Cytherea Part 4

This made Lee restive, and, patting her hand, he left to dance with Alice Lucian. "When this is over," she informed him, "we'll get Anette and George, and go out to my car. There is a Thermos bottle of c.o.c.ktails hidden under the seat." The girl who had sat at Lee's right was dancing with a tall fair-haired boy in a corner. Entirely oblivious of the rest of the room, they were advancing two matched steps and then retreating, their eyes tightly shut and cheeks together. A man fell in the middle of the floor, catching his partner's skirt and tearing it from the waistband. Everywhere the mad effort at escape!

Lee Randon lost his impression of the triviality of the occasion: they all seemed desperately searching for that something he had lost and which was overwhelmingly important to him; and all the while the music stuttered and mocked and confused a tragic need. Or it was like a momentary release from deadly confinement, a respite that, by its rare intoxication, drove the partic.i.p.ants into forms of incredulous cramped abandon. Positively, he thought, they were grasping at light, at color, at the commonplace sounds of a few instruments, as though they were incalculable treasures. Alice, when she danced, held her head back with eyes half closed; and suddenly, with her mouth a little parted, she, too, had a look of Cytherea, a flash of the withheld beauty which filled him with restlessness.

It startled him, and, sub-consciously, his arm tightened about her. She responded immediately, with an accelerated breath, and the resemblance was gone. Greatly to his relief, a man cut in on them, and once more he found himself dancing with Anette. She asked him, in a murmurous warmth, if he liked her, at all. And, with a new and surprising, a distasteful, sense of lying, he replied that he did, tremendously. No, a feeling in him, automatic and strange, responded--not Anette! He wanted to leave her, to leave everyone here, and go. For what? At the same time he realized that he would stay, and go out, drink, in the Lucians' car. He had a haunting impression, familiar to him in the past weeks, that he was betraying an essential quality of his being.

Yet along with this his other consciousness, his interest in Anette, lingered; it existed in him tangibly, a thing of the flesh, not to be denied. She was all prost.i.tute, Mina Raff had said, using the word in a general sense rather than particularly, without an obvious condemning morality. Indeed, it might easily be converted into a term of praise, for what, necessarily, it described was the incentive that forever drove men out to difficult accomplishment, to anything rather than ease. Good or bad, bad or good--which, such magic or maternity, was which?

"What are you thinking about?"

"It would take years to tell you."

"I wish ... you might; but I didn't mean to say that, to let you know--"

"You didn't let me know anything," he broke into her period impatiently.

"If we get on together isn't that enough? It's really not necessary to hide ourselves behind a lot of pretentious words. And what we feel tonight hasn't a thing to do with tomorrow; probably then we'll be entirely different; how can it matter?"

"It does, though, because you might hate me tomorrow for being myself tonight. What you think of me has to be big enough to guard against that. You hurt me, Lee, very much, talking in that way."

Alice Lucian, with George Willard, pa.s.sed them and nodded significantly toward the entrance. "You will need a cloak," Lee told Anette; "it's blowing colder and colder." She vanished up the stairs, to the dressing-rooms, while Lee stood waiting with Willard. He didn't especially like the latter, a man with an exuberant loud friendliness, a good nature, that served as a cover for a facilely predatory sensuality.

He was continually taking hold of feminine arms, bending close over dinner dresses; and he used--with a show of humorous frankness--his long knowledge of the girls of Eastlake as a reason for kissing them on every possible occasion.

Anette and Alice appeared, with their wraps turned to exhibit the silk linings, bright like their dresses; and, at a favorable moment, they slipped out into the malice of the wind beating on them from the darkness. Anette was pressed tightly against Lee, Alice and George Willard were vaguely ahead; and, after a short breathless distance, they were in the protection of the shed. The Lucians' automobile had an elaborate enclosed body: shutting the doors they were completely comfortable, un.o.bserved and warm. "No," Alice directed, "don't put on the light; I can find it. There! We'll have to use the cap for a gla.s.s."

The aluminum top of the bottle was filled and refilled; the frigid gin and orange juice brought Lee Randon a glow of careless well-being, irresponsibility.

The others had gone to the front seat, where they were squeezed into a remarkably small s.p.a.ce. Anette sat leaning forward, her chin propped in her left hand and the right lightly resting on Lee's knee. A loose board in the shed kept up an exasperating clatter. A match flared and Willard lighted a cigarette. It was curious about Alice--only in the last year, and for no reason Lee could discover, had she done things such as this. Perhaps, with no children, and the money Warner had acc.u.mulated comparatively lately, she hadn't enough to do. Of course, Warner, a splendid individual, could not be called entertaining; he was totally absorbed in his business, often away at the wood-pulp mill, in the Laurentian Mountains, in which he had a large interest.

Warner Lucian had nearly all the princ.i.p.al virtues--integrity, generosity, courage, and he was as single in mind as Willard was dubious; but, in spite of so much, it was clear that he had begun to weary Alice. She was publicly indifferent to him, careless of his wishes; she had even complained to Lee about her husband's good conduct, explaining that if he would only have what she termed an affair he would be more human.

"I am still very cross at you." Anette spoke out of a gloom in which her face was barely distinguishable. "You took all the niceness out of our friends.h.i.+p and made it seem horrid; just as though you had pulled off my clothes; I--I haven't the same feeling about you."

His effort at honesty, at discovering the mystery of profound disturbing needs, had been vain. Gathering Anette in his arms Lee kissed her.

She rested there for a moment; then, with her hands against his chest, pushed him away. "I can't, now," she told him; "somehow it's all spoiled. It seemed as though you were studying me disapprovingly. I'm not just bad, you know."

"I don't think you are bad at all," he replied irritably; "you brought that into it. Why, in the name of heaven, should I?"

"f.a.n.n.y doesn't like me," she said at a tangent.

"Who put that in your head?"

"f.a.n.n.y. She's hardly civil."

"If you mean she's jealous, she isn't."

"You hardly need to add that. Of course, I realize f.a.n.n.y Randon couldn't be jealous of me. Good Lord, no! Why should she be? No one would give me a thought."

Anette, wholly irrational, was furious. d.a.m.n women, anyway! It was impossible to get along with them, since they hadn't a grain of reason.

He was superior to her temper, indifferent to it, because he was indifferent to her. Suddenly the charm she had had for him was gone, the seductiveness dissolved, leaving only Anette, a fairly good-looking girl he had known for a great while. His warm response to her was dead; whatever she had aroused and satisfied, or left in suspense, no longer contented him. The memory of his interest in her, the thought he had expended, was now a cause of surprise, incomprehensible. Lee wanted to return to the club house and f.a.n.n.y.

There was an obscure indication of Alice's hands raised in the rearrangement of her hair. George Willard half turned, facing the rear of the car. "I can't see much," he said, "but it is evident that you two have been fighting. Why don't you live in peace and happiness? The trouble's all with Lee, too, you don't have to tell me that, Anette; he is too cursed cantankerous; and it would serve him right if you'd come up here with us."

Anette opened the door and an icy draft swept about their knees. "Not yet," Willard begged; "we won't be missed."

"You may stay as long as you want," Anette replied, "but I am going back." Positively her voice bore a trace of tears. What, what was it all about? It was Alice who decided that they should return together: "The bottle's empty, my hair net is fixed for the third time, and we had better. You get out, George, please. No, I told you."

Lee Randon welcomed the solid rus.h.i.+ng of the wind; it swept in full blast across the open of the golf course and made walking precarious.

Anette was lost, forgotten. If the chill air could only take the fever, the desire, out of his mind and blood! He wished that he might be absorbed into the night, the storm, become one with its anonymous force, one with the trees he heard laboring on their trunks. Instead of the safety of being a part of nature he felt that, without directions, he had been arbitrarily set down on earth, left to wander blindly with no knowledge of his destination or its means of accomplishment.

Fragments of a dance measure were audible, and he returned to the pounding music, the heat, the perceptibly chlorinated perfumes and determined activity. He went at once in search of his wife; she had apparently not moved from the chair in which he had left her. Meeting her slightly frowning, questioning expression he told her simply, without premeditation or reserve, that he had been out in an automobile.

f.a.n.n.y was obviously not prepared for his candor, and she studied him with the question held on her lifted face. Then banis.h.i.+ng that she proceeded to scold him:

"You know how I hate you to do such things, and it seems precisely as though my wish were nothing. It isn't because I am afraid of how you'll act, Lee; but I will not let you make a fool of yourself. And that, exactly, is what happens. I don't want women like Anette to have anything on you, or to think you'll come whenever they call you. I can't make out what it is in your character that's so--so weak. There simply isn't any other name for it. I don't doubt you, Lee," she repeated, in a different, fuller voice, "I know you love me; and I am just as certain you have never lied to me. I'm sure you haven't, in spite of what the girls say about men."

He was cut by an unbearably sharp, a knife-like, regret that he had ever, with f.a.n.n.y, departed from the utmost truth. Lee Randon had a sudden vision, born of that feeling returning from the shed, of the illimitable tranquility, the release from all triviality, of an honesty beyond equivocation or a.s.sault. f.a.n.n.y, in her way, possessed it; but that, he saw, was made vulnerable, open to disaster, through her love for him. It was necessary, for complete safety, to be entirely insulated from the humanity of emotions. That condition he instinctively put from his thoughts as being as undesirable as it was beyond realization. Lee, with all his vitality, drew away from a conception, a figure, with the cold immobility of death. After all, he rea.s.sured himself, he had never essentially lied to f.a.n.n.y; he had merely suppressed some unnecessary details in order to make their existence smoother. The welcome collapse of his small affair with Anette proved the wisdom of avoiding the exaggeration and difficulty of explanations.

"Lee," f.a.n.n.y said, changing the direction of their thoughts, "I don't want to bother you, but I am uneasy about Claire and Peyton. He hasn't left Mina Raff a minute this evening. And he has such an unhappy expression, not at all as though he were enjoying himself."

"I noticed that," Lee agreed; "but it will do him no good with Mina--she's a cold potato, career's the only thing in her head." Then he remembered what Mina Raff had told him about her individuality, her personal desire; and he repeated it to his wife.

"I don't think Claire is entirely wise," she went on; "but you can't tell her a thing. She listens as sweetly as possible and then says that she won't interfere with Peyton. Well, someone else will. Claire has too much reserve, she is too well-bred and quietly superior. You wait and see if I am not right; life is very vulgar, and it will take advantage of her."

"I wonder if you are? Well, as you say, we shall see. If Mina Raff fixes her mind on him there will be a lot to watch."

"You must speak to him."

"Now there," Lee expostulated, "you make me sick. How--will you tell me--can I speak to Peyton until he first says something? And when that happens, as easily as not it may be a cable from Peru. You want to interfere too much, f.a.n.n.y, and insist that everybody follow your idea of right."

She retired into a silence of wisdom that merely looked down on him. Her face was troubled, her lips tightly compressed. "What time is it?" she asked sharply; "the ribbon of my watch is worn out. Oh, we can go home with decency. It makes me rather sick here."

He went below, for his hat and coat, and found the room beyond the lockers, built as an informal cafe before the era of prohibition, occupied by a number of men transferring the balance of fulness from a row of bottles to themselves.

He accepted a drink, more for the purpose of considering Peyton Morris, moodily abstracted by the table, than for itself. It seemed to Lee that the young man had actually aged since the c.o.c.ktail party at his house, earlier in the evening. Peyton's mouth was hard and sullen; his brow was corrugated. "We're going home," Lee told him; "and it seemed to me that an hour ago Claire was tired."

"She didn't tell me," Peyton responded punctiliously; "and certainly if she's low we'll go too." He rose promptly, and, with his outer garb, accompanied Lee Randon. His step was uncertain, and Lee put a hand under his elbow. "Liquored?" he asked casually.

"Not in my brain," Peyton Morris returned: "it seems like I could never get drunk again; but my dam' feet are all over the place. Thanks for hanging on to me: I have an idea you are going to drop me pretty quickly."

"I don't want to question you," Randon said, "or in any way force a confidence, but, Peyton, in addition to the relations.h.i.+p, I am exceptionally fond of Claire; and, since helping you is practically the same thing as helping her--"

"I wish to Christ I had been sunk in the North Sea," Morris broke in bitterly.

They were up the stairs and standing on the emptied floor of an intermission. f.a.n.n.y, prepared to leave, was gazing about for him.

"You've been an age," she cried to Lee; "and, Peyton, Claire is at last looking for you; although she'd kill me for saying it. You had better go outside a minute, first, and clear your head."

He came very near to her, slightly swaying. "f.a.n.n.y, you are a darling, but you are hard; you are hard as the Commandments."