Twilight Sleep (4 page)

"I mean—" But he broke off, and signed to the butler to remove
his plate. There was another pause; then Lita's little head turned
on its long interrogative neck toward Nona. "It seems we're
banqueting tonight at the Palazzo Manford. Did you know?"

"Did I know? Why, Lita! I've heard of nothing else for weeks.
It's the annual feast for the Marchesa."

"I was never told," said Lita calmly. "I'm afraid I'm engaged."

Jim lifted his head with a jerk. "You were told a fortnight ago."

"Oh, a fortnight! That's too long to remember anything. It's like
Nona's telling me that I ought to admire my drawing–room because I
admired it two years ago."

Her husband reddened to the roots of his tawny hair. "Don't you
admire it?" he asked, with a sort of juvenile dismay.

"There; Lita'll be happy now—she's produced her effect!" Nona
laughed a little nervously.

Lita joined in the laugh. "Isn't he like his mother?" she
shrugged.

Jim was silent, and his sister guessed that he was afraid to insist
on the dinner engagement lest he should increase his wife's
determination to ignore it. The same motive kept Nona from saying
anything more; and the lunch ended in a clatter of talk about other
things. But what puzzled Nona was that her father's communication
to Lita should have concerned the fact that she was dining at his
house that night. It was unlike Dexter Manford to remember the
fact himself (as Miss Bruss's frantic telephoning had testified),
and still more unlike him to remind his wife's guests, even if he
knew who they were to be—which he seldom did. Nona pondered.
"They must have been going somewhere together—he told me he was
engaged tonight—and Lita's in a temper because they can't. But
then she's in a temper about everything today." Nona tried to make
that cover all her perplexities. She wondered if it did as much
for Jim.

It would have been hard, Nona Manford thought, to find a greater
contrast than between Lita Wyant's house and that at which, two
hours later, she descended from Lita Wyant's smart Brewster.

"You won't come, Lita?" The girl paused, her hand on the motor
door. "He'd like it awfully."

Lita shook off the suggestion. "I'm not in the humour."

"But he's such fun—he can be better company than anybody."

"Oh, for you he's a fad—for me he's a duty; and I don't happen to
feel like duties." Lita waved one of her flower–hands and was off.

Nona mounted the pock–marked brown steps. The house was old Mrs.
Wyant's, a faded derelict habitation in a street past which fashion
and business had long since flowed. After his mother's death
Wyant, from motives of economy, had divided it into small flats.
He kept one for himself, and in the one overhead lived his mother's
former companion, the dependent cousin who had been the cause of
his divorce. Wyant had never married her; he had never deserted
her; that, to Nona's mind, gave one a fair notion of his character.
When he was ill—and he had developed, rather early, a queer sort
of nervous hypochondria—the cousin came downstairs and nursed him;
when he was well his visitors never saw her. But she was reported
to attend to his mending, keep some sort of order in his accounts,
and prevent his falling a prey to the unscrupulous. Pauline
Manford said it was probably for the best. She herself would have
thought it natural, and in fact proper, that her former husband
should have married his cousin; as he had not, she preferred to
decide that since the divorce they had been "only friends." The
Wyant code was always a puzzle to her. She never met the cousin
when she called on her former husband; but Jim, two or three times
a year, made it a point to ring the bell of the upper flat, and at
Christmas sent its invisible tenant an azalea.

Nona ran up the stairs to Wyant's door. On the threshold a thin
gray–haired lady with a shadowy face awaited her.

"Come in, do. He's got the gout, and can't get up to open the
door, and I had to send the cook out to get something tempting for
his dinner."

"Oh, thank you, cousin Eleanor." The girl looked sympathetically
into the other's dimly tragic eyes. "Poor Exhibit A! I'm sorry
he's ill again."

"He's been—imprudent. But the worst of it's over. It will
brighten him up to see you. Your cousin Stanley's there."

"Is he?" Nona half drew back, feeling herself faintly redden.

"He'll be going soon. Mr. Wyant will be disappointed if you don't
go in."

"But of course I'm going in."

The older woman smiled a worn smile, and vanished upstairs while
Nona slipped off her furs. The girl knew it would be useless to
urge cousin Eleanor to stay. If one wished to see her one had to
ring at her own door.

Arthur Wyant's shabby sitting–room was full of February sunshine,
illustrated magazines, newspapers and cigar ashes. There were some
books on shelves, shabby also: Wyant had apparently once cared for
them, and his talk was still coloured by traces of early
cultivation, especially when visitors like Nona or Stan Heuston
were with him. But the range of his allusions suggested that he
must have stopped reading years ago. Even novels were too great a
strain on his attention. As far back as Nona could remember he had
fared only on the popular magazines, picture–papers and the weekly
purveyors of social scandal. He took an intense interest in the
private affairs of the world he had ceased to frequent, though he
always ridiculed this interest in talking to Nona or Heuston.

While he sat there, deep in his armchair, with bent shoulders, sunk
head and clumsy bandaged foot, Nona saw him, as she always did, as
taller, slimmer, more handsomely upstanding than any man she had
ever known. He stooped now, even when he was on his feet; he was
prematurely aged; and the fact perhaps helped to connect him with
vanished institutions to which only his first youth could have
belonged.

To Nona, at any rate, he would always be the Arthur Wyant of the
race–meeting group in the yellowing photograph on his mantelpiece:
clad in the gray frock–coat and topper of the early 'eighties, and
tallest in a tall line of the similarly garbed, behind ladies with
puffed sleeves and little hats tilting forward on elaborate hair.
How peaceful, smiling and unhurried they all seemed! Nona never
looked at them without a pang of regret that she had not been born
in those spacious days of dogcarts, victorias, leisurely tennis and
afternoon calls…

Wyant's face, even more than his figure, related him to that past:
the small shapely head, the crisp hair grown thin on a narrow
slanting forehead, the eyes in which a twinkle still lingered, eyes
probably blue when the hair was brown, but now faded with the rest,
and the slight fair moustache above an uncertain ironic mouth.

A romantic figure; or rather the faded photograph of one. Yes;
perhaps Arthur Wyant had always been faded—like a charming
reflection in a sallow mirror. And all that length of limb and
beauty of port had been meant for some other man, a man to whom the
things had really happened which Wyant had only dreamed.

His visitor, though of the same stock, could never have inspired
such conjectures. Stanley Heuston was much younger—in the middle
thirties—and most things about him were middling: height,
complexion, features. But he had a strong forehead, his mouth was
curved for power and mockery, and only his small quick eyes
betrayed the uncertainty and lassitude inherited from a Wyant
mother.

Wyant, at Nona's approach, held out a dry feverish hand. "Well,
this is luck! Stan was just getting ready to fly at your mother's
approach, and you turn up instead!"

Heuston got to his feet, and greeted Nona somewhat ceremoniously.
"Perhaps I'd better fly all the same," he said in a singularly
agreeable voice. His eyes were intent on the girl's.

She made a slight gesture, not so much to detain or dismiss as to
signify her complete indifference. "Isn't mother coming
presently?" she said, addressing the question to Wyant.

"No; I'm moved on till tomorrow. There must have been some big
upheaval to make her change her plans at the last minute. Sit down
and tell us all about it."

"I don't know of any upheaval. There's only the dinner–dance for
Amalasuntha this evening."

"Oh, but that sort of thing is in your mother's stride. You
underrate her capacity. Stan has been giving me a hint of
something a good deal more volcanic."

Nona felt an inward tremor; was she going to hear Lita's name? She
turned her glance on Heuston with a certain hostility.

"Oh, Stan's hints—."

"You see what Nona thinks of my views on cities and men," Heuston
shrugged. He had remained on his feet, as though about to take
leave; but once again the girl felt his eager eyes beseeching her.

"Are you waiting to walk home with me? You needn't. I'm going to
stay for hours," she said, smiling across him at Wyant as she
settled down into one of the chintz armchairs.

"Aren't you a little hard on him?" Wyant suggested, when the door
had closed on their visitor. "It's not exactly a crime to want to
walk home with you."

Nona made an impatient gesture. "Stan bores me."

"Ah, well, I suppose he's not enough of a novelty. Or not up–to–
date enough; YOUR dates. Some of his ideas seem to me pretty
subversive; but I suppose in your set and Lita's a young man who
doesn't jazz all day and drink all night—or vice versa—is a back
number."

The girl did not take this up, and after a moment Wyant continued,
in his half–mocking half–querulous voice: "Or is it that he isn't
'psychic' enough? That's the latest, isn't it? When you're not
high–kicking you're all high–thinking; and that reminds me of
Stan's news—"

"Yes?" Nona brought it out between parched lips. Her gaze turned
from Wyant to the coals smouldering in the grate. She did not want
to face any one just then.

"Well, it seems there's going to be a gigantic muck–raking—one of
the worst we've had yet. Into this Mahatma business; you know, the
nigger chap your mother's always talking about. There's a hint of
it in the last number of the 'Looker–on'; here … where is it?
Never mind, though. What it says isn't a patch on the real facts,
Stan tells me. It seems the goings–on in that School of Oriental
Thought—what does he call the place: Dawnside?—have reached such
a point that the Grant Lindons, whose girl has been making a
'retreat' there, or whatever they call it, are out to have a
thorough probing. They say the police don't want to move because
so many people we know are mixed up in it; but Lindon's back is up,
and he swears he won't rest till he gets the case before the Grand
Jury…"

As Wyant talked, the weight lifted from Nona's breast. Much she
cared for the Mahatma, or for the Grant Lindons! Stuffy old–
fashioned people—she didn't wonder Bee Lindon had broken away from
such parents—though she was a silly fool, no doubt. Besides, the
Mahatma certainly had reduced Mrs. Manford's hips—and made her
less nervous too: for Mrs. Manford sometimes WAS nervous, in spite
of her breathless pursuit of repose. Not, of course, in the same
querulous uncontrolled way as poor Arthur Wyant, who had never been
taught poise, or mental uplift, or being in tune with the Infinite;
but rather as one agitated by the incessant effort to be calm. And
in that respect the Mahatma's rhythmic exercises had without doubt
been helpful. No; Nona didn't care a fig for scandals about the
School of Oriental Thought. And the relief of finding that the
subject she had dreaded to hear broached had probably never even
come to Wyant's ears, gave her a reaction of light–heartedness.

There were moments when Nona felt oppressed by responsibilities and
anxieties not of her age, apprehensions that she could not shake
off and yet had not enough experience of life to know how to meet.
One or two of her girl friends—in the brief intervals between
whirls and thrills—had confessed to the same vague disquietude.
It was as if, in the beaming determination of the middle–aged, one
and all of them, to ignore sorrow and evil, "think them away" as
superannuated bogies, survivals of some obsolete European
superstition unworthy of enlightened Americans, to whom plumbing
and dentistry had given higher standards, and bi–focal glasses a
clearer view of the universe—as if the demons the elder generation
ignored, baulked of their natural prey, had cast their hungry
shadow over the young. After all, somebody in every family had to
remember now and then that such things as wickedness, suffering and
death had not yet been banished from the earth; and with all those
bright–complexioned white–haired mothers mailed in massage and
optimism, and behaving as if they had never heard of anything but
the Good and the Beautiful, perhaps their children had to serve as
vicarious sacrifices. There were hours when Nona Manford,
bewildered little Iphigenia, uneasily argued in this way: others
when youth and inexperience reasserted themselves, and the load
slipped from her, and she wondered why she didn't always believe,
like her elders, that one had only to be brisk, benevolent and fond
to prevail against the powers of darkness.

She felt this relief now; but a vague restlessness remained with
her, and to ease it, and prove to herself that she was not nervous,
she mentioned to Wyant that she had just been lunching with Jim and
Lita.

Wyant brightened, as he always did at his son's name. "Poor old
Jim! He dropped in yesterday, and I thought he looked overworked!
I sometimes wonder if that father of yours hasn't put more hustle
into him than a Wyant can assimilate." Wyant spoke good–
humouredly; his first bitterness against the man who had supplanted
him (a sentiment regarded by Pauline as barbarous and mediæval) had
gradually been swallowed up in gratitude for Dexter Manford's
kindness to Jim. The oddly–assorted trio, Wyant, Pauline and her
new husband, had been drawn into a kind of inarticulate
understanding by their mutual tenderness for the progeny of the two
marriages, and Manford loved Jim almost as much as Wyant loved
Nona.

"Oh, well," the girl said, "Jim always does everything with all his
might. And now that he's doing it for Lita and the baby, he's got
to keep on, whether he wants to or not."

"I suppose so. But why do you say 'whether'?" Wyant questioned
with one of his disconcerting flashes. "Doesn't he want to?"

Nona was vexed at her slip. "Of course. I only meant that he used
to be rather changeable in his tastes, and that getting married has
given him an object."

"How very old–fashioned! You ARE old–fashioned, you know, my
child; in spite of the jazz. I suppose that's what I've done for
YOU, in exchange for Manford's modernizing Jim. Not much of an
exchange, I'm afraid. But how long do you suppose Lita will care
about being an object to Jim?"

"Why shouldn't she care? She'd go on caring about the baby, even
if … not that I mean…"

"Oh, I know. That's a great baby. Queer, you know—I can see he's
going to have the Wyant nose and forehead. It's about all we've
left to give. But look here—haven't you really heard anything
more about the Mahatma? I thought that Lindon girl was a pal of
yours. Now listen—"

When Nona Manford emerged into the street she was not surprised to
meet Stanley Heuston strolling toward her across Stuyvesant Square.
Neither surprised, nor altogether sorry; do what she would, she
could never quite repress the sense of ease and well–being that his
nearness gave. And yet half the time they were together she always
spent in being angry with him and wishing him away. If only the
relation between them had been as simple as that between herself
and Jim! And it might have been—ought to have been—seeing that
Heuston was Jim's cousin, and nearly twice her age; yes, and had
been married before she left the schoolroom. Really, her
exasperation was justified. Yet no one understood her as well as
Stanley; not even Jim, who was so much dearer and more lovable.
Life was a confusing business to Nona Manford.