Cytherea Part 9

After all, were his individual opinions and doubts expressed in a manner forceful enough to diversify him from a porcine apathy? The pig, secure against the inequalities of fate and weather, wallowed through life with a dull fullness of food as regular as the solar course. Christopher was his wife. Now that, Lee told himself, with a vision of the gardener's moustache, sadly drooping and stained with tobacco, his pale doubtful gaze, was inexcusable. He abruptly directed his thoughts to Peyton and Claire Morris; how exact Claire had been in the expression of her personality! What, he grasped, was different in her from other women was precisely that; together with an astonis.h.i.+ng lack of sentimental bias, it operated with the cutting realism of a surgeon's blade. She had, as well, courage.

That was the result of her heritage; and he wondered if all strong traits were the action of superior blood strayed into expected and unexpected places? It was probable, but not susceptible of proof. The pig's blood was that of the best registered Berks.h.i.+re. G.o.d d.a.m.n the pig!

He asked f.a.n.n.y if she had heard any further particulars of the proposed rearrangement of the Morrises' lives; when they were to separate; but she knew no more than he. "I hope he doesn't come here," she said vigorously: "I should refuse to speak to him or have him at my table.

Outrageous! I can't make out why you take it so coolly. Mina Raff's a rotten immoral woman; it doesn't matter how it's arranged. Why," she gasped, "she can be no more than Peyton's mistress, no better than the women on the street."

"That is so," he agreed. But his following question of the accepted badness of mistresses and streetwalkers he wisely kept to himself.

Were they darker than the shadow cast by the inelastic inst.i.tution of matrimony? At one time prost.i.tutes were greatly honored; but that had pa.s.sed, he was convinced, forever; and this, on the whole, he concluded, was fortunate; for, perhaps, if prost.i.tution were thoroughly discredited, marriage might, in some Elysian future, be swept of most of its rubbish. Houses of prost.i.tution, mistresses, like charity, absorbed and dissipated a great deal of the dissatisfaction inseparable from the present misconceptions of love and society. The first move, obviously, in stopping war was the suppression of such ameliorating forces as the Red Cross; and, conversely, with complete unions, infidelity would languish and disappear.

He thought of this further in the darkened theatre to which, driven by his growing curiosity, he had gone to see Mina Raff in the leading part of a moving picture. It was a new version, in a new medium, of an old and perennial melodrama; but, too late for the opening scenes, the story for the moment was incomprehensible to him. However, it had to do with the misadventures of a simple country girl in what, obviously, was the conventional idea of a most sophisticated and urbane society.

Lee waited, and not vainly, to see the feminine grub transformed, by brilliant clothes, into a b.u.t.terfly easily surpa.s.sing all the select glittering creatures of the city; and he told himself that, personally, he vastly preferred Mina Raff in her plainest dress.

It was strange--seeing her there; while, in fact, she was in New York with far different things occupying her thoughts. Here she was no more than an illusion, a pattern, without substance, of projected light and shade; she had neither voice nor warmth nor color; only the most primitive minds could be carried away, lost, in the convention of her flat mobile effigy! Yet, after a little, he found that he as well was absorbed in the atmosphere of emotional verity she created. It was clear to him now that not the Mina Raff in New York, but this, was the important reality. In herself she was little compared to what she so miraculously did. Then--the final step in a surrender, however much he hated the word, to art--he forgot Mina Raff completely. He lost her partly in his own mental processes and partly in the unhappy girl she was portraying:

It was an uncomplicated story of betrayal, of a marriage that was no marriage, and the birth, in circ.u.mstances of wretched loneliness, of an illegitimate baby. The father annoyed Lee excessively; he was the anciently familiar inaccurate shape of conventionalized l.u.s.t without an identifying human trait. Not for a second did Lee believe in his grease-pencilled incontinence and perfidy; but the child he seduced, incidents of the seduction charged with the beauty of pity, thronged Lee's mind with sensations and ideas. However, it was the world surrounding the central motive, the action, that most engaged him; hardly a trait of generosity dignified it; and, exaggeratedly as a universal meanness and self-righteous cruelty was shown, it scarcely departed, he felt, from the truth.

Why was it that virtue, continence, corroded the heart? Why did people who, through predilection, went to churches, regard those who didn't with such an insistent animosity? Why did the church itself seek to obliterate--as though they were a breathing menace--all who stood outside its doors? There was something terribly wrong in the reaction of life to religion, or in the religion that was applied to life. It began, in the symbolical person of Christ, with, at least, a measure of generosity; but that had been long lost. Now the bitterness of the religious rather resembled envy.

In the picture flickering on the screen the girl who had suffered the agonies of birth sat, with her baby on her young lap, in the forlorn room of a village boarding house. The baby was sick, a doctor had left shortly before, and one minute clenched hand rested on the mother's bare breast. Lee found himself gazing fixedly at the girl's face: trouble slowly clouded it, the trouble was invaded by fear, a terrible question.

He realized that the hand was growing cold--the baby was dead.

Waves of suffering pa.s.sed darkly over the mother, incredulity swiftly followed by a frozen knowledge; she tried with her lips, her mouth, to breath life into the flesh already meaningless, lost to her. Then the tragedy of existence drew her face into a mask universal and timeless, a staring tearless shocked regard as white and inhuman as plaster of Paris. Emotion choked at Lee's throat; and, in a sense of shame at having been so shaken, he admitted that Mina Raff had an extraordinary ability: he evaded the impressive reality by a return to the trivial fact. In the gloom there was only a scattering of applause, a failure of approbation caused either by an excess of emotion in the audience, or--this he thought more probable--a general uneasiness before a great moment of life. The crowded theatre was wholly relieved, itself again, in a succeeding pa.s.sage of trivial clowning.

Hatred pursued the youthful informally maternal figure: that, eventually, she was saved by the love of an individual was small before the opposed ma.s.s--women surrounded her with vitriolic whispers, women turned her maliciously from house to house, a woman had betrayed her.

Finally the tide of Christianity rose, burst, in a biblical father who drove her into a night of snow that was a triumph of the actual subst.i.tuted for the cut paper of stage convention. That she would be rescued, no doubt was permitted; and Lee took no part in the storm of applause which greeted this act of satisfactory heroics.

The other spirit had appalled him: in his state of mental doubt--it might equally have been a condition of obscure hope--he had been rudely shoved toward pessimism; the converse of the announced purpose of the picture. The audience, for one thing, was so depressingly wrong in the placing of its merriment: it laughed delightedly at a gaunt feminine vindictiveness hurrying through the snow on an errand of destruction.

The fact that the girl's maternity was transcendent in a generous and confident heart, made lovely by spiritual pa.s.sion, escaped everyone. The phrase, spiritual pa.s.sion, had occurred to him without forethought and he wondered if it were permissible, if it meant anything? It did decidedly to him; he told himself further that it was the fusion of the body and all the aspirations called spirit in one supreme act of feeling.

It had been his and f.a.n.n.y's ... at first. Then the spirit, though it had lingered in other relations.h.i.+ps, had deserted the consummation of pa.s.sion. That hadn't grown perfunctory, but it became a thing more and more strictly of the flesh; with this it was less thrilling. There, he believed, they were not singular; or, anyhow, he wasn't; he saw what he was convinced was the same failure in the men past youth about him. But in f.a.n.n.y there was, he recognized, that fierce if narrow singleness of impulse, of purity. His thoughts of other women were not innocent of provocative conjecture--Anette's sinuous body, now as dead to him as Alohabad, recurred to his mind--but in this f.a.n.n.y was utterly loyal.

Yes, she had, a thing impossible for any man he had known, a mental singleness of desire.

Was it that which had in her an affinity with the oppressors of the picture, which made her, mechanically, the vigorously enlisted enemy of the actual Mina Raff? It startled him a little to realize that f.a.n.n.y--for all her marked superiority--was definitely arrayed with the righteous mob. She was sorry for those who failed in the discharge of duty to G.o.d and man, and she worked untiringly to reinstate them--in her good opinion. That was it, and it was no more! All such attempted salvation resolved itself into the mere effort to drag men up to the complacent plane of the incidental savior.

This recognition took a great deal of the vigor from his intended conversation with Peyton Morris: anything in the way of patronage, he reflected, would be as useless as it would be false. But he had no impulse to forego his purpose; he was engaged to help Claire who was too proud to help herself; yes, by heaven, and too right for the least humiliation. If Claire suffered, it must be because the world was too inferior for hope of any kind.

Lee was not unaware of the incongruity of his position, for he was equally ignoring the needs of two others, Peyton and Mina Raff. It was evident to him now, since he had seen her in a picture, that she was well worth the greatest consideration. She lay outside the stream of ordinary responsibilities. What held him steady was the belief that she and Peyton were not so important to each other as they thought; Claire needed him more badly than Mina. There was a possibility--no, it was probable--that Claire deserted would develop into an individual as empty and as vacantly sounding as a drum. She had said as much. Her heritage, together with its splendors of courage and charm, signally carried that menace.

So much, joined to what already was thronging his thoughts, brought Lee's mind to resemble the sheet of an enormous ledger covered with a jumble of figures apparently beyond any reduction to an answer. He was considering Claire and Mina Raff, Mina and Claire, at a hunt breakfast at Willing Spencer's in Nantbrook Valley, north of Eastlake, when, with a plate of food in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he collided with Peyton Morris, his face pinched and his eyes dull from a lack of rest. The Spencer house was sparely furnished, a square unimpressive dwelling princ.i.p.ally adapted to the early summers of its energetic children; and Peyton and Lee Randon allowed themselves to be crowded into the bare angle formed by a high inner door.

"Claire told you," the younger said.

"Yes," Lee replied briefly. It wouldn't, after all, be difficult to talk to Peyton; he was obviously miserable from the necessity of suppressing what absorbed his entire consciousness.

"Well, I suppose you think there's nothing to be said for me," his voice was defiant; "and that I ought to be shot."

"Very much to the contrary," Lee a.s.serted; "there is so much to say that it's difficult to know where to begin. With another situation practically the same, I might have agreed with you thoroughly; but, with Claire and what I have gathered of you, in this special one I can't."

"It isn't absolutely necessary," the other pointed out; "Mina and I will have a lot to ignore."

"The first thing you'll have to manage," Lee observed sharply, "is to grow up. You are not in a place to be helped by leather-headed satire and visions of solitary grandeur. My interest comes only from Claire and some personal curiosity; Mina Raff doesn't require anyone's a.s.sistance.

Of you all, her position is clearest. I don't know if you can be brought to see it, but this is only incidental, a momentary indulgence, with her."

"What you don't seem to get," Peyton told him, with a brutally cold face, "is that I may smash you; now, where you are."

"That was possible," Lee agreed; "and you are right--I had overlooked it. I think that's pa.s.sed, though; I'm going to keep on as if it were.

Why, you young fool, you seem to have no conception, none in the world, of what you propose to do. In a week, in your frame of mind, you'd have a hundred fights; there would be time for nothing else but knocking out the men who insulted you. You'll collapse over Sunday if you are not absolutely and totally impervious to everything and everybody. The only way you can throw the world over is to ignore it; while you appear to have the idea that it should put a rose in your b.u.t.tonhole."

"You don't have to tell me it's going to be stiff," Peyton Morris a.s.serted gloomily. "I can take care of that. Claire and Ira are the hard part. Lee, if anyone a year ago had said that I was like this, that I was even capable of it, I'd have ruined him. G.o.d, what a thing to happen! I want you to understand that we, Mina and I, didn't have a particle to do with it--it just flatly occurred. I had seen her only three times when it was too late; and if you think I didn't try to break it, and myself, too--"

Lee nodded. "Certainly. Why not, since it's bound to knock you on the head? You've been very unfortunate: I can't imagine a man to whom this would come worse."

"If I can make Mina happy I don't care about myself."

"Of course, that is understood," Lee Randon returned impatiently; "it is nothing but sentimental rot, all the same. If you are not contented, easy in mind, how can she be happy? You have got to believe entirely in what you are doing, it must be right to you on every possible side; and you can't make that grade, Peyton; you are too conventional underneath."

"Sink your spurs in me," he said doggedly; "it's funny when you really think about it. Why, only a little while ago, if I had heard of a man doing this, I would have beaten him up just on general principles: running away from his wife and child, with another woman, an actress, that's what it is! I tell myself that, but the words haven't a trace of meaning or importance. Somehow, they don't seem to apply to me, to us; they can say what they like, but Mina isn't wicked. She--she loves me, Lee; and, suddenly, that swept everything else out of sight.

"But go back to me--you realize that I was rather in favor of what I was, what I had. Brandenhouse is a good school and my crowd ran it. We were pretty abrupt with boys who wh.o.r.ed about; and, at Princeton, well, we thought we were it. We were, still, there; and I got a heavy idea of what I liked and was like. We were very d.a.m.ned honorable and the icing on the cake generally. That was good after I left college, too; but what's the use of going into it; I was in the same old Brandenhouse surrounding. The war split us wide open. Or I thought it did; but, Lee, by G.o.d, I don't believe it changed a thing. I got my touch of concussion early, Ira was born, and, and--"

"Disaster," Lee Randon p.r.o.nounced shortly.

"Call it that if you choose; there isn't much use in calling it at all: it simply is."

"With someone else, yes; but with you, no, not finally; you haven't the character and disposition to get away with it. You don't, secretly, approve of yourself, Peyton; and that will be fatal. The truth is that, while you want this now, in a year, or two years, or five, you'll demand the other. You think it is going to be different from everything else in heaven and earth, you're convinced it's going to stay all in the sky; but it will be on the solid familiar ground. Understand again--it isn't your plan I'm attacking; but your ability; that and your real ignorance of Mina Raff.

"If you imagine for an instant that this love will be bigger than her work, if you suppose that, against her acting, it will last, you are an idiot for your pains. If I don't know the side of her you do, I have become fairly familiar with one you haven't dreamed of. She is a greater actress than people yet recognize, princ.i.p.ally because of the general doubt about moving pictures; but that recognition will come, and, when it does, you will be swept out of sight.

"No, you haven't the slightest suspicion of what it is about; that side of her, and it's very nearly the whole woman, is a blank. She admitted to me that she couldn't understand it herself. But what she is doing is dragging into her genius what it needs. She loves you now, and tomorrow she'll love a Belgian violinist, a great engineer, a Spanish prince at San Sebastian. How will you take sitting in the salon and hearing them padding around over your head? It's no good your getting mad at me; I am not blaming Mina Raff; you are. I admire her tremendously.

"In the beginning I said she could watch out for herself, and I intimated that I was reasonably indifferent to what happened to you: it is Claire I am concerned about. Unfortunately for her, and without much reason, she loves you too. When Mina is done with you and you stray back, from, perhaps, South America, Claire won't be here. I don't mean that she will have gone away, or be dead in the familiar sense.

I haven't any doubt but that she would live with you again--she is not small-minded and she's far more unconventional than you--what there was of her."

"If you or anyone else thinks that I don't admire Claire--" he stopped desperately. "We won't get far talking," Peyton added; "even if all you have said is a fact. You can't hit on much that I've missed. You might just as well curse me and let me go."

"Nothing of the sort," Lee Randon returned equably; "that's exactly what I have no intention of doing. In the interest of Claire I must try to open your eyes." The younger man said indignantly:

"You talk as though I were a day-old kitten. It's cursed impertinent: I don't seem to remember asking for so much advice."

Throughout their conversation they were both holding the plates of sausage and scrambled eggs, from which rose a pungent odor, inevitable to the occasion. And, in a silence which fell upon them, Lee realized the absurdity of their position behind the door. "We can't keep this up," he declared, and moved into the eddying throng, the intermingling ceaseless conversations. Almost at once Peyton Morris disappeared, and Lee found f.a.n.n.y at his shoulder. Neither of them fox-hunted, although they hacked a great deal over the country roads and fields, and they had ridden to the Spencers' that morning. f.a.n.n.y wore dark brown and a flattened hunting derby which, with her hair in a short braid tied by a stiff black ribbon, was particularly becoming. She was, he told himself, with her face positively animated, sparkling, from talk, unusually attractive. f.a.n.n.y was like that--at times she was singularly engaging.

"What did he say?" she demanded, nodding in the direction in which Peyton had disappeared. "I have avoided him all morning."