PART II
XIII
WHEN Violet Melrose had said to Susy Branch, the winter before in New York: âBut why on earth donât you and Nick go to my little place at Versailles for the honey-moon? Iâm off to China, and you could have it to yourselves all summer,â the offer had been tempting enough to make the lovers waver.
It was such an artless ingenuous little house, so full of the demoralizing simplicity of great wealth, that it seemed to Susy just the kind of place in which to take the first steps in renunciation. But Nick had objected that Paris, at that time of year, would be swarming with acquaintances who would hunt them down at all hours; and Susyâs own experience had led her to remark that there was nothing the very rich enjoyed more than taking pot-luck with the very poor. They therefore gave Streffordâs villa the preference, with an inward proviso (on Susyâs part) that Violetâs house might very conveniently serve their purpose at another season.
These thoughts were in her mind as she drove up to Mrs. Melroseâs door on a rainy afternoon late in August, her boxes piled high on the roof of the cab she had taken at the station. She had travelled straight through from Venice, stopping in Milan just long enough to pick up a reply to the telegram she had despatched to the perfect house-keeper whose permanent presence enabled Mrs. Melrose to say: âOh, when Iâm sick of everything I just rush off without warning to my little shanty at Versailles, and live there all alone on scrambled eggs.â
The perfect house-keeper had replied to Susyâs enquiry: âAm sure Mrs. Melrose most happyâ; and Susy, without further thought, had jumped into a Versailles train, and now stood in the thin rain before the sphinx-guarded threshold of the pavilion.
The revolving year had brought around the season at which Mrs. Melroseâs house might be convenient: no visitors were to be feared at Versailles at the end of August, and though Susyâs reasons for seeking solitude were so remote from those she had once prefigured, they were none the less cogent. To be aloneâalone! After those first exposed days when, in the persistent presence of Fred Gillow and his satellites, and in the mocking radiance of late summer on the lagoons, she had turned and turned about in her agony like a trapped animal in a cramping cage, to be alone had seemed the only respite, the one craving: to be alone somewhere in a setting as unlike as possible to the sensual splendours of Venice, under skies as unlike its azure roof. If she could have chosen she would have crawled away into a dingy inn in a rainy northern town, where she had never been and no one knew her. Failing that unobtainable luxury, here she was on the threshold of an empty house, in a deserted place, under lowering skies. She had shaken off Fred Gillow, sulkily departing for his moor (where she had half-promised to join him in September); the Prince, young Breckenridge, and the few remaining survivors of the Venetian group, had dispersed in the direction of the Engadine or Biarritz; and now she could at least collect her wits, take stock of herself, and prepare the countenance with which she was to face the next stage in her career. Thank God it was raining at Versailles!
The door opened, she heard voices in the drawing-room, and a slender languishing figure appeared on the threshold.
âDarling!â Violet Melrose cried in an embrace, drawing her into the dusky perfumed room.
âBut I thought you were in China!â Susy stammered.
âIn China ⊠in China?â Mrs. Melrose stared with dreamy eyes, and Susy remembered her drifting disorganised life, a life more planless, more inexplicable than that of any of the other ephemeral beings blown about upon the same winds of pleasure.
âWell, Madam, I thought so myself till I got a wire from Mrs. Melrose last evening,â remarked the perfect house-keeper, following with Susyâs hand-bag.
Mrs. Melrose clutched her cavernous temples in her attenuated hands. âOf course, of course! I had meant to go to Chinaâno, India. ⊠But Iâve discovered a genius ⊠and Genius, you knowâŠ.â Unable to complete her thought, she sank down upon a pillowy divan, stretched out an arm, cried: âFulmer! Fulmer!â and, while Susy Lansing stood in the middle of the room with widening eyes, a man emerged from the more deeply cushioned and scented twilight of some inner apartment, and she saw with surprise Nat Fulmer, the good Nat Fulmer of the New Hampshire bungalow and the ubiquitous progeny, standing before her in lordly ease, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette between his lips, his feet solidly planted in the insidious depths of one of Violet Melroseâs white leopard skins.
âSusy!â he shouted with open arms; and Mrs. Melrose murmured: âYou didnât know, then? You hadnât heard of his masterpieces?â
In spite of herself, Susy burst into a laugh. âIs Nat your genius?â
Mrs. Melrose looked at her reproachfully.
Fulmer laughed. âNo; Iâm Graceâs. But Mrs. Melrose has been our Providence, and. âŠâ
âProvidence?â his hostess interrupted. âDonât talk as if you were at a prayer-meeting! He had an exhibition in New York ⊠it was the most fabulous success. Heâs come abroad to make studies for the decoration of my music-room in New York. Ursula Gillow has given him her garden-house at Roslyn to do. And Mrs. Bockheimerâs ball-roomâoh, Fulmer, where are the cartoons?â She sprang up, tossed about some fashion-papers heaped on a lacquer table, and sank back exhausted by the effort. âIâd got as far as Brindisi. Iâve travelled day and night to be here to meet him,â she declared. âBut, you darling,â and she held out a caressing hand to Susy, âIâm forgetting to ask if youâve had tea?â
An hour later, over the tea-table, Susy already felt herself mysteriously reabsorbed into what had so long been her native element. Ellie Vanderlyn had brought a breath of it to Venice; but Susy was then nourished on another air, the air of Nickâs presence and personality; now that she was abandoned, left again to her own devices, she felt herself suddenly at the mercy of the influences from which she thought she had escaped.
In the queer social whirligig from which she had so lately fled, it seemed natural enough that a shake of the box should have tossed Nat Fulmer into celebrity, and sent Violet Melrose chasing back from the ends of the earth to bask in his success. Susy knew that Mrs. Melrose belonged to the class of moral parasites; for in that strange world the parts were sometimes reversed, and the wealthy preyed upon the pauper. Wherever there was a reputation to batten on, there poor Violet appeared, a harmless vampire in pearls who sought only to feed on the notoriety which all her millions could not create for her. Any one less versed than Susy in the shallow mysteries of her little world would have seen in Violet Melrose a baleful enchantress, in Nat Fulmer her helpless victim. Susy knew better. Violet, poor Violet, was not even that. The insignificant Ellie Vanderlyn, with her brief trivial passions, her artless mixture of amorous and social interests, was a woman with a purpose, a creature who fulfilled herself; but Violet was only a drifting interrogation.
And what of Fulmer? Mustering with new eyes his short sturdily-built figure, his nondescript bearded face, and the eyes that dreamed and wandered, and then suddenly sank into you like claws, Susy seemed to have found the key to all his years of dogged toil, his indifference to neglect, indifference to poverty, indifference to the needs of his growing familyâŠ. Yes: for the first time she saw that he looked commonplace enough to be a geniusâwas a genius, perhaps, even though it was Violet Melrose who affirmed it! Susy looked steadily at Fulmer, their eyes met, and he smiled at her faintly through his beard.
âYes, I did discover himâI did,â Mrs. Melrose was insisting, from the depths of the black velvet divan in which she lay sunk like a wan Nereid in a midnight sea. âYou mustnât believe a word that Ursula Gillow tells you about having pounced on his âSpring Snow Stormâ in a dark corner of the American Artistsâ exhibitionâskied, if you please! They skied him less than a year ago! And naturally Ursula never in her life looked higher than the first line at a picture-show. And now she actually pretends ⊠oh, for pityâs sake donât say it doesnât matter, Fulmer! Your saying that just encourages her, and makes people think she did. When, in reality, any one who saw me at the exhibition on varnishing-dayâŠ. Who? Well, Eddy Breckenridge, for instance. He was in Egypt, you say? Perhaps he was! As if one could remember the people about one, when suddenly one comes upon a great work of art, as St. Paul didâdidnât he?âand the scales fell from his eyes. Well⊠thatâs exactly what happened to me that day ⊠and Ursula, everybody knows, was down at Roslyn at the time, and didnât come up for the opening of the exhibition at all. And Fulmer sits there and laughs, and says it doesnât matter, and that heâll paint another picture any day for me to discover!â
Susy had rung the door-bell with a hand trembling with eagernessâeagerness to be alone, to be quiet, to stare her situation in the face, and collect herself before she came out again among her kind. She had stood on the door-step, cowering among her bags, counting the instants till a step sounded and the door-knob turned, letting her in from the searching glare of the outer worldâŠ. And now she had sat for an hour in Violetâs drawing-room, in the very house where her honey-moon might have been spent; and no one had asked her where she had come from, or why she was alone, or what was the key to the tragedy written on her shrinking faceâŠ.
That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any moreâbecause nobody had time to remember. The old risk of prying curiosity, of malicious gossip, was virtually over: one was left with oneâs drama, oneâs disaster, on oneâs hands, because there was nobody to stop and notice the little shrouded object one was carrying. As Susy watched the two people before her, each so frankly unaffected by her presence, Violet Melrose so engrossed in her feverish pursuit of notoriety, Fulmer so plunged in the golden sea of his success, she felt like a ghost making inaudible and imperceptible appeals to the grosser senses of the living.
âIf I wanted to be alone,â she thought, âIâm alone enough, in all conscience.â There was a deathly chill in such security. She turned to Fulmer.
âAnd Grace?â
He beamed back without sign of embarrassment. âOh, sheâs here, naturallyâweâre in Paris, kids and all. In a pension, where we can polish up the lingo. But I hardly ever lay eyes on her, because sheâs as deep in music as I am in paint; it was as big a chance for her as for me, you see, and sheâs making the most of it, fiddling and listening to the fiddlers. Well, itâs a considerable change from New Hampshire.â He looked at her dreamily, as if making an intense effort to detach himself from his dream, and situate her in the fading past, âRemember the bungalow? And Nickâah, howâs Nick?â He brought out triumphantly.
âOh, yesâdarling Nick?â Mrs. Melrose chimed in; and Susy, her head erect, her cheeks aflame, declared with resonance: âMost awfully wellâsplendidly!â
âHeâs not here, though?â from Fulmer.
âNo. Heâs off travellingâcruising.â
Mrs. Melroseâs attention was faintly roused. âWith anybody interesting?â
âNo; you wouldnât know them. People we metâŠ.â She did not have to continue, for her hostessâs gaze had again strayed.
âAnd youâve come for your clothes, I suppose, darling? Donât listen to people who say that skirts are to be wider. Iâve discovered a new womanâa Geniusâand she absolutely swathes youâŠ. Her nameâs my secret; but weâll go to her together.â
Susy rose from her engulphing armchair. âDo you mind if I go up to my room? Iâm rather tiredâcoming straight through.â
âOf course, dear. I think there are some people coming to dinner ⊠Mrs. Match will tell you. She has such a memoryâŠ. Fulmer, where on earth are those cartoons of the music-room?â
Their voices pursued Susy upstairs, as, in Mrs. Matchâs perpendicular wake, she mounted to the white-panelled room with its gay linen hangings and the low bed heaped with more cushions.
âIf weâd come here,â she thought, âeverything might have been different.â And she shuddered at the sumptuous memories of the Palazzo Vanderlyn, and the great painted bedroom where she had met her doom.
Mrs. Match, hoping she would find everything, and mentioning that dinner was not till nine, shut her softly in among her terrors.
âFind everything?â Susy echoed the phrase. Oh, yes, she would always find everything: every time the door shut on her now, and the sound of voices ceased, her memories would be there waiting for her, every one of them, waiting quietly, patiently, obstinately, like poor people in a doctorâs office, the people who are always last to be attended to, but whom nothing will discourage or drive away, people to whom time is nothing, fatigue nothing, hunger nothing, other engagements nothing: who just waitâŠ. Thank heaven, after all, that she had not found the house empty, if, whenever she returned to her room, she was to meet her memories there!
It was just a week since Nick had left her. During that week, crammed with people, questions, packing, explaining, evading, she had believed that in solitude lay her salvation. Now she understood that there was nothing she was so unprepared for, so unfitted for. When, in all her life, had she ever been alone? And how was she to bear it now, with all these ravening memories besetting her?
Dinner not till nine? What on earth was she to do till nine oâclock? She knelt before her boxes, and feverishly began to unpackâŠ.
Gradually, imperceptibly, the subtle influences of her old life were stealing into her. As she pulled out her tossed and crumpled dresses she remembered Violetâs emphatic warning: âDonât believe the people who tell you that skirts are going to be wider.â Were hers, perhaps, too wide as it was? She looked at her limp raiment, piling itself up on bed and sofa, and understood that, according to Violetâs standards, and that of all her set, those dresses, which Nick had thought so original and exquisite, were already commonplace and dowdy, fit only to be passed on to poor relations or given to oneâs maid. And Susy would have to go on wearing them till they fell to bitsâor elseâŠ. Well, or else begin the old life again in some new formâŠ.
She laughed aloud at the turn of her thoughts. Dresses? How little they had mattered a few short weeks ago! And now, perhaps, they would again be one of the foremost considerations in her life. How could it be otherwise, if she were to return again to her old dependence on Ellie Vanderlyn, Ursula Gillow, Violet Melrose? And beyond that, only the Bockheimers and their kind awaited herâŠ.
A knock on the doorâwhat a relief! It was Mrs. Match again, with a telegram. To whom had Susy given her new address? With a throbbing heart she tore open the envelope and read:
âShall be in Paris Friday for twenty-four hours where can I see you write Nouveau Luxe.â
* * *
Ah, yesâshe remembered now: she had written to Strefford! And this was his answer: he was coming. She dropped into a chair, and tried to think. What on earth had she said in her letter? It had been mainly, of course, one of condolence; but now she remembered having added, in a precipitate postscript: âI canât give your message to Nick, for heâs gone off with the HicksesâI donât know where, or for how long. Itâs all right, of course: it was in our bargain.â
She had not meant to put in that last phrase; but as she sealed her letter to Strefford her eye had fallen on Nickâs missive, which lay beside it. Nothing in her husbandâs brief lines had embittered her as much as the allusion to Strefford. It seemed to imply that Nickâs own plans were made, that his own future was secure, and that he could therefore freely and handsomely take thought for hers, and give her a pointer in the right direction. Sudden rage had possessed her at the thought: where she had at first read jealousy she now saw only a cold providence, and in a blur of tears she had scrawled her postscript to Strefford. She remembered that she had not even asked him to keep her secret. Wellâafter all, what would it matter if people should already know that Nick had left her? Their parting could not long remain a mystery, and the fact that it was known might help her to keep up a pretence of indifference.
âIt was in the bargainâin the bargain,â rang through her brain as she re-read Streffordâs telegram. She understood that he had snatched the time for this hasty trip solely in the hope of seeing her, and her eyes filled. The more bitterly she thought of Nick the more this proof of Streffordâs friendship moved her.
The clock, to her relief, reminded her that it was time to dress for dinner. She would go down presently, chat with Violet and Fulmer, and with Violetâs other guests, who would probably be odd and amusing, and too much out of her world to embarrass her by awkward questions. She would sit at a softly-lit table, breathe delicate scents, eat exquisite food (trust Mrs. Match!), and be gradually drawn again under the spell of her old associations. Anything, anything but to be aloneâŠ.
She dressed with even more than her habitual care, reddened her lips attentively, brushed the faintest bloom of pink o...