Cytherea Part 2

A fist, now, was softly pounding him; and Gregory's voice threatened tears. "What is it?" Lee Randon asked. "You will have to excuse me, I was thinking."

The narrative which followed, the confused history of a two and a half dollar gold-piece finally taken from Gregory by his mother, was broken into by Helena's irrepressible contempt at his youthfulness.

"He thinks the money is gone," she explained, "because Mother put it in the bank for him. I told him when he got it there would be a lot more, but he just wouldn't listen to me. No matter what anybody said it was no good."

"Well," Gregory inquired, "how much more?"

"I don't know, silly; but packs."

"Seventy-seven dollars?"

"That depends on how long you leave it in the bank," Lee instructed him.

"If you didn't ask for it for twenty years--"

"But I want it next Thursday," Gregory hotly interrupted; "won't it be any bigger then?"

"He does nothing but ask and ask questions," Helena added. Lee patted Gregory's cheek:

"Don't let Helena discourage you. If I don't put the light out your mother will make me go to bed."

There were breathless delighted giggles at the thought of that absurdity. He leaned over his son. "Kiss me!" Helena cried. "Now kiss me," Gregory echoed. "Kiss me back again--"

The light went out with a sharp click, and the room was once more a glimmering darkness, blanched and cold. The ruddy faces of the children, their bright hair, even their voices, were subdued. f.a.n.n.y, apparently, hadn't moved; the light at her shoulder was reflected in the cut steel buckles of her slippers; she had slight but graceful ankles. He recognized this, drawing a sheaf of reports from his brief-case; but, after a perfunctory glance, he dropped them beside him on the floor.

"Really, Lee, your condition is getting dreadful," f.a.n.n.y observed; "you are too nervous for words. Go in and look at that doll you brought from New York. She ought to teach you repose even if I can't." A swift concern shadowed her eyes. "Are you doing too much, do you think? It isn't necessary, you know. We have plenty. I don't understand why you will go so hard at all those fool concerns of yours. There might be a mortgage on us, from the way you work."

The latter part of her speech he forgot in the calling of his attention to Cytherea. f.a.n.n.y had said that the doll might tranquilize him. The opposite was more probable--Cytherea, what could be more disturbing?

f.a.n.n.y hadn't noticed her smile, the long half-closed eyes, the expression of malicious tenderness, if such a thing were possible, the pale seductiveness of her wrists and hands, the finger nails stained with vermilion. He tried to imagine a woman like that, warm, no--burning, with life. It seemed to Lee the doll became animated in a whisper of cool silk, but he couldn't invent a place, a society, into which she fitted. Not Eastlake, certainly, nor New York ... perhaps Cuba. What a vanity of nonsense his thoughts had led him back into: Cytherea, a thing of wax, was on the over-mantel beyond the hall; Cuba beyond the sea.

The smoke of another cigar, precisely in the manner of the one before, hung between him and the piano. His wife settled contentedly in the curly maple rocker, her rings flas.h.i.+ng in the swift drawing of threads from a square of linen.

Early in the morning Lee Randon drove himself, in a Ford sedan, to a station on the main line of a railway which bore him into the city and his office. It was nine miles from Eastlake to the station, where he left the car for his return; and, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, he accomplished the distance in twenty minutes. The road was good and lay through open rolling country, grazing and farmed land; he knew its every aspect thoroughly, each hill and turning and old stone house, in the pale green of early spring with the flushed petals of the apple blossoms falling on the dark ploughed ground; yellow with grain; a sweeping stubble with the corn shocked in which rabbit hunters, brown like the sheaves, called to their dogs.

Now it was sombre and, in the morning and evening, wrapped in blue mist; the air had the thick damp coldness usually precipitated in snow; the cattle, gathered about the fodder spread in the fields, were huddled against the rising winds. The smoke of a chimney was flattened on a low roof; and Lee, who had sometimes wished that he were a part of the measured countryside life, had a sudden feeling of revolt from such binding circ.u.mstances. He wasn't surprised, this morning, that it was difficult to get men to work in the comparative loneliness of the farms, or that farmers' sons went continually to the cities.

When they couldn't get there they crowded into their borough towns, into Eastlake, at every opportunity, attracted by the gaiety, the lights, the stir, the contact with humanity. Before prohibition they had drunk at the hotel bars, and driven home, with discordant laughter and the urged clatter of hoofs, to the silence of star-lit fields. The buggies had gone; High Street, on Sat.u.r.day night, was filled with automobiles; there was practically no drunkenness; but there was no lessening in the restless seeking stream of men, the curiosity of the women with folded hands and tightly folded lips.

They all wanted a mitigation of a life which, fundamentally, did not fill them; they had an absorbing labor, love and home and children, the church, yet they were unsatisfied. They were discontented with the primary facts of existence, the serious phases, and wanted, above everything, tinsel and laughter. If a girl pa.s.sing on the street smiled boldly at such youths they were fired with triumph and happiness; they nudged each other violently and made brazen declarations which, faced by the girls, escaped in disconcerted laughter. Their language--and this, too, was a revolt--was like the sweepings of the cow barns.

Life, it occurred to Lee Randon, in this connection, was amazingly muddled; and he wondered what would happen if the restraint, since it was no better than sham, should be swept away, and men acknowledged what they so largely were? A fresh standard, a new set of values, would have to be established. But before that could be accomplished an underlying motive must be discovered. That he searched for in himself; suppose he were absolutely free, not tomorrow, that evening, but now--

Would he go to the office, to the affairs of the Zenith cigarette, and, once there, would he come home again--the four thirty-seven train and the Ford in the shed by the station? Lee couldn't answer this finally. A road led over the hills on the right, beyond a horizon of trees. He knew it for only a short distance; where ultimately it led he had no idea.

But it was an enticing way, and he had an idiotic impulse to turn aside, follow it, and never come back any more. Actually he almost cut in, and he had to swing the car sharply to the left.

If he had been in trouble or debt, if his life had been a failure, he would have understood his impulse; but as it was, with f.a.n.n.y and Helena and Gregory, all his flouris.h.i.+ng affairs--why, it was insanity! However, what absorbed him in his present state of mind, of inquiry, was its honesty; nothing could be served by conventional protests and nice sentiments. Lee had long wanted to escape from life, from the acc.u.mulating limiting circ.u.mstances. Or was it death he tried to avoid?

What became clearest was that, of all the things which had happened to him, he would not, at the beginning, have deliberately chosen any. One, it seemed, bred by the other, had overtaken him, fastened upon him, while he was asleep. Lee knew a man who, because of his light strength and mastery of horses, had spent a prolonged youth riding in gentlemen's steeplechases for the great Virginia stables; a career of racing silk and odds and danger, of highly ornamental women and champagne, of paddocks and formal halls and surrept.i.tious little ante-rooms. That he envied; and, recalling his safe ignominious usefulness during the war, he envied the young half-drunk aviators sweeping in reckless arcs above the fortified German cities.

Or was it, again, only youth that he lamented, conscious of its slipping supinely from his grasp? Yet, if that were all, why was he rebellious about the present, the future, rather than the past? Lee Randon wasn't looking back in a self-indulgent melancholy. Nor was he an isolated, peculiar being; yes, all the men he knew had, more or less, his own feeling; he could think of none, even half intelligent, who was happy.

Each had Lee's aspect of having been forced into a consummation he would not have selected, of something temporary, hurried, apologetic.

He thought more specially of men celebrated in great industries, who had acc.u.mulated power beyond measure, millions almost beyond count--what extravagantly mad outlets they turned to! The captains of steel, of finance, were old, spent, before they were fifty, broken by machinery and strain in mid-life, by a responsibility in which they were like pig iron in an open hearth furnace. What man would choose to crumble, to find his brain paralysed, at forty-five or six? Such labor was a form of desperation, of drowning, forgetting, an affair at best an implied failure.

That was the strength, the anodyne, of drink, of c.o.c.ktails, that they spread a glittering transformation about cra.s.s reality; people danced at stated times, in hot crowded rooms, because life was pedestrian; they were sick of walking in an ugly meaningless clamor and wanted to move to music, to wear pearl studs and fragile slippers and floating chiffons.

"The whole d.a.m.ned business is a mess," he said aloud. Then, reaching the city, he threw himself with a familiar vigor into the activities he had challenged.

Returning over the familiar road, in his small closed car, he was quieter mentally, critical of his useless dissatisfaction; he was making needless trouble for himself. Small things filled his thoughts, among them the question of how much gin would be consumed by the c.o.c.ktail party f.a.n.n.y and he were having before the dinner dance at the Country Club. Peyton and Claire Morris, Anette and, if she came, Mina Raff, with two men, and the Lucians. Perhaps twelve in all; two quarts. The Country Club dances, princ.i.p.ally made up of people who had known each other long and intimately, decidedly needed an impetus; society was rather dreadful without rum. Anette was an attractive girl; she had beautiful legs; but they were hardly better than f.a.n.n.y's; why in the name of G.o.d was he captivated by Anette's casual ankles and indifferent to his wife's?

Women's legs--they were even no longer hidden--were only a reasonable anatomical provision exactly shared by men. Why, he particularized, did he prefer them in silk stockings rather than bare, and in black more than bright colors? Anette's had never failed to excite his imagination, but Alice Lucian's, graceful enough, were without interest for him. How stupid was the spectacle of women in tights! Short bathing skirts left him cold, but the unexpected, the casual, the vagaries of fas.h.i.+on and the wind, were unfailingly potential. Humiliating, he thought, a curiosity that should be left with the fresh experience of youth; but it wasn't--comic opera with its choruses and the burlesque stage were princ.i.p.ally the extravagances of middle age.

The orange juice and square bottles of clear gin, the array of gla.s.ses and ice-filled pewter pitcher in which Lee mixed his drinks, were standing conveniently on a table in the small reception room. f.a.n.n.y, in a lavender dress with a very full skirt decorated with erratically placed pale yellow flowers, had everything in readiness. "Mina Raff came," she announced, as he descended the stairs. "Anette telephoned. To be quite frank I didn't much care whether she did or didn't. She used to be too stiff, too selfish, I thought; and I never liked Anette."

"Nothing but prejudice, that," he replied decidedly. "Anette has a very good head. You have just heard stories from envious women." He was careful to say nothing about her legs. "I haven't found her the least bit out of the way; and she thinks a lot of you."

"Bosh," f.a.n.n.y said inattentively; "I know what she thinks of me. I am surprised, Lee, that you do so well, because really you are nothing but an impressionable old fool." She touched him affectionately on the cheek, "But I can take care of you and Anette too."

He didn't in the slightest wish to be taken care of in the manner she indicated; yet there was nothing he could answer; and, at the sound of a motor on the drive, he turned toward the entrance at the back. It was the Lucians; and as he greeted them the whole small company swept into the house. Claire, with her narrow dark vivid face, wore diagonals of black and grey, with a long trailing girdle of soft blues and pinks. She came up at once to Lee and kissed him with a warm friendliness. "Have you seen Mina Raff?" she asked; "she's wonderful."

As Claire spoke Lee Randon saw the woman who was becoming such a noted personality. She was slim, neither tall nor short--Peyton Morris was removing a voluminous white cloak with dull red stripes and a high collar of fox. He had been wrong in his remembrance of her, for her loveliness was beyond challenge. Yes, a wistful April moon described her very well: Mina Raff was ashen blonde, her face was a very pure oval, and her large eyes, the delicate slightly drooping mouth, held an expression of devastating sweetness.

She came forward promptly, and yet with a little touching air of hesitation, and accused him, in a serious low voice, of having forgotten her. That, he returned, was ridiculous, an impossibility. Pictures of her were in all the magazines. Close by her he recognized that the sweetness was far from sugary; there were indications of a determination that reached stubbornness; already there were faint lines--skilfully covered--at the corners of her eyes, and she was palpably, physically, weary. It was that, he decided, which gave her the wistful charm. That and something more. She was considered, he knew, and by the judges best qualified, to have a very sure and perfect talent; and he had no doubt that that possession stamped and qualified her.

He was obliged to attend to the c.o.c.ktails; and, at his back, a gay chatter of voices rose. He had fleeting impressions of very different people: a strange man in naval uniform with the insignia of a commander; Anette in a scanty sheath of satin from which an airy skirt spread to the left like a fan; Alice Lucian sitting on the steps with George Willard: Frank Carver remote and lost in his bitter thoughts; Elsie Wayland with the gold halo of an income almost a dollar a minute.

Mina Raff, with Peyton Morris at her shoulder, smiled at him. "What an adorable house," she p.r.o.nounced; "I wish I could have it near the studio." She waved Peyton away unceremoniously, "Come, everybody has had enough drinks, and show it to me." They pa.s.sed through the hall, and into the quiet of the s.p.a.ce beyond, lighted by a single un.o.btrusive lamp. "What a satisfactory fireplace!" she exclaimed in her faint key, as though, Lee thought, her silent acting were depriving her of voice.

She sank onto the cus.h.i.+oned bench against the part.i.tion. "How did they feel, do you suppose--the people, the men and women, who belonged to such things?" As Lee watched her it seemed that she grew more remote, shadowy, like a memory of long vanished beauty made before his eyes from the s.h.i.+fting firelight and immaterial shadows. Mina Raff lost her reality in an unreal charm that compressed his heart. The atmosphere around her stirred with re-created dead emotions. Then:

"Ah!" she cried softly, unexpectedly, "what a wonderful doll." She rose, with a graceful gesture of her hands up to where Cytherea rested. "Where did you get her? But that doesn't matter: do you suppose, would it be possible for me, could I buy her?"

"I'm sorry," Lee answered promptly; "we can't do without her. She belongs to Helena," he lied.

"But not to a child," Mina Raff protested, with what, in her, was animation and color; "it has a wicked, irresistible beauty." She gazed with a sudden flash of penetration at Lee Randon. "Are you sure it's your daughter's?" she asked, once more repressed, negative. "Are you quite certain it is not yours and you are in love with it?"

He laughed uncomfortably. "You seem to think I'm insane--"

"No," she replied, "but you might, perhaps, be about that." Her voice was as impersonal as an oracle's. "You would be better off without her in your house; she might easily ruin it. No common infidelity could be half as dangerous. How blind women are--your wife would keep that about and yet divorce you for kissing a servant. What did you call her?"

"Cytherea."

"I don't know what that means."

He told her, and she studied him in a brief masked appraisal. "Do you know," she went on, "that I get four hundred letters a week from men; they are put everywhere, sometimes in my bed; and last week a man killed himself because I wouldn't see him. You'd think that he had all a man wanted from life; yet, in his library, with his secretary waiting for him, he.... Why?" she demanded, questioning him with her subdued magic.

"Have you ever cared for any of them?" he asked indirectly.