Twilight Sleep (9 page)

"Yes; trying to give ME a leg up." He glanced at his bandages.
"Rather more difficult, that. I must get it down first—to the
floor. But Manford's awfully kind too—it's catching. He wants me
to go off with Jim, down to that island of his, and get a
fortnight's real sunshine. Says he can get Jim off by a little
wirepulling, some time just before Easter, he thinks. It's
tempting—"

Pauline smiled: she was always pleased when the two men spoke of
each other in that tone; and certainly it WAS kind of Dexter to
offer the hospitality of his southern island to poor Arthur…
She thought how easy life would be if only every one were kind and
simple.

"But about Michelangelo: I was going to tell you what is worrying
Amalasuntha. Of course what she means by Michelangelo's going into
business in America is marrying an heiress—"

"Oh, of course. And I daresay he will."

"Exactly. She's got her eye on one already. You haven't guessed?
Nona!"

Pauline's sense of humour was not unfailing, but this relaxed her
taut nerves, and she laughed. "Poor Michelangelo!"

"I thought it wouldn't worry you. But what is worrying Amalasuntha
is that he won't be LET—"

"Be let?"

"By Lita. Her theory is that Lita will fall madly in love with
Michelangelo as soon as she lays eyes on him—and that when they've
had one dance together she'll be lost. And Amalasuntha, for that
reason—though she daren't tell you so—thinks it might really be
cheaper in the end to pay Michelangelo's debts than to import him.
As she says, it's for the family to decide, now she's warned them."

Their laughter mingled. It was the first time, perhaps, since they
had been young together; as a rule, their encounters were untinged
with levity.

But Pauline dismissed the laugh hurriedly for the Grant Lindons.
At the name Wyant's eyes lit up: it was as if she had placed an
appetizing morsel before a listless convalescent.

"But you're the very person to tell me all about it—or, no, you
can't, of course, if Manford's going to take it up. But no matter—
after all, it's public property by this time. Seen this morning's
'Looker–on'—with pictures? Here, where—" In the stack of
illustrated papers always at his elbow he could never find the one
he wanted, and now began to toss over "Prattlers," "Listeners" and
others with helpless hand. How that little symptom of inefficiency
took her back to the old days, when his perpetual disorder, and his
persistent belief that he could always put his hand on everything,
used to be such a strain on her nerves!

"Pictures?" she gasped.

"Rather. The nigger himself, in turban and ritual togs; and a lot
of mixed nudes doing leg–work round a patio. The place looks like
a Palm Beach Hotel. Fanny Lindon's in a stew because she's
recognized Bee in the picture. She says she's going to have the
man in jail if they spend their last penny on it. Hullo—here it
is, after all."

Pauline shrank back. Would people never stop trying to show her
disgusting photographs? She articulated: "You haven't seen Fanny
Lindon too?"

"Haven't I? She spent the morning here. She told Amalasuntha
everything."

Pauline, with a great effort, controlled her rising anger. "How
idiotic! Now it WILL be spread to all the winds!" She saw Fanny
and Amalasuntha gloatingly exchanging the images of their
progenies' dishonour. It was too indecent … and the old New
Yorker was as shameless as the demoralized foreigner.

"I didn't know Fanny had been here before me. I've just left her.
I've been trying to persuade her to stop; to hush up the whole
business before it's too late. I suppose you gave her the same
advice?"

Wyant's face clouded: he looked perplexedly at his former wife, and
she saw he had lost all sense of the impropriety and folly of the
affair in his famished enjoyment of its spicy details.

"I don't know—I understood it WAS too late; and that Manford was
urging them to do it."

Pauline made a slight movement of impatience. "Dexter—of course!
When he sees a 'case'! I suppose lawyers are all alike. At any
rate, I can't make him understand…" She broke off, suddenly
aware that the rôles were reversed, and that for the first time she
was disparaging her second husband to her first. "Besides," she
hurried on, "it's no affair of Dexter's if the Lindons choose to
dishonour their child publicly. They're not HIS relations; Bee is
not HIS cousin's daughter. But you and I—how can we help feeling
differently? Bee and Nona and Jim were all brought up together.
You must help me to stop this scandal! You must send for Grant
Lindon at once. He's sure to listen to you … you've always had
a great influence on Grant…"

She found herself, in her extremity, using the very arguments she
had addressed to Manford, and she saw at once that in this case
they were more effective. Wyant drew himself up stiffly with a
faint smile of satisfaction. Involuntarily he ran a thin gouty
hand through his hair, and tried for a glimpse of himself in the
mirror.

"Think so—really? Of course when Grant was a boy he used to
consider me a great fellow. But now … who remembers me in my
dingy corner?"

Pauline rose with her clear wintry smile. "A good many of us, it
seems. You tell me I'm the third lady to call on you today! You
know well enough, Arthur—" she brushed the name in lightly, on the
extreme tip of her smile—"that the opinion of people like you
still counts in New York, even in these times. Imagine what your
mother would have felt at the idea of Fanny and Bee figuring in all
the daily headlines, with reporters and photographers in a queue on
the doorstep! I'm glad she hasn't lived to see it."

She knew that Wyant's facile irony always melted before an
emotional appeal, especially if made in his mother's name. He
blinked unsteadily, and flung away the "Looker–on."

"You're dead right: they're a pack of fools. There are no
standards left. I'll do what I can; I'll telephone to Grant to
look in on his way home this evening… I say, Pauline: what's
the truth of it all, anyhow? If I'm to give him a talking to I
ought to know." His eyes again lit up with curiosity.

"Truth of it? There isn't any—it's the silliest mare's–nest!
Why, I'm going to Dawnside for a rest–cure next month, while
Dexter's tarpon–fishing. The Mahatma is worlds above all this
tattle—it's for the Lindons I'm anxious, not him."

The paper thrown aside by Wyant had dropped to the floor, face
upward at a full–page picture—THE picture. Pauline, on her way
out, mechanically yielded to her instinct for universal tidying,
and bent to pick it up; bent and looked. Her eyes were still keen;
passing over the noxious caption "Dawnside Co–Eds," they
immediately singled out Bee Lindon from the capering round; then
travelled on, amazed, to another denuded nymph … whose face,
whose movements… Incredible! … For a second Pauline
refused to accept what her eyes reported. Sick and unnerved, she
folded the picture away and laid the magazine on a table.

"Oh, don't bother about picking up that paper. Sorry there's no
one to show you out!" she heard Wyant calling. She went
downstairs, blind, unbelieving, hardly knowing how she got into her
motor.

Barely time to get home, change, and be in the Chair, her address
before her, when the Mothers arrived in their multitude…

Well, perhaps Dexter would understand NOW the need of hushing up
the Grant Lindons… The picture might be a libel, of course—
such things, Pauline knew, could be patched up out of quite
unrelated photographs. The dancing circle might have been
skilfully fitted into the Dawnside patio, and goodness knew what
shameless creatures have supplied the bodies of the dancers.
Dexter had often told her that it was a common blackmailing trick.

Even if the photograph were genuine, Pauline could understand and
make allowances. She had never seen anything of the kind herself
at Dawnside—heaven forbid!—but whenever she had gone there for a
lecture, or a new course of exercises, she had suspected that the
bare whitewashed room, with its throned Buddha, which received her
and other like–minded ladies of her age, all active, earnest and
eager for self–improvement, had not let them very far into the
mystery. Beyond, perhaps, were other rites, other settings: why
not? Wasn't everybody talking about "the return to Nature," and
ridiculing the American prudery in which the minds and bodies of
her generation had been swaddled? The Mahatma was one of the
leaders of the new movement: the Return to Purity, he called it.
He was always celebrating the nobility of the human body, and
praising the ease of the loose Oriental dress compared with the
constricting western garb: but Pauline had supposed the draperies
he advocated to be longer and less transparent; above all, she had
not expected familiar faces above those insufficient scarves…

But here she was at her own door. There was just time to be ready
for the Mothers; none in which to telephone to Dexter, or buy up
the whole edition of the "Looker–on" (fantastic vision!), or try
and get hold of its editor, who had once dined with her, and was
rather a friend of Lita's. All these possibilities and
impossibilities raced through her brain to the maddening tune of
"too late" while she slipped off her street–dress and sat twitching
with impatience under the maid's readjustment of her ruffled head.
The gown prepared for the meeting, rich, matronly and just the
least bit old–fashioned—very different from the one designed for
the Birth Control committee—lay spread out beside the copy of her
speech, and Maisie Bruss, who had been hovering within call, dashed
back breathless from a peep over the stairs.

"They're arriving—"

"Oh, Maisie, rush down! Say I'm telephoning—"

Her incurable sincerity made her unhook the receiver and call out
Manford's office number. Almost instantly she heard him. "Dexter,
this Mahatma investigation must be stopped! Don't ask me why—
there isn't time. Only promise—"

She heard his impatient laugh.

"No?"

"Impossible," came back.

She supposed she had hung up the receiver, fastened on her jewelled
"Motherhood" badge, slipped on rings and bracelets as usual. But
she remembered nothing clearly until she found herself on the
platform at the end of the packed ball–room, looking across rows
and rows of earnest confiding faces, with lips and eyes prepared
for the admiring reception of her "message." She was considered a
very good speaker: she knew how to reach the type of woman
represented by this imposing assemblage—delegates from small towns
all over the country, united by a common faith in the infinite
extent of human benevolence and the incalculable resources of
American hygiene. Something of the moral simplicity of her own
bringing–up brought her close to these women, who had flocked to
the great perfidious city serenely unaware of its being anything
more, or other, than the gigantic setting of a Mothers' Meeting.
Pauline, at such times, saw the world through their eyes, and was
animated by a genuine ardour for the cause of motherhood and
domesticity.

As she turned toward her audience a factitious serenity descended
on her. She felt in control of herself and of the situation. She
spoke.

"Personality—first and last, and at all costs. I've begun my talk
to you with that one word because it seems to me to sum up our
whole case. Personality—room to develop in: not only elbow–room
but body–room and soul–room, and plenty of both. That's what every
human being has a right to. No more effaced wives, no more
drudging mothers, no more human slaves crushed by the eternal round
of housekeeping and child–bearing—"

She stopped, drew a quick breath, met Nona's astonished gaze over
rows of bewildered eye–glasses, and felt herself plunging into an
abyss. But she caught at the edge, and saved herself from the
plunge—

"That's what our antagonists say—the women who are afraid to be
mothers, ashamed to be mothers, the women who put their enjoyment
and their convenience and what they call their happiness before the
mysterious heaven–sent joy, the glorious privilege, of bringing
children into the world—"

A round of applause from the reassured mothers. She had done it!
She had pulled off her effect from the very jaws of disaster. Only
the swift instinct of recovery had enabled her, before it was too
late, to pass off the first sentences of her other address, her
Birth Control speech, as the bold exordium of her hymn to
motherhood! She paused a moment, still inwardly breathless, yet
already sure enough of herself to smile back at Nona across her
unsuspecting audience—sure enough to note that her paradoxical
opening had had a much greater effect than she could have hoped to
produce by the phrases with which she had meant to begin.

A hint for future oratory—

Only—the inward nervousness subsisted. The discovery that she
could lose not only her self–control but her memory, the very sense
of what she was saying, was like a hand of ice pointing to an
undecipherable warning.

Nervousness, fatigue, brain–exhaustion … had her fight against
them been vain? What was the use of all the months and years of
patient Taylorized effort against the natural human fate: against
anxiety, sorrow, old age—if their menace was to reappear whenever
events slipped from her control?

The address ended in applause and admiring exclamations. She had
won her way straight to those trustful hearts, still full of
personal memories of a rude laborious life, or in which its stout
tradition lingered on in spite of motors, money and the final word
in plumbing.

Pauline, after the dispersal of the Mothers, had gone up to her
room still dazed by the narrowness of her escape. Thank heaven she
had a free hour! She threw herself on her lounge and turned her
gaze inward upon herself: an exercise for which she seldom had the
leisure.

Now that she knew she was safe, and had done nothing to discredit
herself or the cause, she could penetrate an inch or two farther
into the motive power of her activities; and what she saw there
frightened her. To be Chairman of the Mothers' Day Association,
and a speaker at the Birth Control banquet! It did not need her
daughter's derisive chuckle to give her the measure of her
inconsequence. Yet to reconcile these contradictions had seemed as
simple as to invite the Chief Rabbi and the Bishop of New York to
meet Amalasuntha's Cardinal. Did not the Mahatma teach that, to
the initiated, all discords were resolved into a higher harmony?
When her hurried attention had been turned for a moment on the
seeming inconsistency of encouraging natality and teaching how to
restrict it, she had felt it was sufficient answer to say that the
two categories of people appealed to were entirely different, and
could not be "reached" in the same way. In ethics, as in
advertising, the main thing was to get at your public. Hitherto
this argument had satisfied her. Feeling there was much to be said
on both sides, she had thrown herself with equal zeal into the
propagation of both doctrines; but now, surveying her attempt with
a chastened eye, she doubted its expediency.

Maisie Bruss, appearing with notes and telephone messages, seemed
to reflect this doubt in her small buttoned–up face.

"Oh, Maisie! Is there anything important? I'm dead tired." It
was an admission she did not often make.

"Nothing much. Three or four papers have 'phoned for copies of
your address. It was a great success."

A faint glow of satisfaction wavered through Pauline's
perplexities. She did not pretend to eloquence; she knew her
children smiled at her syntax. Yet she had reached the hearts of
her audience, and who could deny that that was success?

"Oh, Maisie—I don't think it's good enough to appear in print … "

The secretary smiled, made a short–hand memorandum, and went on:
"The Marchesa telephoned that her son is sailing on Wednesday—and
I've sent off her cable about the Cardinal, answer paid."

"Sailing on Wednesday? But it can't be—the day after tomorrow!"
Pauline raised herself on an anxious elbow. She had warned her
husband, and he wouldn't listen. "Telephone downstairs, please,
Maisie—find out if Mr. Manford has come in." But she knew well
enough what the answer would be. Nowadays, whenever there was
anything serious to be talked over, Dexter found some excuse for
avoiding her. She lay back, her lids dropped over her tired eyes,
and waited for the answer: "Mr. Manford isn't in yet."

Something had come over Dexter lately: no closing of her eyes would
shut that out! She supposed it was over–work—the usual reason.
Rich men's doctors always said they were over–worked when they
became cross and trying at home.

"Dinner at the Toys' at 8.30." Miss Bruss continued her recital;
and Pauline drew in her lips on a faintly bitter smile. At the
Toys'—he wouldn't forget that! Whenever there was a woman who
attracted him … why, Lita even … she'd seen him in a
flutter once when he was going to the cinema with Lita, and thought
she had forgotten to call for him! He had stamped up and down,
watch in hand… Well, she supposed it was one of the symptoms
of middle age: a passing phase. She could afford to be generous,
after twenty years of his devotion; and she meant to be. Men
didn't grow old as gracefully as women—she knew enough not to nag
him about his little flirtations, and was really rather grateful to
that silly Gladys Toy for making a fuss over him.

But when it came to serious matters, like this of the Mahatma, it
was different, Dexter owed it to her to treat her opinions with
more consideration—a woman whose oratory was sought for by a dozen
newspapers! And that tiresome business of Michelangelo; another
problem he had obstinately shirked. Discouragement closed in on
Pauline. Of what use were eurythmics, cold douches, mental deep–
breathings and all the other panaceas?

If things went on like this she would have to have her face lifted.