Twilight Sleep (10 page)

It was exasperating, the way the Vollard girl lurked and ogled…
Undoubtedly she was their best typist: mechanically perfect, with a
smattering of French and Italian useful in linguistic emergencies.
There could be no question of replacing her. But, apart from her
job, what a poor Poll! And always—there was no denying it, the
office smiled over it—always finding excuses to intrude on
Manford's privacy: a hurry trunk–call, a signature forgotten, a
final question to ask, a message from one of the other members of
the firm … she seized her pretexts cleverly… And when she
left him nowadays, he always got up, squared his shoulders, studied
himself critically in the mirror over the mantelpiece, and hated
her the more for having caused him to do anything so silly.

This afternoon her excuse had been flimsier than usual: a new point
to be noted against her. "One of the gentlemen left it on his
desk. There's a picture in it that'll amuse you. Oh, you don't
mind my bringing it in?" she gasped.

Manford was just leaving; overcoat on, hat and stick in hand. He
muttered: "Oh, thanks," and took the "Looker–on" in order to cut
short her effusions. A picture that might amuse him! The
simpleton… Probably some of those elaborate "artistic" studies
of the Cedarledge gardens. He remembered that his wife had allowed
the "Looker–on" photographers to take them last summer. She
thought it a duty: it might help to spread the love of gardening
(another of her hobbies); and besides it was undemocratic to refuse
to share one's private privileges with the multitude. He knew all
her catch–words and had reached the point of wondering how much she
would have valued her privileges had the multitude not been there
to share them.

He thrust the magazine under his arm, and threw it down, half an
hour later, in Lita Wyant's boudoir. It was so quiet and shadowy
there that he was almost glad Lita was not in, though sometimes her
unpunctuality annoyed him. This evening, after the rush and
confusion of the day, he found it soothing to await her in this
half–lit room, with its heaped–up cushions still showing where she
had leaned, and the veiled light on two arums in a dark bowl.
Wherever Lita was, there were some of those smooth sculptural
arums.

When she came, the stillness would hardly be disturbed. She had a
way of deepening it by her presence: noise and hurry died on her
threshold. And this evening all the house was quiet. Manford, as
usual, had tiptoed up to take a look at the baby, in the night
nursery where there were such cool silver–coloured walls, and white
hyacinths in pots of silvery lustre. The baby slept, a round pink
Hercules with defiant rosy curls, his pink hands clenched on the
coverlet. Even the nurse by the lamp sat quiet and silver–coloured
as a brooding pigeon.

A house without fixed hours, engagements, obligations … where
none of the clocks went, and nobody was late, because there was no
particular time for anything to happen. Absurd, of course,
maddeningly unpractical—but how restful after a crowded day! And
what a miracle to have achieved, in the tight pattern of New York's
tasks and pleasures—in the very place which seemed doomed to
collapse and vanish if ever its clocks should stop!

These late visits had begun by Manford's dropping in on the way
home for a look at the baby. He liked babies in their cribs, and
especially this fat rascal of Jim's. Next to Nona, there was no
one he cared for as much as Jim; and seeing Jim happily married,
doing well at his bank, and with that funny little chap upstairs,
stirred in the older man all his old regrets that he had no son.

Jim seldom got back early enough to assist at these visits; and
Lita too, at first, was generally out. But in the last few months
Manford had more often found her—or at least, having fallen into
the habit of lingering over a cigarette in her boudoir, had managed
to get a glimpse of her before going on to that other house where
all the clocks struck simultaneously, and the week's engagements,
in Maisie Bruss's hand, jumped out at him as he entered his study.

This evening he felt more than usually tired—of his day, his work,
his life, himself—oh, especially himself; so tired that, the deep
armchair aiding, he slipped into a half–doze in which the quietness
crept up round him like a tide.

He woke with a start, imagining that Lita had entered, and feeling
the elderly man's discomfiture when beauty finds him napping…
But the room was empty: a movement of his own had merely knocked
Miss Vollard's magazine to the floor. He remembered having brought
it in to show Lita the photographs of Cedarledge which he supposed
it to contain. Would there be time? He consulted his watch—an
anachronism in that house—lit another cigarette, and leaned back
contentedly. He knew that as soon as he got home Pauline, who had
telephoned again that afternoon about the Mahatma, would contrive
to corner him and reopen the tiresome question, together with
another, which threatened to be almost equally tiresome, about
paying that rotten Michelangelo's debts. "If we don't, we shall
have him here on our hands: Amalasuntha is convinced you'll take
him into the firm. You'd better come home in time to talk things
over—." Always talking over, interfering, adjusting! He had
enough of that in his profession. Pity Pauline wasn't a lawyer:
she might have worked off her steam in office hours. He would sit
quietly where he was, taking care to reach his house only just in
time to dress and join her in the motor. They were dining out, he
couldn't remember where.

For a moment his wife's figure stood out before him in brilliant
stony relief, like a photograph seen through a stereopticon; then
it vanished in the mist of his well–being, the indolence engendered
by waiting there alone and undisturbed for Lita. Queer creature,
Lita! His lips twitched into a reminiscent smile. One day she had
come up noiselessly behind him and surprised him by a light kiss on
his hair. He had thought it was Nona… Since then he had
sometimes feigned to doze while he waited; but she had never kissed
him again…

What sort of a life did she really lead, he wondered? And what did
she make of Jim, now the novelty was over? He could think of no
two people who seemed less made for each other. But you never
could tell with a woman. Jim was young and adoring; and there was
that red–headed boy…

Luckily Lita liked Nona, and the two were a good deal together.
Nona was as safe as a bank—and as jolly as a cricket. Everything
was sure to be right when she was there. But there were all the
other hours, intervals that Manford had no way of accounting for;
and Pauline always said the girl had had a queer bringing–up, as
indeed any girl must have had at the hands of Mrs. Percy Landish.
Pauline had objected to the marriage on that ground, though the
modern mother's respect for the independence of her children had
reduced her objection to mere shadowy hints of which Jim, in his
transports, took no heed.

Manford also disliked the girl at first, and deplored Jim's choice.
He thought Lita positively ugly, with her high cheekbones, her too
small head, her glaring clothes and conceited lackadaisical airs.
Then, as time passed, and the marriage appeared after all to be
turning out well, he tried to interest himself in her for Jim's
sake, to see in her what Jim apparently did. But the change had
not come till the boy's birth. Then, as she lay in her pillows, a
new shadowiness under her golden lashes, one petal of a hand
hollowed under the little red head at her side, the vision struck
to his heart. The enchantment did not last; he never recaptured
it; there were days when what he called her "beauty airs"
exasperated him, others when he was chilled by her triviality. But
she never bored him, never ceased to excite in him a sort of
irritated interest. He told himself that it was because one could
never be sure what she was up to; speculating on what went on
behind that smooth round forehead and those elusive eyes became his
most absorbing occupation.

At first he used to be glad when Nona turned up, and when Jim came
in from his bank, fagged but happy, and the three young people sat
talking nonsense, and letting Manford smoke and listen. But
gradually he had fallen into the way of avoiding Nona's days, and
of coming earlier (extricating himself with difficulty from his
professional engagements), so that he might find Lita alone before
Jim arrived.

Lately she had seemed restless, vaguely impatient with things; and
Manford was determined to win her confidence and get at the riddle
behind that smooth round brow. He could not bear the idea that
Jim's marriage might turn out to be a mere unsuccessful adventure,
like so many others. Lita must be made to understand what a
treasure she possessed, and how easily she might lose it. Lita
Cliffe—Mrs. Percy Landish's niece—to have had the luck to marry
Jim Wyant, and to risk estranging him! What fools women were! If
she could be got away from the pack of frauds and flatterers who
surrounded her, Manford felt sure he could bring her to her senses.
Sometimes, in her quiet moods, she seemed to depend on his
judgment, to defer rather touchingly to what he said…

The thing would be to coax her from jazz and night–clubs, and the
pseudo–artistic rabble of house–decorators, cinema stars and
theatrical riff–raff who had invaded her life, to get her back to
country joys, golf and tennis and boating, all the healthy outdoor
activities. She liked them well enough when there were no others
available. She had owned to Manford that she was sick of the rush
and needed a rest; had half promised to come to Cedarledge with the
boy for Easter. Jim would be taking his father down to the island
off the Georgia coast; and Jim's being away might be a good thing.
These modern young women soon tired of what they were used to; Lita
would appreciate her husband all the more after a separation.

Well, only a few weeks more, and perhaps it would come true. She
had never seen the Cedarledge dogwood in bud, the woods trembling
into green. Manford, smiling at the vision, stooped to pick up the
"Looker–on" and refresh his memory.

But it wasn't the right number: there were no gardens in it. Why
had Miss Vollard given it to him? As he fluttered the pages they
dropped open at: "Oriental Sage in Native Garb"—. Oh, damn the
Mahatma! "Dawnside Co–Eds"—oh, damn…

He stood up to thrust the paper under one of the heavily–shaded
lamps. At home, where Pauline and reason ruled, the lighting was
disposed in such a way that one could always read without moving
from one's chair; but in this ridiculous house, where no one ever
opened a book, the lamps were so perversely placed, and so deeply
shrouded, that one had to hold one's paper under the shade to make
out anything.

He scrutinized the picture, shrugged away his disgusted recognition
of Bee Lindon, looked again and straightened his eye–glasses on his
nose to be doubly sure—the lawyer's instinct of accuracy
prevailing over a furious inward tremor.

He walked to the door, and then turned back and stood irresolute.
To study the picture he had lifted the border of the lampshade, and
the light struck crudely on the statue above Lita's divan; the
statue of which Pauline (to her children's amusement) always said a
little apprehensively that she supposed it must be Cubist. Manford
had hardly noticed the figure before, except to wonder why the
young people admired ugliness: half lost in the shadows of the
niche, it seemed a mere bundle of lumpy limbs. Now, in the glare—
"Ah, you carrion, you!" He clenched his fist at it. "THAT'S what
they want—that's their brutish idol!" The words came stammering
from him in a blur of rage. It was on Jim's account … the
shock, the degradation… The paper slipped to the floor, and he
dropped into his seat again.

Slowly his mind worked its way back through the disgust and
confusion. Pauline had been right: what could one expect from a
girl brought up in that Landish house? Very likely no one had ever
thought of asking where she was, where she had been—Mrs. Landish,
absorbed in her own silly affairs, would be the last person to
know.

Well, what of that? The modern girl was always free, was expected
to know how to use her freedom. Nona's independence had been as
scrupulously respected as Jim's; she had had her full share of the
perpetual modern agitations. Yet Nona was firm as a rock: a man's
heart could build on her. If a woman was naturally straight, jazz
and night–clubs couldn't make her crooked…

True, in Nona's case there had been Pauline's influence: Pauline
who, whatever her faults, was always good–humoured and usually wise
with her children. The proof was that, while they laughed at her,
they adored her: he had to do her that justice. At the thought of
Pauline a breath of freshness and honesty swept through him. He
had been unfair to her lately, critical, irritable. He had been
absorbing a slow poison, the poison emanating from this dusky self–
conscious room, with all its pernicious implications. His first
impression of Lita, when he had thought her ugly and pretentious,
rushed back on him, dissipating the enchantment.

"Oh, I'm glad you waited—" She was there before him, her little
heart–shaped face deep in its furs, like a bird on the nest. "I
wanted to see you today; I WILLED you to wait." She stood there,
her head slightly on one side, distilling her gaze through half–
parted lids like some rare golden liquid.

Manford stared back. Her entrance had tangled up the words in his
throat: he stood before her choked with denunciation and invective.
And then it occurred to him how much easier it was just to say
nothing—and to go. Of course he meant to go. It was no business
of his: Jim Wyant was not his son. Thank God he could wash his
hands of the whole affair.