Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 9
KAY never remembered much of that journey East. One day she was leaving Tom behind forever, and some time after that, ages and ages, they were at home again. There were all the familiar incidents of such returns; the car meeting them in town and taking them out to the country. Hawkins touching his cap:
"Glad to see you back, sir."
"Very glad to be back, Hawkins."
Hawkins's hair newly cut, since Mrs. Dowling, having to look mostly at the back of his neck, was particular about this; Hawkins tucking in the rug.
"Directly home, sir?"
"Yes."
Moving along, the streets smooth, the engine gayly purring. Leaning back against soft upholstery, dropping Herbert at his apartment, Nora stiff and silent out in front beside Hawkins and discouraging conversation. It was not good form to have conversation on in the front seat. The country and the Club, set in its green links; still green, not burnt and parched like the plains. Big estates; gates of iron and smooth drives, and beyond them the houses, luxurious houses surrounded by trees and flowers. Turning in at their own gate, with its tidy lodge, and James at the door and Rutherford in the doorway, very elegant, very English.
"Welcome home, sir. Welcome home, madam."
Inside the house now. The mingled odors of soap, furniture polish and fresh flowers. The parlor maid in the background, a study in black and white.
"Well, Hannah? Is everything all right?"
"Very nice, madam. Thank you."
Nora nervously counting the bags once more, and James and Hawkins carrying them up.
"Will you have tea now, madam, or later?"
"Now, I think, Rutherford."
Carrying accumulated mail and cards from the hall into the drawing room, with its tapestries and paintings, its old Italian chairs, and through it to the small tile-floored morning room beyond.
"No use going up yet, until Nora gets the dressing cases unpacked. Mercy, I feel untidy!"
Tea, scalding hot, and her father's table laid out with whisky and soda.
"The Marshall Merediths are having a garden party."
"When, mother?"
"On the nineteenth. Their dahlias ought to be very nice now."
James passing little cakes with cream inside, her favorite cakes, and Rutherford gravely watching. James really was funny in his livery, with the buttons down the long tails. Did he sit on them, ever? And how they must scratch the chairs! She must look at the chairs in the servants' dining room sometime.
"I don't see why people want to give dinner parties at this time of year."
"Gertrude Hazlett is having a dance at the country club tomorrow, mother."
Anything, everything. Only don't think.
Mr. Dowling had settled down in his deep chair, the tray with decanter and siphon at his elbow. He was glad to be at home again. He never entered either of his houses without a deep sense of satisfaction. After all, although his father had left him a great deal, he had not been content to live without effort. He had added to what he inherited. And this house was his, his and Katherine's. It represented their common tastes; together they had traveled and collected.
He could look around and remember where and how each piece was secured. The old glass decanter beside him, for instance
Katherine was going upstairs. She gathered up her gloves, her bag and the litter of cards, notes and invitations from her lap and rose.
"Glad to be back, aren't you?" Henry asked.
She hesitated, glanced at Kay. The sense of home and of security, for her and hers, was suddenly strong in her. He had been a good husband, had Henry; safe and sound. Not a figure of romance, certainly, like that cowboy of the ranch, but he had never given her any trouble. She moved toward him, shyly, like a girl.
"Yes," she said, and would have stooped down and kissed him. But he reached for the siphon at that moment, and she turned and went out of the room.
After a minute or two Kay followed her and went up to her bedroom. It had been her bedroom in the summer ever since she could remember, and the day nursery was just beyond it. Now however the day nursery was her boudoir, a gay little room with a small balcony. There used to be an extra rail on the balcony, because Mademoiselle was afraid she would climb the railing and fall.
Now Nora and a housemaid were there, and Nora was in a sad way.
"They've broke your mirror, Miss Kay," she wailed. "I told them not to put that dressing case under anything."
"Don't mind about that. We can have a new glass put in."
"But it's seven years' bad luck!"
Seven years! But what did it matter? Who could think ahead seven dreary empty years? They spread out before her, those years, filled with unimportant things. The telephone ringing, and some young voice at the other end:
"Hello, Kay! What's on for today?"
"Nothing much. I thought I'd ride this afternoon."
"How about some tennis? I'll get some extras in to tea."
"All right. Count me in."
Summer parties, centering around the club, winter parties, centering around the débutantes. Fluffy little girls, looking wide-eyed and more innocent than they were, standing before banks of flowers beside mothers elaborately coiffed and gowned.
"Well, well, Anne! And so you're out at last!" And Anne restraining an inclination to drop a curtsy, and offering instead a limp and nervous hand.
She opened the door and stepping out onto her balcony, with its striped chairs and flower boxes, she faced the setting sun.
Somewhere out there the sun would be setting soon too. It would go down behind the mountains, leaving them first rose, then blue, and then gray. Like her life from now on.
But later on hope began to revive in her.
The dignified, almost ritualistic life of the household went on. In the morning her father's car came to the door, and he got in heavily and drove into the city. He kept almost as long hours as his clerks, but at four o'clock he went to his club, and there played bridge until six-thirty. Promptly at seven each day he came home, had a whisky and soda, and then went upstairs to dress for dinner. And at five minutes to eight he came heavily down the wide staircase, dinner suit, onyx studs and black tie carefully tied, and took the cocktail which James proffered him on an antique silver tray. Both tray and cocktail were, so to speak, hall-marked.
Sometimes they dined out. Then the only variation would be long tails instead of short, and pearl studs and white tie. And he would descend a few minutes earlier, and the car would be at the door. Or there was a dinner party. There would be a tray of tiny envelopes on the hall table, and after each gentleman had taken off his overcoat and top hat, he would take his envelope and look to see whom he was "taking in." And occasionally the information cheered him, but quite frequently it did not.
Sometimes some one fell out at the last moment, and Herbert filled in. Then he and Kay, as the only two young people, would be put together. They would make up talk.
"When are you going to open the town house?"
"Not while the weather is so good."
"You are looking very lovely tonight."
"Thanks, It's a new frock."
"I didn't mean the frock."
But that was as far as it went. She had a very definite idea that Herbert was marking time; that much as he worked out his days to a schedule, he was now patiently allotting time for her recovery. She even figured how he would do it. Two months to forget Tom McNair, two months for a restoration of his old relationship, and two months to courtship! That would take them—one, two, three, four, five, six—to the first of April.
"What on earth are you counting on your fingers?"
"I always count on my fingers. That's what they are for, isn't it?"
"They are for other things too," he said darkly, and glanced at her left hand. Maybe she had been wrong about the six months!
But she was marking time also. During those early days after her return she gained a little perspective on the situation, or thought she did. Thus she was convinced that Tom had been deliberately sent away, and that she would hear from him as soon as he could write. He could not ignore that last night together; he would not want to ignore it.
He loved her, and he knew she loved him; nothing but that mattered. Later on they could plan. Now all she wanted was to nurse the thought of his love and keep it warm, to lie awake in the darkness and recapture the ecstasy of that moment when he had held her in his arms. His strong arms, His brave, reckless arms.
She lived in a secret world of her own, and looked out from it at the environment she had never questioned before. Were they really satisfied, all these people who came and went, rustling in to tea and dinner, stepping out of their handsome motors, well dressed, well fed—too well fed—well mannered.
"I declare, Katherine, the ranch has made you over."
And her mother living her own secret life, as Kay had begun to suspect, smiling the correct smile, saying the correct thing.
"I'm so glad you could come. We have been away so long, and we have missed our friends."
"We, we." Kay had begun to notice that her mother seldom said "I."
It was such feeble living; men who had grown paunchy at desks and the tables of directors' meetings, women who welcomed even these familiar gatherings as breaks in the monotony of their luxurious days. Surely one must live, must do and be. No wonder old Lucius had revolted, had played as robustly as he had done everything else. And she remembered a story where a party of magnates, after a night of poker and certain accompaniments, had gone out to the swimming pool and jumped in, clothing and all. And one of them, who did not know how to swim, had forgotten he did not know and had almost drowned.
She was singularly detached those days. Never before had she questioned the life she lived, or Henry and Katherine's right to dictate to her. Now she did.
They still had, although she was of age, certain arbitrary powers over her which they would use unscrupulously; the power of affection, the power of money, the power of long habitual authority. And against them what had she? Aunt Bessie, perhaps. She thought Bessie might understand, might even help her when the time came.
She was certain that some day, somehow, the time would come.
And then Bessie did come, and failed her absolutely.
She wandered in, said her maid was outside with her bags, that her house was too dirty to live in. She was staying until it was cleaned. Then she lighted a cigarette, sat down, and took off her hat.
"New hair cut!" she said. "Ears again. It's a frightful nuisance. One has to wash them and everything. Of course if they stick out it won't do." She eyed Kay with her head slightly on one side.
"What's the matter with you, child? You look washed-out. Didn't the ranch agree with you?"
"I'm all right. Maybe it's leaving the altitude. I don't sleep very well."
Bessie glanced at her, blew through her cigarette holder and getting up moved languidly toward the door.
"The usual place, I suppose, Katherine? I'm going to bathe and take a nap. Come in and see me after a while, Kay. I want to hear about things."
She wandered out, humming, and up the staircase, but in her own room, the door safely closed, she put down her cigarette holder and the hat she still carried, and stood thinking. Nothing had been lost on her downstairs, neither Kay's pallor nor the faint color which had followed her question. And the faint tightening of her sister-in-law's lips was a signal with which she was entirely familiar.
"They've been deviling her about something, or somebody," she considered. "The life's gone out of her. If it's that stick of a secretary!" She considered that, discarded it. More likely it was somebody out West. "Somebody real and of course ineligible. They'd hate that like poison."
She slept until time to dress for dinner, and then swaggered downstairs in a dress with practically no back in it. But although she kept her eyes and her mind alert she got no clue that evening. Kay ate very little; Katherine talked politely, and Henry gave assiduous and critical attention to his food. She herself smoked after every course, and through the smoke haze that surrounded her watched them all in turn with bright and comprehending eyes.
Something was certainly wrong among them.
However, it was not until the third day of her stay that she learned anything, and then it required all of her philosophy to meet the situation.
In her casual way she drifted about the house. No door was safe against her unless it was locked; she had no reserves and very little sense of privacy. Indeed, once long ago her sister-in-law had been taken up to her dressing room, to find Bessie in a very sketchy negligée having her hair waved, and a young minor poet reading to her from a manuscript in his hand.
Mrs. Dowling had apologized and tried to back out again, but Bessie had seen her and called to her.
"Come in," she said. "Don't you want a wave while Pierre is here? He's about finished with me. Don't mind Jimmy here. Most of his poems are about ladies who don't wear anything at all."
Katherine had never told Henry that.
So now Bessie wandered about the house and grounds, talking to the servants, who adored her, singing her snatches of little French songs, smoking interminably, and even quietly interrogating Herbert when one evening he came to dine, and she got downstairs before the others.
"I don't think Kay is looking very well. Do you?"
"It's still warm."
"This isn't her first summer," she said, rather sharply. "She's thin, and I don't think she's very happy."
"I can't say as to that. She's rather quiet. But then she never is—boisterous."
"Now see here, Herbert," she said. "I've seen a lot of lives ruined by people keeping their mouths shut when they should have talked. I happen to be fond of Kay, and there's something wrong with her. She doesn't laugh and she doesn't eat. I don't think she's sleeping, either. It isn't between you and her, is it?"
"Good Lord! No."
"Do you know what it is?"
And for a moment she thought he was going to tell her. Then he pulled himself up, all correct in his dinner jacket with his tie neatly tied, and remembered that there were some things one did not talk about.
"Really," he said, "I hardly feel that I can discuss Kay, even with you, Mrs. Osborne. Why don't you talk to her yourself?"
She turned away from him, exasperated.
Then, the next and last day of her visit, she walked into Kay's bedroom to find her face down on the bed, and a little, a very little snap-shot picture clutched in her hand. She had dropped asleep like that, and with no more compunction than she would have extracted a splinter, Bessie Osborne took the picture from her as she slept, and carried it to the window.
She was still gazing at it when Kay wakened and sat up. Bessie turned and looked at her.
"It won't do, darling," she said. "He's a handsome rascal, but it just won't do."
Kay slid off the bed and went over to her.
"Why won't it do? He's a man. A real man."
"He looks it, honey. But he won't do, just the same. What's his name?"
"McNair. Tom McNair."
"Very well, I'll take it for granted this Tom McNair is in love with you. I suppose he has told you so."
Kay nodded.
"And that this love is all you have in common. That's true, too, isn't it?"
"What have any other two people who love and marry?"
"Plenty," she said quickly. "Tastes. Habits. Ideas of life. You don't realize all that now, but you will later on. This—this early ecstasy we call love, it's only a part of the whole business. And when it's gone—and it always goes, my dear—you have to have something else to fall back on. I suppose you met him out at the ranch?"
"Yes."
"What is he? Foreman? I thought Mallory"
"He isn't anything. He just works there. I don't think he owns a thing in the world, unless it's his horse and saddle! Oh, don't tell me I'm crazy. I've gone through all that. And I've fought until I'm worn out. I can't fight it any more. It's just happened, that's all."
"Do they know, here?"
"More or less. They think I've given him up."
"But you haven't?"
"Not if he wants me. I ought to tell you this about him; I asked him to let me stay, and he sent me away."
If Bessie made any mental reservation about this heroic attitude of Tom's she concealed it.
"That was very noble of him," she said, and Kay ascepted it literally.
But Bessie did not feel, as she went back to her room an hour or so later, that she had effected any real change in Kay's attitude. The mention of disinheritance she had put aside with a gesture. Talk of her father's and mother's sense of injury and deep resentment had brought tears to her eyes, but had not weakened her. Nor could she be, induced to make a promise to do nothing rash without consulting Bessie herself.
"I might not keep it," she said honestly. "It's not stubbornness. I'm just afraid. I made a lot of promises to myself out there, but somehow"
Late that night Henry Dowling, retired and reading the catalogue of a sale of old English furniture by way of soporific, was less surprised than he might have been when his sister came in and perched herself on the foot of the bed.
"What about the L. D., Henry?" she inquired, helping herself to one of his cigarettes. "Are we selling it, or giving it away?"
"There's no profit in the deal, if that's what you mean," he told her grimly.
"It's a relief, of course. Still, when you think of father, and all the lovely ladies!"
"Don't be vulgar, Bessie. And for God's sake don't be sentimental." He leaned back among his pillows and surveyed her critically. "What in the name of heaven made you do that to your hair?" he demanded.
"The search for youth. Lovely, romantic youth, Henry," she told him flippantly. "What you've forgotten you ever had, and never will understand."
She went to bed herself on that, leaving Henry to ponder over it. He knew she had meant something by it, possibly about Kay. Well, that was all over now. Well over.
He turned again to his book.
"Six Heppelwhite chairs in excellent condition. From the collection of"