Red Book (January and February 1926)
I
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you
have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created —
nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and
voices than we want any one to know or than we know ourselves. When I hear a
man proclaiming himself an “average, honest, open fellow,” I feel pretty sure
that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed
to conceal — and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his
way of reminding himself of his misprision.
There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is
his and not his brothers’ story. All my life I have lived among his brothers
but this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his brothers I
should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor have told about
the rich and the rich have told about themselves — such a wild structure they
have erected that when we pick up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares
us for unreality. Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have
made the country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you
and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them
soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that,
unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep
in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover
the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep
into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we
are. They are different. The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter is to
approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of
view. If I accept his for a moment I am lost — I have nothing to show but a
preposterous movie.
II
Anson was the eldest of six children who would some day divide a
fortune of fifteen million dollars, and he reached the age of reason — is it
seven? — at the beginning of the century when daring young women were already
gliding along Fifth Avenue in electric “mobiles.” In those days he and his
brother had an English governess who spoke the language very clearly and
crisply and well, so that the two boys grew to speak as she did — their words
and sentences were all crisp and clear and not run together as ours are. They
didn’t talk exactly like English children but acquired an accent that is
peculiar to fashionable people in the city of New York.
In the summer the six children were moved from the house on 71st
Street to a big estate in northern Connecticut. It was not a fashionable
locality — Anson’s father wanted to delay as long as possible his children’s
knowledge of that side of life. He was a man somewhat superior to his class,
which composed New York society, and to his period, which was the snobbish and
formalized vulgarity of the Gilded Age, and he wanted his sons to learn habits
of concentration and have sound constitutions and grow up into right-living and
successful men. He and his wife kept an eye on them as well as they were able
until the two older boys went away to school, but in huge establishments this
is difficult — it was much simpler in the series of small and medium-sized
houses in which my own youth was spent — I was never far out of the reach of my
mother’s voice, of the sense of her presence, her approval or disapproval.
Anson’s first sense of his superiority came to him when he
realized the half-grudging American deference that was paid to him in the
Connecticut village. The parents of the boys he played with always inquired
after his father and mother, and were vaguely excited when their own children
were asked to the Hunters’ house. He accepted this as the natural state of
things, and a sort of impatience with all groups of which he was not the center
— in money, in position, in authority— remained with him for the rest of his
life. He disdained to struggle with other boys for precedence — he expected it
to be given him freely, and when it wasn’t he withdrew into his family. His
family was sufficient, for in the East money is still a somewhat feudal thing,
a clan-forming thing. In the snobbish West, money separates families to form
“sets.”
At eighteen, when he went to New Haven, Anson was tall and
thick-set, with a clear complexion and a healthy color from the ordered life he
had led in school. His hair was yellow and grew in a funny way on his head, his
nose was beaked —these two things kept him from being handsome — but he had a
confident charm and a certain brusque style, and the upper-class men who passed
him on the street knew without being told that he was a rich boy and had gone
to one of the best schools. Nevertheless, his very superiority kept him from
being a success in college — the independence was mistaken for egotism, and the
refusal to accept Yale standards with the proper awe seemed to belittle all
those who had. So, long before he graduated, he began to shift the center of
his life to New York.
He was at home in New York — there was his own house with “the
kind of servants you can’t get any more” — and his own family, of which,
because of his good humor and a certain ability to make things go, he was
rapidly becoming the center, and the débutante parties, and the correct manly
world of the men’s clubs, and the occasional wild spree with the gallant girls
whom New Haven only knew from the fifth row. His aspirations were conventional
enough — they included even the irreproachable shadow he would some day marry,
but they differed from the aspirations of the majority of young men in that
there was no mist over them, none of that quality which is variously known as
“idealism” or “illusion.” Anson accepted without reservation the world of high
finance and high extravagance, of divorce and dissipation, of snobbery and of
privilege. Most of our lives end as a compromise — it was as a compromise that
his life began.
He and I first met in the late summer of 1917 when he was just out
of Yale, and, like the rest of us, was swept up into the systematized hysteria
of the war. In the blue-green uniform of the naval aviation he came down to
Pensacola, where the hotel orchestras played “I’m sorry, dear,” and we young
officers danced with the girls. Every one liked him, and though he ran with the
drinkers and wasn’t an especially good pilot, even the instructors treated him
with a certain respect. He was always having long talks with them in his
confident, logical voice — talks which ended by his getting himself, or, more
frequently, another officer, out of some impending trouble. He was convivial,
bawdy, robustly avid for pleasure, and we were all surprised when he fell in
love with a conservative and rather proper girl.
Her name was Paula Legendre, a dark, serious beauty from somewhere
in California. Her family kept a winter residence just outside of town, and in
spite of her primness she was enormously popular; there is a large class of men
whose egotism can’t endure humor in a woman. But Anson wasn’t that sort, and I
couldn’t understand the attraction of her“sincerity” — that was the thing to
say about her — for his keen and somewhat sardonic mind.
Nevertheless, they fell in love — and on her terms. He no longer
joined the twilight gathering at the De Sota bar, and whenever they were seen
together they were engaged in a long, serious dialogue, which must have gone on
several weeks. Long afterward he told me that it was not about anything in
particular but was composed on both sides of immature and even meaningless
statements — the emotional content that gradually came to fill it grew up not
out of the words but out of its enormous seriousness. It was a sort of
hypnosis. Often it was interrupted, giving way to that emasculated humor we
call fun; when they were alone it was resumed again, solemn, low-keyed, and
pitched so as to give each other a sense of unity in feeling and thought. They
came to resent any interruptions of it, to be unresponsive to facetiousness
about life, even to the mild cynicism of their contemporaries. They were only
happy when the dialogue was going on, and its seriousness bathed them like the
amber glow of an open fire. Toward the end there came an interruption they did
not resent — it began to be interrupted by passion.
Oddly enough, Anson was as engrossed in the dialogue as she was
and as profoundly affected by it, yet at the same time aware that on his side
much was insincere, and on hers much was merely simple. At first, too, he
despised her emotional simplicity as well, but with his love her nature
deepened and blossomed, and he could despise it no longer. He felt that if he
could enter into Paula’s warm safe life he would be happy. The long preparation
of the dialogue removed any constraint — he taught her some of what he had
learned from more adventurous women, and she responded with a rapt holy
intensity. One evening after a dance they agreed to marry, and he wrote a long
letter about her to his mother. The next day Paula told him that she was rich,
that she had a personal fortune of nearly a million dollars.
III
It was exactly as if they could say “Neither of us has anything:
we shall be poor together” — just as delightful that they should be rich
instead. It gave them the same communion of adventure. Yet when Anson got leave
in April, and Paula and her mother accompanied him North, she was impressed
with the standing of his family in New York and with the scale on which they
lived. Alone with Anson for the first time in the rooms where he had played as
a boy, she was filled with a comfortable emotion, as though she were
pre-eminently safe and taken care of. The pictures of Anson in a skull cap at
his first school, of Anson on horseback with the sweetheart of a mysterious
forgotten summer, of Anson in a gay group of ushers and bridesmaid at a
wedding, made her jealous of his life apart from her in the past, and so completely
did his authoritative person seem to sum up and typify these possessions of his
that she was inspired with the idea of being married immediately and returning
to Pensacola as his wife.
But an immediate marriage wasn’t discussed — even the engagement
was to be secret until after the war. When she realized that only two days of
his leave remained, her dissatisfaction crystallized in the intention of making
him as unwilling to wait as she was. They were driving to the country for
dinner and she determined to force the issue that night.
Now a cousin of Paula’s was staying with them at the Ritz, a
severe, bitter girl who loved Paula but was somewhat jealous of her impressive
engagement, and as Paula was late in dressing, the cousin, who wasn’t going to
the party, received Anson in the parlor of the suite.
Anson had met friends at five o’clock and drunk freely and
indiscreetly with them for an hour. He left the Yale Club at a proper time, and
his mother’s chauffeur drove him to the Ritz, but his usual capacity was not in
evidence, and the impact of the steam-heated sitting-room made him suddenly
dizzy. He knew it, and he was both amused and sorry.
Paula’s cousin was twenty-five, but she was exceptionally naïve,
and at first failed to realize what was up. She had never met Anson before, and
she was surprised when he mumbled strange information and nearly fell off his
chair, but until Paula appeared it didn’t occur to her that what she had taken
for the odor of a dry-cleaned uniform was really whiskey. But Paula understood
as soon as she appeared; her only thought was to get Anson away before her
mother saw him, and at the look in her eyes the cousin understood too.
When Paula and Anson descended to the limousine they found two men
inside, both asleep; they were the men with whom he had been drinking at the
Yale Club, and they were also going to the party. He had entirely forgotten
their presence in the car. On the way to Hempstead they awoke and sang. Some of
the songs were rough, and though Paula tried to reconcile herself to the fact
that Anson had few verbal inhibitions, her lips tightened with shame and
distaste.
Back at the hotel the cousin, confused and agitated, considered
the incident, and then walked into Mrs. Legendre’s bedroom, saying: “Isn’t he
funny?”
“Who is funny?”
“Why — Mr. Hunter. He seemed so funny.”
Mrs. Legendre looked at her sharply.
“How is he funny?”
“Why, he said he was French. I didn’t know he was French.”
“That’s absurd. You must have misunderstood.” She smiled: “It was
a joke.”
The cousin shook her head stubbornly.
“No. He said he was brought up in France. He said he couldn’t
speak any English, and that’s why he couldn’t talk to me. And he couldn’t!”
Mrs. Legendre looked away with impatience just as the cousin added
thoughtfully, “Perhaps it was because he was so drunk,” and walked out of the
room.
This curious report was true. Anson, finding his voice thick and
uncontrollable, had taken the unusual refuge of announcing that he spoke no
English. Years afterward he used to tell that part of the story, and he
invariably communicated the uproarious laughter which the memory aroused in
him.
Five times in the next hour Mrs. Legendre tried to get Hempstead
on the phone. When she succeeded, there was a ten-minute delay before she heard
Paula’s voice on the wire.
“Cousin Jo told me Anson was intoxicated.”
“Oh, no. . . . ”
“Oh, yes. Cousin Jo says he was intoxicated. He told her he was
French, and fell off his chair and behaved as if he was very intoxicated. I
don’t want you to come home with him.”
“Mother, he’s all right! Please don’t worry about — ”
“But I do worry. I think it’s dreadful. I want you to promise me
not to come home with him.”
“I’ll take care of it, mother. . . . ”
“I don’t want you to come home with him.”
“All right, mother. Good-by.”
“Be sure now, Paula. Ask some one to bring you.”
Deliberately Paula took the receiver from her ear and hung it up.
Her face was flushed with helpless annoyance. Anson was stretched asleep out in
a bedroom up-stairs, while the dinner-party below was proceeding lamely toward
conclusion.
The hour’s drive had sobered him somewhat — his arrival was merely
hilarious — and Paula hoped that the evening was not spoiled, after all, but
two imprudent cocktails before dinner completed the disaster. He talked boisterously
and somewhat offensively to the party at large for fifteen minutes, and then
slid silently under the table; like a man in an old print — but, unlike an old
print, it was rather horrible without being at all quaint. None of the young
girls present remarked upon the incident — it seemed to merit only silence. His
uncle and two other men carried him up-stairs, and it was just after this that
Paula was called to the phone.
An hour later Anson awoke in a fog of nervous agony, through which
he perceived after a moment the figure of his uncle Robert standing by the
door.
“ . . . I said are you better?”
“What?”
“Do you feel better, old man?”
“Terrible,” said Anson.
“I’m going to try you on another bromo-seltzer. If you can hold it
down, it’ll do you good to sleep.”
With an effort Anson slid his legs from the bed and stood up.
“I’m all right,” he said dully.
“Take it easy.”
“I thin’ if you gave me a glassbrandy I could go down-stairs.”
“Oh, no — ”
“Yes, that’s the only thin’. I’m all right now. . . . I suppose I’m
in Dutch dow’ there.”
“They know you’re a little under the weather,” said his uncle
deprecatingly. “But don’t worry about it. Schuyler didn’t even get here. He
passed away in the locker-room over at the Links.”
Indifferent to any opinion, except Paula’s, Anson was nevertheless
determined to save the débris of the evening, but when after a cold bath he
made his appearance most of the party had already left. Paula got up
immediately to go home.
In the limousine the old serious dialogue began. She had known
that he drank, she admitted, but she had never expected anything like this — it
seemed to her that perhaps they were not suited to each other, after all. Their
ideas about life were too different, and so forth. When she finished speaking,
Anson spoke in turn, very soberly. Then Paula said she’d have to think it over;
she wouldn’t decide to-night; she was not angry but she was terribly sorry. Nor
would she let him come into the hotel with her, but just before she got out of
the car she leaned and kissed him unhappily on the cheek.
The next afternoon Anson had a long talk with Mrs. Legendre while
Paula sat listening in silence. It was agreed that Paula was to brood over the
incident for a proper period and then, if mother and daughter thought it best,
they would follow Anson to Pensacola. On his part he apologized with sincerity
and dignity — that was all; with every card in her hand Mrs. Legendre was
unable to establish any advantage over him. He made no promises, showed no
humility, only delivered a few serious comments on life which brought him off
with rather a moral superiority at the end. When they came South three weeks
later, neither Anson in his satisfaction nor Paula in her relief at the reunion
realized that the psychological moment had passed forever.
IV
He dominated and attracted her, and at the same time filled her
with anxiety. Confused by his mixture of solidity and self-indulgence, of
sentiment and cynicism — incongruities which her gentle mind was unable to
resolve — Paula grew to think of him as two alternating personalities. When she
saw him alone, or at a formal party, or with his casual inferiors, she felt a
tremendous pride in his strong, attractive presence, the paternal,
understanding stature of his mind. In other company she became uneasy when what
had been a fine imperviousness to mere gentility showed its other face. The
other face was gross, humorous, reckless of everything but pleasure. It
startled her mind temporarily away from him, even led her into a short covert
experiment with an old beau, but it was no use — after four months of Anson’s
enveloping vitality there was an anæmic pallor in all other men.
In July he was ordered abroad, and their tenderness and desire
reached a crescendo. Paula considered a last-minute marriage — decided against
it only because there were always cocktails on his breath now, but the parting
itself made her physically ill with grief. After his departure she wrote him
long letters of regret for the days of love they had missed by waiting. In
August Anson’s plane slipped down into the North Sea. He was pulled onto a
destroyer after a night in the water and sent to hospital with pneumonia; the
armistice was signed before he was finally sent home.
Then, with every opportunity given back to them, with no material
obstacle to overcome, the secret weavings of their temperaments came between
them, drying up their kisses and their tears, making their voices less loud to
one another, muffling the intimate chatter of their hearts until the old
communication was only possible by letters, from far away. One afternoon a
society reporter waited for two hours in the Hunters’ house for a confirmation
of their engagement. Anson denied it; nevertheless an early issue carried the
report as a leading paragraph — they were “constantly seen together at
Southampton, Hot Springs, and Tuxedo Park.” But the serious dialogue had turned
a corner into a long-sustained quarrel, and the affair was almost played out.
Anson got drunk flagrantly and missed an engagement with her, whereupon Paula
made certain behavioristic demands. His despair was helpless before his pride
and his knowledge of himself: the engagement was definitely broken.
“Dearest,” said their letters now, “Dearest, Dearest, when I wake
up in the middle of the night and realize that after all it was not to be, I
feel that I want to die. I can’t go on living any more. Perhaps when we meet
this summer we may talk things over and decide differently — we were so excited
and sad that day, and I don’t feel that I can live all my life without you. You
speak of other people. Don’t you know there are no other people for me, but
only you. . . . ”
But as Paula drifted here and there around the East she would
sometimes mention her gaieties to make him wonder. Anson was too acute to
wonder. When he saw a man’s name in her letters he felt more sure of her and a
little disdainful — he was always superior to such things. But he still hoped
that they would some day marry.
Meanwhile he plunged vigorously into all the movement and glitter
of post-bellum New York, entering a brokerage house, joining half a dozen
clubs, dancing late, and moving in three worlds — his own world, the world of
young Yale graduates, and that section of the half-world which rests one end on
Broadway. But there was always a thorough and infractible eight hours devoted
to his work in Wall Street, where the combination of his influential family
connection, his sharp intelligence, and his abundance of sheer physical energy
brought him almost immediately forward. He had one of those invaluable minds
with partitions in it; sometimes he appeared at his office refreshed by less
than an hour’s sleep, but such occurrences were rare. So early as 1920 his
income in salary and commissions exceeded twelve thousand dollars.
As the Yale tradition slipped into the past he became more and
more of a popular figure among his classmates in New York, more popular than he
had ever been in college. He lived in a great house, and had the means of
introducing young men into other great houses. Moreover, his life already
seemed secure, while theirs, for the most part, had arrived again at precarious
beginnings. They commenced to turn to him for amusement and escape, and Anson
responded readily, taking pleasure in helping people and arranging their affairs.
There were no men in Paula’s letters now, but a note of tenderness
ran through them that had not been there before. From several sources he heard
that she had “a heavy beau,” Lowell Thayer, a Bostonian of wealth and position,
and though he was sure she still loved him, it made him uneasy to think that he
might lose her, after all. Save for one unsatisfactory day she had not been in
New York for almost five months, and as the rumors multiplied he became
increasingly anxious to see her. In February he took his vacation and went down
to Florida.
Palm Beach sprawled plump and opulent between the sparkling
sapphire of Lake Worth, flawed here and there by house-boats at anchor, and the
great turquoise bar of the Atlantic Ocean. The huge bulks of the Breakers and
the Royal Poinciana rose as twin paunches from the bright level of the sand,
and around them clustered the Dancing Glade, Bradley’s House of Chance, and a
dozen modistes and milliners with goods at triple prices from New York. Upon
the trellissed veranda of the Breakers two hundred women stepped right, stepped
left, wheeled, and slid in that then celebrated calisthenic known as the
double-shuffle, while in half-time to the music two thousand bracelets clicked
up and down on two hundred arms.
At the Everglades Club after dark Paula and Lowell Thayer and
Anson and a casual fourth played bridge with hot cards. It seemed to Anson that
her kind, serious face was wan and tired — she had been around now for four,
five, years. He had known her for three.
“Two spades.”
“Cigarette? . . . Oh, I beg your pardon. By me.”
“By.”
“I’ll double three spades.”
There were a dozen tables of bridge in the room, which was filling
up with smoke. Anson’s eyes met Paula’s, held them persistently even when
Thayer’s glance fell between them. . . .
“What was bid?” he asked abstractedly.
“Rose of Washington Square”
sang the young people in the corners:
“I’m withering there
In basement air — ”
The smoke banked like fog, and the opening of a door filled the
room with blown swirls of ectoplasm. Little Bright Eyes streaked past the
tables seeking Mr. Conan Doyle among the Englishmen who were posing as
Englishmen about the lobby.
“You could cut it with a knife.”
“ . . . cut it with a knife.”
“ . . . a knife.”
At the end of the rubber Paula suddenly got up and spoke to Anson
in a tense, low voice. With scarcely a glance at Lowell Thayer, they walked out
the door and descended a long flight of stone steps — in a moment they were
walking hand in hand along the moonlit beach.
“Darling, darling. . . . ” They embraced recklessly, passionately,
in a shadow. . . . Then Paula drew back her face to let his lips say what she
wanted to hear — she could feel the words forming as they kissed again. . . .
Again she broke away, listening, but as he pulled her close once more she
realized that he had said nothing — only ”Darling! Darling!“ in that
deep, sad whisper that always made her cry. Humbly, obediently, her emotions
yielded to him and the tears streamed down her face, but her heart kept on
crying: “Ask me — oh, Anson, dearest, ask me!”
“Paula. . . . Paula!“
The words wrung her heart like hands, and Anson, feeling her
tremble, knew that emotion was enough. He need say no more, commit their
destinies to no practical enigma. Why should he, when he might hold her so,
biding his own time, for another year — forever? He was considering them both,
her more than himself. For a moment, when she said suddenly that she must go
back to her hotel, he hesitated, thinking, first, “This is the moment, after
all,” and then: “No, let it wait— she is mine. . . . ”
He had forgotten that Paula too was worn away inside with the
strain of three years. Her mood passed forever in the night.
He went back to New York next morning filled with a certain
restless dissatisfaction. There was a pretty débutante he knew in his car, and
for two days they took their meals together. At first he told her a little
about Paula and invented an esoteric incompatibility that was keeping them
apart. The girl was of a wild, impulsive nature, and she was flattered by
Anson’s confidences. Like Kipling’s soldier, he might have possessed himself of
most of her before he reached New York, but luckily he was sober and kept
control. Late in April, without warning, he received a telegram from Bar Harbor
in which Paula told him that she was engaged to Lowell Thayer, and that they
would be married immediately in Boston. What he never really believed could
happen had happened at last.
Anson filled himself with whiskey that morning, and going to the
office, carried on his work without a break — rather with a fear of what would
happen if he stopped. In the evening he went out as usual, saying nothing of
what had occurred; he was cordial, humorous, unabstracted. But one thing he
could not help — for three days, in any place, in any company, he would
suddenly bend his head into his hands and cry like a child.
V
In 1922 when Anson went abroad with the junior partner to
investigate some London loans, the journey intimated that he was to be taken
into the firm. He was twenty-seven now, a little heavy without being definitely
stout, and with a manner older than his years. Old people and young people
liked him and trusted him, and mothers felt safe when their daughters were in
his charge, for he had a way, when he came into a room, of putting himself on a
footing with the oldest and most conservative people there. “You and I,” he
seemed to say, “we’re solid. We understand.”
He had an instinctive and rather charitable knowledge of the
weaknesses of men and women, and, like a priest, it made him the more concerned
for the maintenance of outward forms. It was typical of him that every Sunday
morning he taught in a fashionable Episcopal Sunday-school — even though a cold
shower and a quick change into a cutaway coat were all that separated him from
the wild night before. Once, by some mutual instinct, several children got up
from the front row and moved to the last. He told this story frequently, and it
was usually greeted with hilarious laughter.
After his father’s death he was the practical head of his family,
and, in effect, guided the destinies of the younger children. Through a
complication his authority did not extend to his father’s estate, which was
administrated by his Uncle Robert, who was the horsey member of the family, a good-natured,
hard-drinking member of that set which centers about Wheatley Hills.
Uncle Robert and his wife, Edna, had been great friends of Anson’s
youth, and the former was disappointed when his nephew’s superiority failed to
take a horsey form. He backed him for a city club which was the most difficult
in America to enter — one could only join if one’s family had “helped to build
up New York” (or, in other words, were rich before 1880) — and when Anson,
after his election, neglected it for the Yale Club, Uncle Robert gave him a
little talk on the subject. But when on top of that Anson declined to enter
Robert Hunter’s own conservative and somewhat neglected brokerage house, his
manner grew cooler. Like a primary teacher who has taught all he knew, he slipped
out of Anson’s life.
There were so many friends in Anson’s life — scarcely one for whom
he had not done some unusual kindness and scarcely one whom he did not
occasionally embarrass by his bursts of rough conversation or his habit of
getting drunk whenever and however he liked. It annoyed him when any one else
blundered in that regard — about his own lapses he was always humorous. Odd
things happened to him and he told them with infectious laughter.
I was working in New York that spring, and I used to lunch with
him at the Yale Club, which my university was sharing until the completion of
our own. I had read of Paula’s marriage, and one afternoon, when I asked him
about her, something moved him to tell me the story. After that he frequently
invited me to family dinners at his house and behaved as though there was a
special relation between us, as though with his confidence a little of that
consuming memory had passed into me.
I found that despite the trusting mothers, his attitude toward
girls was not indiscriminately protective. It was up to the girl — if she
showed an inclination toward looseness, she must take care of herself, even
with him.
“Life,” he would explain sometimes, “has made a cynic of me.”
By life he meant Paula. Sometimes, especially when he was
drinking, it became a little twisted in his mind, and he thought that she had
callously thrown him over.
This “cynicism,” or rather his realization that naturally fast
girls were not worth sparing, led to his affair with Dolly Karger. It wasn’t
his only affair in those years, but it came nearest to touching him deeply, and
it had a profound effect upon his attitude toward life.
Dolly was the daughter of a notorious “publicist” who had married
into society. She herself grew up into the Junior League, came out at the
Plaza, and went to the Assembly; and only a few old families like the Hunters
could question whether or not she “belonged,” for her picture was often in the
papers, and she had more enviable attention than many girls who undoubtedly
did. She was dark-haired, with carmine lips and a high, lovely color, which she
concealed under pinkish-gray powder all through the first year out, because
high color was unfashionable — Victorian-pale was the thing to be. She wore
black, severe suits and stood with her hands in her pockets leaning a little
forward, with a humorous restraint on her face. She danced exquisitely — better
than anything she liked to dance — better than anything except making love.
Since she was ten she had always been in love, and, usually, with some boy who
didn’t respond to her. Those who did — and there were many — bored her after a
brief encounter, but for her failures she reserved the warmest spot in her
heart. When she met them she would always try once more — sometimes she succeeded,
more often she failed.
It never occurred to this gypsy of the unattainable that there was
a certain resemblance in those who refused to love her — they shared a hard
intuition that saw through to her weakness, not a weakness of emotion but a
weakness of rudder. Anson perceived this when he first met her, less than a
month after Paula’s marriage. He was drinking rather heavily, and he pretended
for a week that he was falling in love with her. Then he dropped her abruptly
and forgot — immediately he took up the commanding position in her heart.
Like so many girls of that day Dolly was slackly and indiscreetly
wild. The unconventionality of a slightly older generation had been simply one
facet of a post-war movement to discredit obsolete manners — Dolly’s was both
older and shabbier, and she saw in Anson the two extremes which the emotionally
shiftless woman seeks, an abandon to indulgence alternating with a protective
strength. In his character she felt both the sybarite and the solid rock, and
these two satisfied every need of her nature.
She felt that it was going to be difficult, but she mistook the
reason — she thought that Anson and his family expected a more spectacular
marriage, but she guessed immediately that her advantage lay in his tendency to
drink.
They met at the large débutante dances, but as her infatuation
increased they managed to be more and more together. Like most mothers, Mrs.
Karger believed that Anson was exceptionally reliable, so she allowed Dolly to
go with him to distant country clubs and suburban houses without inquiring
closely into their activities or questioning her explanations when they came in
late. At first these explanations might have been accurate, but Dolly’s worldly
ideas of capturing Anson were soon engulfed in the rising sweep of her emotion.
Kisses in the back of taxis and motor-cars were no longer enough; they did a
curious thing:
They dropped out of their world for a while and made another world
just beneath it where Anson’s tippling and Dolly’s irregular hours would be
less noticed and commented on. It was composed, this world, of varying elements
— several of Anson’s Yale friends and their wives, two or three young brokers
and bond salesmen and a handful of unattached men, fresh from college, with
money and a propensity to dissipation. What this world lacked in spaciousness
and scale it made up for by allowing them a liberty that it scarcely permitted
itself. Moreover, it centered around them and permitted Dolly the pleasure of a
faint condescension — a pleasure which Anson, whose whole life was a
condescension from the certitudes of his childhood, was unable to share.
He was not in love with her, and in the long feverish winter of
their affair he frequently told her so. In the spring he was weary — he wanted
to renew his life at some other source — moreover, he saw that either he must
break with her now or accept the responsibility of a definite seduction. Her
family’s encouraging attitude precipitated his decision — one evening when Mr.
Karger knocked discreetly at the library door to announce that he had left a
bottle of old brandy in the dining-room, Anson felt that life was hemming him
in. That night he wrote her a short letter in which he told her that he was
going on his vacation, and that in view of all the circumstances they had
better meet no more.
It was June. His family had closed up the house and gone to the
country, so he was living temporarily at the Yale Club. I had heard about his
affair with Dolly as it developed — accounts salted with humor, for he despised
unstable women, and granted them no place in the social edifice in which he
believed — and when he told me that night that he was definitely breaking with
her I was glad. I had seen Dolly here and there, and each time with a feeling
of pity at the hopelessness of her struggle, and of shame at knowing so much
about her that I had no right to know. She was what is known as “a pretty
little thing,” but there was a certain recklessness which rather fascinated me.
Her dedication to the goddess of waste would have been less obvious had she
been less spirited — she would most certainly throw herself away, but I was
glad when I heard that the sacrifice would not be consummated in my sight.
Anson was going to leave the letter of farewell at her house next
morning. It was one of the few houses left open in the Fifth Avenue district,
and he knew that the Kargers, acting upon erroneous information from Dolly, had
foregone a trip abroad to give their daughter her chance. As he stepped out the
door of the Yale Club into Madison Avenue the postman passed him, and he
followed back inside. The first letter that caught his eye was in Dolly’s hand.
He knew what it would be — a lonely and tragic monologue, full of
the reproaches he knew, the invoked memories, the “I wonder if’s” — all the
immemorial intimacies that he had communicated to Paula Legendre in what seemed
another age. Thumbing over some bills, he brought it on top again and opened
it. To his surprise it was a short, somewhat formal note, which said that Dolly
would be unable to go to the country with him for the weekend, because Perry
Hull from Chicago had unexpectedly come to town. It added that Anson had
brought this on himself: “ — if I felt that you loved me as I love you I would
go with you at any time, any place, but Perry is so nice, and he so much
wants me to marry him — ”
Anson smiled contemptuously — he had had experience with such
decoy epistles. Moreover, he knew how Dolly had labored over this plan,
probably sent for the faithful Perry and calculated the time of his arrival —
even labored over the note so that it would make him jealous without driving
him away. Like most compromises, it had neither force nor vitality but only a
timorous despair.
Suddenly he was angry. He sat down in the lobby and read it again.
Then he went to the phone, called Dolly and told her in his clear, compelling
voice that he had received her note and would call for her at five o’clock as
they had previously planned. Scarcely waiting for the pretended uncertainty of
her “Perhaps I can see you for an hour,” he hung up the receiver and went down
to his office. On the way he tore his own letter into bits and dropped it in
the street.
He was not jealous — she meant nothing to him — but at her
pathetic ruse everything stubborn and self-indulgent in him came to the
surface. It was a presumption from a mental inferior and it could not be
overlooked. If she wanted to know to whom she belonged she would see.
He was on the door-step at quarter past five. Dolly was dressed
for the street, and he listened in silence to the paragraph of “I can only see
you for an hour,” which she had begun on the phone.
“Put on your hat, Dolly,” he said, “we’ll take a walk.”
They strolled up Madison Avenue and over to Fifth while Anson’s
shirt dampened upon his portly body in the deep heat. He talked little,
scolding her, making no love to her, but before they had walked six blocks she
was his again, apologizing for the note, offering not to see Perry at all as an
atonement, offering anything. She thought that he had come because he was
beginning to love her.
“I’m hot,” he said when they reached 71st Street. “This is a
winter suit. If I stop by the house and change, would you mind waiting for me
downstairs? I’ll only be a minute.”
She was happy; the intimacy of his being hot, of any physical fact
about him, thrilled her. When they came to the iron-grated door and Anson took
out his key she experienced a sort of delight.
Down-stairs it was dark, and after he ascended in the lift Dolly
raised a curtain and looked out through opaque lace at the houses over the way.
She heard the lift machinery stop, and with the notion of teasing him pressed
the button that brought it down. Then on what was more than an impulse she got
into it and sent it up to what she guessed was his floor.
“Anson,” she called, laughing a little.
“Just a minute,” he answered from his bedroom . . . then after a
brief delay: “Now you can come in.”
He had changed and was buttoning his vest. “This is my room,” he
said lightly. “How do you like it?”
She caught sight of Paula’s picture on the wall and stared at it
in fascination, just as Paula had stared at the pictures of Anson’s childish
sweethearts five years before. She knew something about Paula — sometimes she
tortured herself with fragments of the story.
Suddenly she came close to Anson, raising her arms. They embraced.
Outside the area window a soft artificial twilight already hovered, though the
sun was still bright on a back roof across the way. In half an hour the room
would be quite dark. The uncalculated opportunity overwhelmed them, made them
both breathless, and they clung more closely. It was eminent, inevitable. Still
holding one another, they raised their heads — their eyes fell together upon
Paula’s picture, staring down at them from the wall.
Suddenly Anson dropped his arms, and sitting down at his desk
tried the drawer with a bunch of keys.
“Like a drink?” he asked in a gruff voice.
“No, Anson.”
He poured himself half a tumbler of whiskey, swallowed it, and
then opened the door into the hall.
“Come on,” he said.
Dolly hesitated.
“Anson — I’m going to the country with you tonight, after all. You
understand that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” he answered brusquely.
In Dolly’s car they rode on to Long Island, closer in their
emotions than they had ever been before. They knew what would happen — not with
Paula’s face to remind them that something was lacking, but when they were
alone in the still, hot Long Island night they did not care.
The estate in Port Washington where they were to spend the week-end
belonged to a cousin of Anson’s who had married a Montana copper operator. An
interminable drive began at the lodge and twisted under imported poplar
saplings toward a huge, pink, Spanish house. Anson had often visited there
before.
After dinner they danced at the Linx Club. About midnight Anson
assured himself that his cousins would not leave before two — then he explained
that Dolly was tired; he would take her home and return to the dance later.
Trembling a little with excitement, they got into a borrowed car together and
drove to Port Washington. As they reached the lodge he stopped and spoke to the
night-watchman.
“When are you making a round, Carl?”
“Right away.”
“Then you’ll be here till everybody’s in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. Listen: if any automobile, no matter whose it is,
turns in at this gate, I want you to phone the house immediately.” He put a
five-dollar bill into Carl’s hand. “Is that clear?”
“Yes, Mr. Anson.” Being of the Old World, he neither winked nor
smiled. Yet Dolly sat with her face turned slightly away.
Anson had a key. Once inside he poured a drink for both of them —
Dolly left hers untouched — then he ascertained definitely the location of the
phone, and found that it was within easy hearing distance of their rooms, both
of which were on the first floor.
Five minutes later he knocked at the door of Dolly’s room.
“Anson?” He went in, closing the door behind him. She was in bed,
leaning up anxiously with elbows on the pillow; sitting beside her he took her
in his arms.
“Anson, darling.”
He didn’t answer.
“Anson. . . . Anson! I love you. . . . Say you love me. Say it now
— can’t you say it now? Even if you don’t mean it?”
He did not listen. Over her head he perceived that the picture of
Paula was hanging here upon this wall.
He got up and went close to it. The frame gleamed faintly with
thrice-reflected moonlight — within was a blurred shadow of a face that he saw
he did not know. Almost sobbing, he turned around and stared with abomination
at the little figure on the bed.
“This is all foolishness,” he said thickly. “I don’t know what I
was thinking about. I don’t love you and you’d better wait for somebody that
loves you. I don’t love you a bit, can’t you understand?”
His voice broke, and he went hurriedly out. Back in the salon he was
pouring himself a drink with uneasy fingers, when the front door opened
suddenly, and his cousin came in.
“Why, Anson, I hear Dolly’s sick,” she began solicitously. “I hear
she’s sick. . . . ”
“It was nothing,” he interrupted, raising his voice so that it
would carry into Dolly’s room. “She was a little tired. She went to bed.”
For a long time afterward Anson believed that a protective God
sometimes interfered in human affairs. But Dolly Karger, lying awake and
staring at the ceiling, never again believed in anything at all.
VI
When Dolly married during the following autumn, Anson was in
London on business. Like Paula’s marriage, it was sudden, but it affected him
in a different way. At first he felt that it was funny, and had an inclination
to laugh when he thought of it. Later it depressed him — it made him feel old.
There was something repetitive about it — why, Paula and Dolly had
belonged to different generations. He had a foretaste of the sensation of a man
of forty who hears that the daughter of an old flame has married. He wired
congratulations and, as was not the case with Paula, they were sincere — he had
never really hoped that Paula would be happy.
When he returned to New York, he was made a partner in the firm,
and, as his responsibilities increased, he had less time on his hands. The
refusal of a life-insurance company to issue him a policy made such an
impression on him that he stopped drinking for a year, and claimed that he felt
better physically, though I think he missed the convivial recounting of those
Celliniesque adventures which, in his early twenties, had played such a part of
his life. But he never abandoned the Yale Club. He was a figure there, a
personality, and the tendency of his class, who were now seven years out of
college, to drift away to more sober haunts was checked by his presence.
His day was never too full nor his mind too weary to give any sort
of aid to any one who asked it. What had been done at first through pride and
superiority had become a habit and a passion. And there was always something —
a younger brother in trouble at New Haven, a quarrel to be patched up between a
friend and his wife, a position to be found for this man, an investment for
that. But his specialty was the solving of problems for young married people.
Young married people fascinated him and their apartments were almost sacred to
him — he knew the story of their love-affair, advised them where to live and
how, and remembered their babies’ names. Toward young wives his attitude was
circumspect: he never abused the trust which their husbands — strangely enough
in view of his unconcealed irregularities — invariably reposed in him.
He came to take a vicarious pleasure in happy marriages, and to be
inspired to an almost equally pleasant melancholy by those that went astray.
Not a season passed that he did not witness the collapse of an affair that
perhaps he himself had fathered. When Paula was divorced and almost immediately
remarried to another Bostonian, he talked about her to me all one afternoon. He
would never love any one as he had loved Paula, but he insisted that he no
longer cared.
“I’ll never marry,” he came to say; “I’ve seen too much of it, and
I know a happy marriage is a very rare thing. Besides, I’m too old.”
But he did believe in marriage. Like all men who spring from a
happy and successful marriage, he believed in it passionately — nothing he had
seen would change his belief, his cynicism dissolved upon it like air. But he
did really believe he was too old. At twenty-eight he began to accept with
equanimity the prospect of marrying without romantic love; he resolutely chose
a New York girl of his own class, pretty, intelligent, congenial, above
reproach — and set about falling in love with her. The things he had said to
Paula with sincerity, to other girls with grace, he could no longer say at all
without smiling, or with the force necessary to convince.
“When I’m forty,” he told his friends, “I’ll be ripe. I’ll fall
for some chorus girl like the rest.”
Nevertheless, he persisted in his attempt. His mother wanted to
see him married, and he could now well afford it — he had a seat on the Stock
Exchange, and his earned income came to twenty-five thousand a year. The idea
was agreeable: when his friends — he spent most of his time with the set he and
Dolly had evolved — closed themselves in behind domestic doors at night, he no
longer rejoiced in his freedom. He even wondered if he should have married
Dolly. Not even Paula had loved him more, and he was learning the rarity, in a
single life, of encountering true emotion.
Just as this mood began to creep over him a disquieting story
reached his ear. His aunt Edna, a woman just this side of forty, was carrying
on an open intrigue with a dissolute, hard-drinking young man named Cary
Sloane. Every one knew of it except Anson’s Uncle Robert, who for fifteen years
had talked long in clubs and taken his wife for granted.
Anson heard the story again and again with increasing annoyance.
Something of his old feeling for his uncle came back to him, a feeling that was
more than personal, a reversion toward that family solidarity on which he had
based his pride. His intuition singled out the essential point of the affair,
which was that his uncle shouldn’t be hurt. It was his first experiment in
unsolicited meddling, but with his knowledge of Edna’s character he felt that
he could handle the matter better than a district judge or his uncle.
His uncle was in Hot Springs. Anson traced down the sources of the
scandal so that there should be no possibility of mistake and then he called
Edna and asked her to lunch with him at the Plaza next day. Something in his
tone must have frightened her, for she was reluctant, but he insisted, putting
off the date until she had no excuse for refusing.
She met him at the appointed time in the Plaza lobby, a lovely,
faded, gray-eyed blonde in a coat of Russian sable. Five great rings, cold with
diamonds and emeralds, sparkled on her slender hands. It occurred to Anson that
it was his father’s intelligence and not his uncle’s that had earned the fur
and the stones, the rich brilliance that buoyed up her passing beauty.
Though Edna scented his hostility, she was unprepared for the
directness of his approach.
“Edna, I’m astonished at the way you’ve been acting,” he said in a
strong, frank voice. “At first I couldn’t believe it.”
“Believe what?” she demanded sharply.
“You needn’t pretend with me, Edna. I’m talking about Cary Sloane.
Aside from any other consideration, I didn’t think you could treat Uncle Robert
— ”
“Now look here, Anson — ” she began angrily, but his peremptory
voice broke through hers:
“ — and your children in such a way. You’ve been married eighteen
years, and you’re old enough to know better.”
“You can’t talk to me like that! You — ”
“Yes, I can. Uncle Robert has always been my best friend.” He was
tremendously moved. He felt a real distress about his uncle, about his three
young cousins.
Edna stood up, leaving her crab-flake cocktail untasted.
“This is the silliest thing — ”
“Very well, if you won’t listen to me I’ll go to Uncle Robert and
tell him the whole story — he’s bound to hear it sooner or later. And afterward
I’ll go to old Moses Sloane.”
Edna faltered back into her chair.
“Don’t talk so loud,” she begged him. Her eyes blurred with tears.
“You have no idea how your voice carries. You might have chosen a less public
place to make all these crazy accusations.”
He didn’t answer.
“Oh, you never liked me, I know,” she went on. “You’re just taking
advantage of some silly gossip to try and break up the only interesting
friendship I’ve ever had. What did I ever do to make you hate me so?”
Still Anson waited. There would be the appeal to his chivalry,
then to his pity, finally to his superior sophistication — when he had
shouldered his way through all these there would be admissions, and he could
come to grips with her. By being silent, by being impervious, by returning
constantly to his main weapon, which was his own true emotion, he bullied her
into frantic despair as the luncheon hour slipped away. At two o’clock she took
out a mirror and a handkerchief, shined away the marks of her tears and
powdered the slight hollows where they had lain. She had agreed to meet him at
her own house at five.
When he arrived she was stretched on a chaise-longue which was
covered with cretonne for the summer, and the tears he had called up at
luncheon seemed still to be standing in her eyes. Then he was aware of Cary
Sloane’s dark anxious presence upon the cold hearth.
“What’s this idea of yours?” broke out Sloane immediately. “I
understand you invited Edna to lunch and then threatened her on the basis of
some cheap scandal.”
Anson sat down.
“I have no reason to think it’s only scandal.”
“I hear you’re going to take it to Robert Hunter, and to my
father.”
Anson nodded.
“Either you break it off — or I will,” he said.
“What God damned business is it of yours, Hunter?”
“Don’t lose your temper, Cary,” said Edna nervously. “It’s only a
question of showing him how absurd — ”
“For one thing, it’s my name that’s being handed around,”
interrupted Anson. “That’s all that concerns you, Cary.”
“Edna isn’t a member of your family.”
“She most certainly is!” His anger mounted. “Why — she owes this
house and the rings on her fingers to my father’s brains. When Uncle Robert
married her she didn’t have a penny.”
They all looked at the rings as if they had a significant bearing
on the situation. Edna made a gesture to take them from her hand.
“I guess they’re not the only rings in the world,” said Sloane.
“Oh, this is absurd,” cried Edna. “Anson, will you listen to me?
I’ve found out how the silly story started. It was a maid I discharged who went
right to the Chilicheffs — all these Russians pump things out of their servants
and then put a false meaning on them.” She brought down her fist angrily on the
table: “And after Tom lent them the limousine for a whole month when we were
South last winter — ”
“Do you see?” demanded Sloane eagerly. “This maid got hold of the
wrong end of the thing. She knew that Edna and I were friends, and she carried
it to the Chilicheffs. In Russia they assume that if a man and a woman — ”
He enlarged the theme to a disquisition upon social relations in
the Caucasus.
“If that’s the case it better be explained to Uncle Robert,” said
Anson dryly, “so that when the rumors do reach him he’ll know they’re not
true.”
Adopting the method he had followed with Edna at luncheon he let
them explain it all away. He knew that they were guilty and that presently they
would cross the line from explanation into justification and convict themselves
more definitely than he could ever do. By seven they had taken the desperate
step of telling him the truth — Robert Hunter’s neglect, Edna’s empty life, the
casual dalliance that had flamed up into passion — but like so many true
stories it had the misfortune of being old, and its enfeebled body beat
helplessly against the armor of Anson’s will. The threat to go to Sloane’s
father sealed their helplessness, for the latter, a retired cotton broker out
of Alabama, was a notorious fundamentalist who controlled his son by a rigid
allowance and the promise that at his next vagary the allowance would stop
forever.
They dined at a small French restaurant, and the discussion
continued — at one time Sloane resorted to physical threats, a little later
they were both imploring him to give them time. But Anson was obdurate. He saw
that Edna was breaking up, and that her spirit must not be refreshed by any
renewal of their passion.
At two o’clock in a small night-club on 53d Street, Edna’s nerves
suddenly collapsed, and she cried to go home. Sloane had been drinking heavily
all evening, and he was faintly maudlin, leaning on the table and weeping a
little with his face in his hands. Quickly Anson gave them his terms. Sloane
was to leave town for six months, and he must be gone within forty-eight hours.
When he returned there was to be no resumption of the affair, but at the end of
a year Edna might, if she wished, tell Robert Hunter that she wanted a divorce
and go about it in the usual way.
He paused, gaining confidence from their faces for his final word.
“Or there’s another thing you can do,” he said slowly, “if Edna
wants to leave her children, there’s nothing I can do to prevent your running
off together.”
“I want to go home!” cried Edna again. “Oh, haven’t you done
enough to us for one day?”
Outside it was dark, save for a blurred glow from Sixth Avenue
down the street. In that light those two who had been lovers looked for the
last time into each other’s tragic faces, realizing that between them there was
not enough youth and strength to avert their eternal parting. Sloane walked
suddenly off down the street and Anson tapped a dozing taxi-driver on the arm.
It was almost four; there was a patient flow of cleaning water
along the ghostly pavement of Fifth Avenue, and the shadows of two night women
flitted over the dark façade of St. Thomas’s church. Then the desolate
shrubbery of Central Park where Anson had often played as a child, and the
mounting numbers, significant as names, of the marching streets. This was his
city, he thought, where his name had flourished through five generations. No
change could alter the permanence of its place here, for change itself was the
essential substratum by which he and those of his name identified themselves
with the spirit of New York. Resourcefulness and a powerful will — for his
threats in weaker hands would have been less than nothing — had beaten the
gathering dust from his uncle’s name, from the name of his family, from even
this shivering figure that sat beside him in the car.
Cary Sloane’s body was found next morning on the lower shelf of a
pillar of Queensboro Bridge. In the darkness and in his excitement he had
thought that it was the water flowing black beneath him, but in less than a
second it made no possible difference — unless he had planned to think one last
thought of Edna, and call out her name as he struggled feebly in the water.
VII
Anson never blamed himself for his part in this affair — the
situation which brought it about had not been of his making. But the just
suffer with the unjust, and he found that his oldest and somehow his most
precious friendship was over. He never knew what distorted story Edna told, but
he was welcome in his uncle’s house no longer.
Just before Christmas Mrs. Hunter retired to a select Episcopal heaven,
and Anson became the responsible head of his family. An unmarried aunt who had
lived with them for years ran the house, and attempted with helpless
inefficiency to chaperone the younger girls. All the children were less
self-reliant than Anson, more conventional both in their virtues and in their
shortcomings. Mrs. Hunter’s death had postponed the début of one daughter and
the wedding of another. Also it had taken something deeply material from all of
them, for with her passing the quiet, expensive superiority of the Hunters came
to an end.
For one thing, the estate, considerably diminished by two
inheritance taxes and soon to be divided among six children, was not a notable
fortune any more. Anson saw a tendency in his youngest sisters to speak rather
respectfully of families that hadn’t “existed” twenty years ago. His own
feeling of precedence was not echoed in them — sometimes they were
conventionally snobbish, that was all. For another thing, this was the last
summer they would spend on the Connecticut estate; the clamor against it was
too loud: “Who wants to waste the best months of the year shut up in that dead
old town?” Reluctantly he yielded — the house would go into the market in the
fall, and next summer they would rent a smaller place in Westchester County. It
was a step down from the expensive simplicity of his father’s idea, and, while
he sympathized with the revolt, it also annoyed him; during his mother’s
lifetime he had gone up there at least every other week-end — even in the
gayest summers.
Yet he himself was part of this change, and his strong instinct
for life had turned him in his twenties from the hollow obsequies of that
abortive leisure class. He did not see this clearly — he still felt that there
was a norm, a standard of society. But there was no norm, it was doubtful if
there had ever been a true norm in New York. The few who still paid and fought
to enter a particular set succeeded only to find that as a society it scarcely
functioned — or, what was more alarming, that the Bohemia from which they fled
sat above them at table.
At twenty-nine Anson’s chief concern was his own growing
loneliness. He was sure now that he would never marry. The number of weddings
at which he had officiated as best man or usher was past all counting — there
was a drawer at home that bulged with the official neckties of this or that
wedding-party, neckties standing for romances that had not endured a year, for
couples who had passed completely from his life. Scarf-pins, gold pencils,
cuff-buttons, presents from a generation of grooms had passed through his
jewel-box and been lost — and with every ceremony he was less and less able to
imagine himself in the groom’s place. Under his hearty good-will toward all
those marriages there was despair about his own.
And as he neared thirty he became not a little depressed at the
inroads that marriage, especially lately, had made upon his friendships. Groups
of people had a disconcerting tendency to dissolve and disappear. The men from
his own college — and it was upon them he had expended the most time and
affection — were the most elusive of all. Most of them were drawn deep into
domesticity, two were dead, one lived abroad, one was in Hollywood writing
continuities for pictures that Anson went faithfully to see.
Most of them, however, were permanent commuters with an intricate
family life centering around some suburban country club, and it was from these
that he felt his estrangement most keenly.
In the early days of their married life they had all needed him;
he gave them advice about their slim finances, he exorcised their doubts about
the advisability of bringing a baby into two rooms and a bath, especially he
stood for the great world outside. But now their financial troubles were in the
past and the fearfully expected child had evolved into an absorbing family.
They were always glad to see old Anson, but they dressed up for him and tried
to impress him with their present importance, and kept their troubles to
themselves. They needed him no longer.
A few weeks before his thirtieth birthday the last of his early
and intimate friends was married. Anson acted in his usual rôle of best man,
gave his usual silver tea-service, and went down to the usual Homeric to
say good-by. It was a hot Friday afternoon in May, and as he walked from the
pier he realized that Saturday closing had begun and he was free until Monday
morning.
“Go where?” he asked himself.
The Yale Club, of course; bridge until dinner, then four or five
raw cocktails in somebody’s room and a pleasant confused evening. He regretted
that this afternoon’s groom wouldn’t be along — they had always been able to
cram so much into such nights: they knew how to attach women and how to get rid
of them, how much consideration any girl deserved from their intelligent
hedonism. A party was an adjusted thing — you took certain girls to certain
places and spent just so much on their amusement; you drank a little, not much,
more than you ought to drink, and at a certain time in the morning you stood up
and said you were going home. You avoided college boys, sponges, future
engagements, fights, sentiment, and indiscretions. That was the way it was
done. All the rest was dissipation.
In the morning you were never violently sorry — you made no
resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of
order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it,
and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another
party.
The lobby of the Yale Club was unpopulated. In the bar three very
young alumni looked up at him, momentarily and without curiosity.
“Hello there, Oscar,” he said to the bartender. “Mr. Cahill been
around this afternoon?”
“Mr. Cahill’s gone to New Haven.”
“Oh . . . that so?”
“Gone to the ball game. Lot of men gone up.”
Anson looked once again into the lobby, considered for a moment,
and then walked out and over to Fifth Avenue. From the broad window of one of
his clubs — one that he had scarcely visited in five years — a gray man with
watery eyes stared down at him. Anson looked quickly away — that figure sitting
in vacant resignation, in supercilious solitude, depressed him. He stopped and,
retracing his steps, started over 47th Street toward Teak Warden’s apartment.
Teak and his wife had once been his most familiar friends — it was a household
where he and Dolly Karger had been used to go in the days of their affair. But
Teak had taken to drink, and his wife had remarked publicly that Anson was a
bad influence on him. The remark reached Anson in an exaggerated form — when it
was finally cleared up, the delicate spell of intimacy was broken, never to be
renewed.
“Is Mr. Warden at home?” he inquired.
“They’ve gone to the country.”
The fact unexpectedly cut at him. They were gone to the country
and he hadn’t known. Two years before he would have known the date, the hour,
come up at the last moment for a final drink, and planned his first visit to
them. Now they had gone without a word.
Anson looked at his watch and considered a week-end with his
family, but the only train was a local that would jolt through the aggressive
heat for three hours. And to-morrow in the country, and Sunday — he was in no
mood for porch-bridge with polite undergraduates, and dancing after dinner at a
rural roadhouse, a diminutive of gaiety which his father had estimated too
well.
“Oh, no,” he said to himself. . . . “No.”
He was a dignified, impressive young man, rather stout now, but
otherwise unmarked by dissipation. He could have been cast for a pillar of
something — at times you were sure it was not society, at others nothing else —
for the law, for the church. He stood for a few minutes motionless on the
sidewalk in front of a 47th Street apartment-house; for almost the first time
in his life he had nothing whatever to do.
Then he began to walk briskly up Fifth Avenue, as if he had just
been reminded of an important engagement there. The necessity of dissimulation
is one of the few characteristics that we share with dogs, and I think of Anson
on that day as some well-bred specimen who had been disappointed at a familiar
back door. He was going to see Nick, once a fashionable bartender in demand at
all private dances, and now employed in cooling non-alcoholic champagne among
the labyrinthine cellars of the Plaza Hotel.
“Nick,” he said, “what’s happened to everything?”
“Dead,” Nick said.
“Make me a whiskey sour.” Anson handed a pint bottle over the
counter. “Nick, the girls are different; I had a little girl in Brooklyn and
she got married last week without letting me know.”
“That a fact? Ha-ha-ha,” responded Nick diplomatically. “Slipped
it over on you.”
“Absolutely,” said Anson. “And I was out with her the night
before.”
“Ha-ha-ha,” said Nick, “ha-ha-ha!”
“Do you remember the wedding, Nick, in Hot Springs where I had the
waiters and the musicians singing ‘God save the King’?”
“Now where was that, Mr. Hunter?” Nick concentrated doubtfully.
“Seems to me that was — ”
“Next time they were back for more, and I began to wonder how much
I’d paid them,” continued Anson.
“ — seems to me that was at Mr. Trenholm’s wedding.”
“Don’t know him,” said Anson decisively. He was offended that a
strange name should intrude upon his reminiscences; Nick perceived this.
“Naw — aw — ” he admitted, “I ought to know that. It was one of your
crowd — Brakins. . . . Baker — ”
“Bicker Baker,” said Anson responsively. “They put me in a hearse
after it was over and covered me up with flowers and drove me away.”
“Ha-ha-ha,” said Nick. “Ha-ha-ha.”
Nick’s simulation of the old family servant paled presently and
Anson went up-stairs to the lobby. He looked around —his eyes met the glance of
an unfamiliar clerk at the desk, then fell upon a flower from the morning’s
marriage hesitating in the mouth of a brass cuspidor. He went out and walked
slowly toward the blood-red sun over Columbus Circle. Suddenly he turned around
and, retracing his steps to the Plaza, immured himself in a telephone-booth.
Later he said that he tried to get me three times that afternoon,
that he tried every one who might be in New York —men and girls he had not seen
for years, an artist’s model of his college days whose faded number was still
in his address book — Central told him that even the exchange existed no
longer. At length his quest roved into the country, and he held brief
disappointing conversations with emphatic butlers and maids. So-and-so was out,
riding, swimming, playing golf, sailed to Europe last week. Who shall I say
phoned?
It was intolerable that he should pass the evening alone — the
private reckonings which one plans for a moment of leisure lose every charm
when the solitude is enforced. There were always women of a sort, but the ones
he knew had temporarily vanished, and to pass a New York evening in the hired
company of a stranger never occurred to him — he would have considered that
that was something shameful and secret, the diversion of a travelling salesman
in a strange town.
Anson paid the telephone bill — the girl tried unsuccessfully to
joke with him about its size — and for the second time that afternoon started
to leave the Plaza and go he knew not where. Near the revolving door the figure
of a woman, obviously with child, stood sideways to the light — a sheer beige
cape fluttered at her shoulders when the door turned and, each time, she looked
impatiently toward it as if she were weary of waiting. At the first sight of
her a strong nervous thrill of familiarity went over him, but not until he was
within five feet of her did he realize that it was Paula.
“Why, Anson Hunter!”
His heart turned over.
“Why, Paula — ”
“Why, this is wonderful. I can’t believe it, Anson!“
She took both his hands, and he saw in the freedom of the gesture
that the memory of him had lost poignancy to her. But not to him — he felt that
old mood that she evoked in him stealing over his brain, that gentleness with
which he had always met her optimism as if afraid to mar its surface.
“We’re at Rye for the summer. Pete had to come East on business —
you know of course I’m Mrs. Peter Hagerty now — so we brought the children and
took a house. You’ve got to come out and see us.”
“Can I?” he asked directly. “When?”
“When you like. Here’s Pete.” The revolving door functioned,
giving up a fine tall man of thirty with a tanned face and a trim mustache. His
immaculate fitness made a sharp contrast with Anson’s increasing bulk, which
was obvious under the faintly tight cut-away coat.
“You oughtn’t to be standing,” said Hagerty to his wife. “Let’s
sit down here.” He indicated lobby chairs, but Paula hesitated.
“I’ve got to go right home,” she said. “Anson, why don’t you — why
don’t you come out and have dinner with us to-night? We’re just getting
settled, but if you can stand that — ”
Hagerty confirmed the invitation cordially.
“Come out for the night.”
Their car waited in front of the hotel, and Paula with a tired
gesture sank back against silk cushions in the corner.
“There’s so much I want to talk to you about,” she said, “it seems
hopeless.”
“I want to hear about you.”
“Well” — she smiled at Hagerty — “that would take a long time too.
I have three children — by my first marriage. The oldest is five, then four,
then three.” She smiled again. “I didn’t waste much time having them, did I?”
“Boys?”
“A boy and two girls. Then — oh, a lot of things happened, and I
got a divorce in Paris a year ago and married Pete. That’s all — except that
I’m awfully happy.”
In Rye they drove up to a large house near the Beach Club, from
which there issued presently three dark, slim children who broke from an
English governess and approached them with an esoteric cry. Abstractedly and
with difficulty Paula took each one into her arms, a caress which they accepted
stiffly, as they had evidently been told not to bump into Mummy. Even against
their fresh faces Paula’s skin showed scarcely any weariness — for all her
physical languor she seemed younger than when he had last seen her at Palm
Beach seven years ago.
At dinner she was preoccupied, and afterward, during the homage to
the radio, she lay with closed eyes on the sofa, until Anson wondered if his
presence at this time were not an intrusion. But at nine o’clock, when Hagerty
rose and said pleasantly that he was going to leave them by themselves for a
while, she began to talk slowly about herself and the past.
“My first baby,” she said — “the one we call Darling, the biggest
little girl — I wanted to die when I knew I was going to have her, because
Lowell was like a stranger to me. It didn’t seem as though she could be my own.
I wrote you a letter and tore it up. Oh, you were so bad to me, Anson.”
It was the dialogue again, rising and falling. Anson felt a sudden
quickening of memory.
“Weren’t you engaged once?” she asked — “a girl named Dolly
something?”
“I wasn’t ever engaged. I tried to be engaged, but I never loved
anybody but you, Paula.”
“Oh,” she said. Then after a moment: “This baby is the first one I
ever really wanted. You see, I’m in love now — at last.”
He didn’t answer, shocked at the treachery of her remembrance. She
must have seen that the “at last” bruised him, for she continued:
“I was infatuated with you, Anson — you could make me do anything
you liked. But we wouldn’t have been happy. I’m not smart enough for you. I
don’t like things to be complicated like you do.” She paused. “You’ll never
settle down,” she said.
The phrase struck at him from behind — it was an accusation that
of all accusations he had never merited.
“I could settle down if women were different,” he said. “If I
didn’t understand so much about them, if women didn’t spoil you for other
women, if they had only a little pride. If I could go to sleep for a while and
wake up into a home that was really mine — why, that’s what I’m made for,
Paula, that’s what women have seen in me and liked in me. It’s only that I
can’t get through the preliminaries any more.”
Hagerty came in a little before eleven; after a whiskey Paula stood
up and announced that she was going to bed. She went over and stood by her
husband.
“Where did you go, dearest?” she demanded.
“I had a drink with Ed Saunders.”
“I was worried. I thought maybe you’d run away.”
She rested her head against his coat.
“He’s sweet, isn’t he, Anson?” she demanded.
“Absolutely,” said Anson, laughing.
She raised her face to her husband.
“Well, I’m ready,” she said. She turned to Anson: “Do you want to
see our family gymnastic stunt?”
“Yes,” he said in an interested voice.
“All right. Here we go!”
Hagerty picked her up easily in his arms.
“This is called the family acrobatic stunt,” said Paula. “He
carries me up-stairs. Isn’t it sweet of him?”
“Yes,” said Anson.
Hagerty bent his head slightly until his face touched Paula’s.
“And I love him,” she said. “I’ve just been telling you, haven’t
I, Anson?”
“Yes,” he said.
“He’s the dearest thing that ever lived in this world; aren’t you,
darling? . . . Well, good night. Here we go. Isn’t he strong?”
“Yes,” Anson said.
“You’ll find a pair of Pete’s pajamas laid out for you. Sweet
dreams — see you at breakfast.”
“Yes,” Anson said.
VIII
The older members of the firm insisted that Anson should go abroad
for the summer. He had scarcely had a vacation in seven years, they said. He
was stale and needed a change. Anson resisted.
“If I go,” he declared, “I won’t come back any more.”
“That’s absurd, old man. You’ll be back in three months with all
this depression gone. Fit as ever.”
“No.” He shook his head stubbornly. “If I stop, I won’t go back to
work. If I stop, that means I’ve given up — I’m through.”
“We’ll take a chance on that. Stay six months if you like — we’re
not afraid you’ll leave us. Why, you’d be miserable if you didn’t work.”
They arranged his passage for him. They liked Anson — every one
liked Anson — and the change that had been coming over him cast a sort of pall
over the office. The enthusiasm that had invariably signalled up business, the
consideration toward his equals and his inferiors, the lift of his vital
presence — within the past four months his intense nervousness had melted down
these qualities into the fussy pessimism of a man of forty. On every
transaction in which he was involved he acted as a drag and a strain.
“If I go I’ll never come back,” he said.
Three days before he sailed Paula Legendre Hagerty died in
childbirth. I was with him a great deal then, for we were crossing together,
but for the first time in our friendship he told me not a word of how he felt,
nor did I see the slightest sign of emotion. His chief preoccupation was with
the fact that he was thirty years old — he would turn the conversation to the
point where he could remind you of it and then fall silent, as if he assumed
that the statement would start a chain of thought sufficient to itself. Like his
partners, I was amazed at the change in him, and I was glad when the Paris
moved off into the wet space between the worlds, leaving his principality
behind.
“How about a drink?” he suggested.
We walked into the bar with that defiant feeling that characterizes
the day of departure and ordered four Martinis. After one cocktail a change
came over him — he suddenly reached across and slapped my knee with the first
joviality I had seen him exhibit for months.
“Did you see that girl in the red tam?” he demanded, “the one with
the high color who had the two police dogs down to bid her good-by.”
“She’s pretty,” I agreed.
“I looked her up in the purser’s office and found out that she’s
alone. I’m going down to see the steward in a few minutes. We’ll have dinner
with her to-night.”
After a while he left me, and within an hour he was walking up and
down the deck with her, talking to her in his strong, clear voice. Her red tam
was a bright spot of color against the steel-green sea, and from time to time
she looked up with a flashing bob of her head, and smiled with amusement and
interest, and anticipation. At dinner we had champagne, and were very joyous —
afterward Anson ran the pool with infectious gusto, and several people who had
seen me with him asked me his name. He and the girl were talking and laughing
together on a lounge in the bar when I went to bed.
I saw less of him on the trip than I had hoped. He wanted to
arrange a foursome, but there was no one available, so I saw him only at meals.
Sometimes, though, he would have a cocktail in the bar, and he told me about
the girl in the red tam, and his adventures with her, making them all bizarre
and amusing, as he had a way of doing, and I was glad that he was himself
again, or at least the self that I knew, and with which I felt at home. I don’t
think he was ever happy unless some one was in love with him, responding to him
like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him
something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would
always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest
hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.