Mrs. Stanhope in a hushed and reverential voice, “the Ballisters; God bless them.” They all sustained a moment's silence like the moment after grace, and Mr. Tevander felt himself forgiven for his uncle.

And March (remembering his coachman days when he drove Merle's father over Brooklyn Bridge and both of them wondering if the Bridge would hold, yet even then aware each of his given place in an ordered world and holding no converse from their distances) humbly and happily drew back the portières and would have scattered roses if he could: for the Ballisters were all that were left to him of blizzards and top-hats and silver-headed canes.