Twilight Sleep (Wharton)/Chapter 13
XIII
I BELIEVE it's the first time in a month that I've heard Nona laugh," Stanley Heuston said with a touch of irony—or was it simply envy?
Nona was still in the whirlpool of her laugh. She struggled to its edge only to be caught back, with retrospective sobs and gasps, into its central coil. "It was too screamingly funny," she flung at them out of the vortex.
She was perched sideways, as her way was, on the arm of the big chintz sofa in Arthur Wyant's sitting-room. Wyant was stretched out in his usual armchair, behind a crumby messy tea-table, on the other side of which sat his son and Stanley Heuston.
"She didn't hesitate for more than half a second—just long enough to catch my eye—then round she jerked, grabbed hold of her last word and fitted it into a beautiful new appeal to the Mothers. Oh—oh—oh! If you could have seen them!"
"I can." Jim's face suddenly became broad, mild and earnestly peering. He caught up a pair of his father's eye-glasses, adjusted them to his blunt nose, and murmured in a soft feminine drawl: "Mrs. Manford is one of our deepest-souled women. She has a vital message for all Mothers."
Wyant leaned back and laughed. His laugh was a contagious chuckle, easily provoked and spreading in circles like a full spring. Jim gave a large shout at his own mimicry, and Heuston joined the chorus on a dry note that neither spread nor echoed, but seemed suddenly to set bounds to their mirth. Nona felt a momentary resentment of his tone. Was he implying that they were ridiculing their mother? They weren't, they were only admiring her in their own way, which had always been humorous and half-parental. Stan ought to have understood by this time—and have guessed why Nona, at this moment, caught at any pretext to make Jim laugh, to make everything in their joint lives appear to him normal and jolly. But Stanley always seemed to see beyond a joke, even when he was in the very middle of it. He was like that about everything in life; forever walking around things, weighing and measuring them, and making his disenchanted calculations. Poor fellow—well, no wonder!
Jim got up, the glasses still clinging to his blunt nose. He gathered an imaginary cloak about him, picked up inexistent gloves and vanity-bag, and tapped his head as if he were settling a feathered hat. The laughter waxed again, and Wyant chuckled: "I wish you young fools would come oftener. It would cure me a lot quicker than being shipped off to Georgia." He turned half-apologetically to Nona. "Not that I'm not awfully glad of the chance—"
"I know, Exhibit dear. It'll be jolly enough when you get down there, you and Jim." "Yes: I only wish you were coming too. Why don't you?"
Jim's features returned to their normal cast, and he removed the eye-glasses. "Because mother and Manford have planned to carry off Lita and the kid to Cedarledge at the same time. Good scheme, isn't it? I wish I could be in both places at once. We're all of us fed up with New York."
His father glanced at him. "Look here, my boy, there's no difficulty about your being in the same place as your wife. I can take my old bones down to Georgia without your help, since Manford's kind enough to invite me."
"Thanks a lot, dad; but part of Lita's holiday is getting away from domestic cares, and I'm the principal one. She has to order dinner for me. And I don't say I shan't like my holiday too . . . sand and sun, any amount of 'em. That's my size at present. No more superhuman efforts." He stretched his arms over his head with a yawn.
"But I thought Manford was off to the south too—to his tarpon? Isn't this Cedarledge idea new?"
"It's part of his general kindness. He wanted me to go with an easy mind, so he's chucked his fishing and mobilized the whole group to go and lead the simple life at Cedarledge with Lita."
Wyant's sallow cheek-bones reddened slightly. "It's awfully kind, as you say; but if my going south is to result in upsetting everybody else's arrangements—"
"Oh, rot, father." Jim spoke with sudden irritability. "Manford would hate it if you chucked now; wouldn't he, Nona? And I do want Lita to get away somewhere, and I'd rather it was to Cedarledge than anywhere." The clock struck, and he pulled himself out of his chair. Nona noticed with a pang how slack and half-hearted all his movements were. "Jove—I must jump!" he said. "We're due at some cabaret show that begins early; and I believe we dine at Ardwin's first, with a bunch of freaks. By-bye, Nona. . . Stan. . . Good-bye, father. Only a fortnight now before we cut it all!"
The door shut after him on a silence. Wyant reached for his pipe and filled it. Heuston stared at the tea-table. Suddenly Wyant questioned: "Look here—why is Jim being shipped off to the island with me when his wife's going to Cedarledge?"
Nona dropped from her sofa-arm and settled into an armchair. "Simply for the reasons he told you. They both want a holiday from each other."
"I don't believe Jim really wants one from Lita."
"Well, so much the worse for Jim. Lita's temporarily tired of dancing and domesticity, and the doctor says she ought to go off for a while by herself."
Wyant was slowly drawing at his pipe. At length he said: "Your mother's doctor told her that once; and she never came back."
Nona's colour rose through her pale cheeks to her very forchead. The motions of her blood were not impetuous, and she now felt herself blushing for having blushed. It was unlike Wyant to say that—unlike his tradition of reticence and decency, which had always joined with Pauline's breezy optimism in relegating to silence and non-existence whatever it was painful or even awkward to discuss. For years the dual family had lived on the assumption that they were all the best friends in the world, and the vocabulary of that convention had become their natural idiom.
Stanley Heuston seemed to catch the constraint in the air. He got up as if to go. "I suppose we're dining somewhere too—." He pronounced the "we" without conviction, for every one knew that he and his wife seldom went out together.
Wyant raised a detaining hand. "Don't go, Stan. Nona and I have no secrets—if we had, you should share them. Why do you look so savage, Nona? I suppose I've said something stupid. . . Fact is, I'm old-fashioned; and this idea of people who've chosen to live together having perpetually to get away from each other. . . When I remember my father and mother, for sixty-odd years. . . New York in winter, Hudson in summer. . . Staple topics: snow for six months, mosquitoes the other. I suppose that's the reason your generation have got the fidgets!"
Nona laughed. "It's a good enough reason; and anyhow there's nothing to be done about it."
Wyant frowned. "Nothing to be done about it—in Lita's case? I hope you don't mean that. My son—God, if ever a man has slaved for a woman, made himself a fool for her. . ."
Heuston's dry voice cut the diatribe. "Well, sir, you wouldn't deprive him of man's peculiar privilege: the right to make a fool of himself?"
Wyant sank back grumbling among his cushions. "I don't understand you, any of you," he said, as if secretly relieved by the admission.
"Well, Exhibit dear, strictly speaking you don't have to. We're old enough to run the show for ourselves, and all you've got to do is to look on from the front row and admire us," said Nona, bending to him with a caress.
In the street she found herself walking silently at Heuston's side. These weekly meetings with him at Wyant's were becoming a tacit arrangement: the one thing in her life that gave it meaning. She thought with a smile of her mother's affirmation that everything always came out right if only one kept on being brave and trustful, and wondered where, under that formula, her relation to Stanley Heuston could be fitted in. It was anything but brave—letting herself drift into these continual meetings, and refusing to accept their consequences. Yet every nerve in her told her that these moments were the best thing in life, the one thing she couldn't do without: just to be near him, to hear his cold voice, to say something to provoke his disenchanted laugh; or, better still, to walk by him as now without talking, with a furtive glance now and then at his profile, ironic, dissatisfied, defiant—yes, and so weak under the defiance. . . The fact that she judged and still loved showed that her malady was mortal.
"Oh, well—it won't last; nothing lasts for our lot," she murmured to herself without conviction. "Or at the worst it will only last as long as I do; and that's a date I can fix as I choose."
What nonsense, though, to talk like that, when all those others needed her: Jim and his silly Lita, her father, yes, even her proud self-confident father, and poor old Exhibit A and her mother who was so sure that nothing would ever go wrong again, now she had found a new Healer! Yes; they all needed help, though they didn't know it, and Fate seemed to have put her, Nona, at the very point where all their lives intersected, as a First-Aid station is put at the dangerous turn of a race-course, or a points-man at the shunting point of a big junction.
"Look here, Nona: my dinner-engagement was a fable. Would the heavens fall if you and I went and dined somewhere by ourselves, just as we are?"
"Oh, Stan—" Her heart gave a leap of joy. In these free days, when the young came and went as they chose, who would have believed that these two had never yet given themselves a stolen evening? Perhaps it was just because it was so easy. Only difficult things tempted Nona, and the difficult thing was always to say "No."
Yet was it? She stole a glance at Heuston's profile, as a street-lamp touched it, saw the set lips already preparing a taunt at her refusal, and wondered if saying no to everything required as much courage as she liked to think. What if moral cowardice were the core of her boasted superiority? She didn't want to be "like the others"—but was there anything to be proud of in that? Perhaps her disinterestedness was only a subtler vanity, not unrelated, say, to Lita's refusal to let a friend copy her new dresses, or Bee Lindon's perpetual craving to scandalize a world sated with scandals. Exhibitionists, one and all of them, as the psycho-analysts said—and, in her present mood, moral exhibitionism seemed to her the meanest form of the display.
"How mid-Victorian, Stan!" she laughed. "As if there were any heavens to fall! Where shall we go? It will be the greatest fun. Isn't there rather a good little Italian restaurant somewhere near here? And afterward there's that nigger dancing at the Housetop."
"Come along, then!"
She felt as little and light as a wisp of straw carried out into the rushing darkness of a sea splashed with millions of stars. Just the thought of a friendly evening, an evening of simple comradeship, could do that; could give her back her youth, yes, and the courage to persevere. She put her hand through his arm, and knew by his silence that he was thinking her thoughts. That was the final touch of magic.
"You really want to go to the Housetop?" he questioned, leaning back to light his cigar with a leisurely air, as if there need never again be any hurrying about anything. Their dinner at the little Italian restaurant was nearly over. They had conscientiously explored the paste, the frutte di mare, the fritture and the cheese-and-tomato mixtures, and were ending up with a foaming sabaione. The room was low-ceilinged, hot, and crowded with jolly noisy people, mostly Italians, over whom, at unnoticed intervals, an olive-tinted musician with blue-white eye-balls showered trills and twangings. His music did not interrupt the conversation, but merely obliged the diners to shout a little louder; a pretext of which they joyfully availed themselves. Nona, at first, had found the noise a delicious shelter for her talk with Heuston; but now it was beginning to stifle her. "Let's get some fresh air first," she said.
"All right. We'll walk for a while."
They pushed back their chairs, wormed a way through the packed tables, got into their wraps, and stepped out of the swinging doors into long streamers of watery lamplight. The douche of a cold rain received them.
"Oh, dear—the Housetop, then!" Nona grumbled. How sweet the rain would have been under the budding trees of Cedarledge! But here, in these degraded streets. . .
Heuston caught a passing taxi. "A turn, first—just round the Park?"
"No; the Housetop."
He leaned back and lit a cigarette. "You know I'm going to get myself divorced: it's all settled," he announced.
"Settled—with Aggie?"
"No: not yet. But with the lady I'm going off with. My word of honour. I am; next week."
Nona gave an incredulous laugh. "So this is good-bye?"
"Very nearly."
"Poor Stan!"
"Nona . . . listen . . . look here. . ."
She took his hand. "Stan, hang next week!"
"Nona—?"
She shook her head, but let her hand lie in his.
"No questions—no plans. Just being together," she pleaded.
He held her in silence and their lips met. "Then why not—?"
"No: the Housetop—the Housetop!" she cried, pulling herself out of his arms.
"Why, you're crying!"
"I'm not! It's the rain. It's—"
"Nona!"
"Stan, you know it's no earthly use."
"Life's so rotten—"
"Not like this."
"This? This—what?"
She struggled out of another enfolding, put her head out of the window, and cried: "The Housetop!"
They found a corner at the back of the crowded floor. Nona blinked a little in the dazzle of light-garlands, the fumes of smoke, the clash of noise and colours. But there he and she sat, close together, hidden in their irresistible happiness, and though his lips had their moody twist she knew the same softness was in his veins as in hers, isolating them from the crowd as completely as if they had still been in the darkness of the taxi. That was the way she must take her life, she supposed; piece-meal, a tiny scrap of sweetness at a time, and never more than a scrap—never once! Well—it would be worse still if there were no moments like this, short and cruel as they seemed when they came.
The Housetop was packed. The low balcony crammed with fashionable people overhung them like a wreath of ripe fruits, peachy and white and golden, made of painted faces, bare arms, jewels, brocades and fantastic furs. It was the music-hall of the moment.
The curtain shot up, and the little auditorium was plunged in shadow. Nona could leave her hand in Heuston's. On the stage—a New Orleans cotton-market—black dancers tossed and capered. They were like ripe fruits too, black figs flung about in hot sunshine, falling to earth with crimson bursts of laughter splitting open on white teeth, and bounding up again into golden clouds of cotton-dust. It was all warm and jolly and inconsequent. The audience forgot to smoke and chatter: little murmurs of enjoyment rippled over it.
The curtain descended, the light-garlands blossomed out, and once more floor and balcony were all sound and movement.
"Why, there's Lita up there in the balcony," Nona exclaimed, "just above the stage. Don't you see—with Ardwin, and Jack Staley, and Bee Lindon, and that awful Keiler woman?"
She had drawn her hand away at the sight of the box full. "I don't see Jim with them after all. Oh, how I hate that crowd!" All the ugly and disquieting realities she had put from her swept back with a rush. If only she could have had her one evening away from them! "I didn't think we should find them here— I thought Lita had been last week."
"Well, don't that crowd always keep on going to the same shows over and over again? There's nothing they hate as much as novelty—they're so fed up with it! And besides, what on earth do you care? They won't bother us."
She wavered a moment, and then said: "You see, Lita always bothers me."
"Why? Anything new?"
"She says she's tired of everything, Jim included, and is going to chuck it, and go in for the cinema."
"Oh, that—?" He manifested no surprise. "Well, isn't it where she belongs?"
"Perhaps—but Jim!"
"Poor Jim. We've all got to swallow our dose one day or another."
"Yes; but I can't bear it. Not for Jim. Look here, Stan—I'm going up there to join them," she suddenly declared.
"Oh, nonsense, Nona; they don't want you. And besides I hate that crowd as much as you do. . . I don't want you mixed up with it. That cad Staley, and the Keiler woman. . ."
She gave a dry laugh. "Afraid they'll compromise me?"
"Oh, rot! But what's the use of their even knowing you're here? They'll hate your butting in, Lita worst of all."
"Stan, I'm going up to them."
"Oh, damn it. You always—"
She had got up and was pushing away the little table in front of them. But suddenly she stopped and sat down again. For a moment or two she did not speak, nor look at Heuston. She had seen the massive outline of a familiar figure rising from a seat near the front and planting itself there for a slow gaze about the audience.
"Hallo—your father? I didn't know he patronized this kind of show," Heuston said.
Nona groped for a careless voice, and found it. "Father? So it is! Oh, he's really very frivolous—my influence, I'm afraid." The voice sounded sharp and rattling in her own ears. "How funny, though! You don't happen to see mother and Amalasuntha anywhere? That would make the family party complete."
She could not take her eyes from her father. How queer he looked—how different! Strained and vigilant; she didn't know how else to put it. And yet tired, inexpressibly tired, as if with some profound inner fatigue which made him straighten himself a little too rigidly, and throw back his head with a masterful young-mannish air as he scanned the balcony just above him. He stood there for a few moments, letting the lights and the eyes concentrate on him, as if lending himself to the display with a certain distant tolerance; then he began to move toward one of the exits. But half way he stopped, turned with his dogged jerk of the shoulders, and made for a gangway leading up to the balcony.
"Hullo," Heuston exclaimed. "Is he going up to Lita?"
Nona gave a little laugh. "I might have known it! How like father—when he undertakes anything!"
"Undertakes what?"
"Why, looking after Lita. He probably found out at the last minute that Jim couldn't come, and made up his mind to replace him. Isn't it splendid, how he's helping us? I know he loathes this sort of place—and the people she's with. But he told me we oughtn't to lose our influence on her, we ought to keep tight hold of her—"
"I see."
Nona had risen again and was beginning to move toward the passageway. Heuston followed her, and she smiled back at him over her shoulder. She felt as if she must cram every cranny in their talk with more words. The silence which had enclosed them as in a crystal globe had been splintered to atoms, and had left them stammering and exposed.
"Well, I needn't go up to Lita after all; she really doesn't require two dragons. Thank goodness, father has replaced me, and I don't have to be with that crew. . . just this evening," she whispered, slipping her arm through Heuston's. "I should have hated to have it end in that way." By this time they were out in the street.
On the wet pavement he detained her. "Nona, how is it going to end?"
"Why, by your driving me home, I hope. It's too wet to walk, worse luck."
He gave a resigned shrug, called a taxi, wavered a moment, and jumped in after her. "I don't know why I come," he grumbled.
She kept a bright hold on herself, lit a cigarette at his lighter, and chattered resolutely of the show till the motor turned the corner of her street.
"Well, my child, it's really good-bye now. I'm off next week with the other lady," Heuston said as they stopped before the Manford door. He paid the taxi and helped her out, and she stood in the rain in front of him. "I don't come back till Aggie divorces me, you understand," he continued.
"She won't!"
"She'll have to."
"It's hideous—doing it in that way."
"Not as hideous as the kind of life I'm leading."
She made no answer, and he followed her silently up the doorstep while she fumbled for her latchkey. She was trembling now with weariness and disappointment, and a feverish thirst for the one more kiss she was resolved he should not take.
"Other people get their freedom. I don't see why I shouldn't have mine," he insisted.
"Not in that way, Stan! You mustn't. It's too horrible."
"That way? You know there's no other."
She turned the latchkey, and the ponderous vestibule door swung inward. "If you do, don't imagine I'll ever marry you!" she cried out as she crossed the threshold; and he flung back furiously: "Wait till I ask you!" and plunged away into the rain.