PART ONE Page 3✦

PART TWO Page 83✦

PART THREE Page 133✦

PART FOUR Page 221✦

PART FIVE Page 281✦

PART ONE✦

I

I realized that I was sorry to be back in New York. Molly Underhill had telephoned: “Oh, darling, I’m so remorseful that we didn’t meet your ship! Eva Litchfield and I were going to be waiting for you with cheers because you’re home at last, and then Eva couldn’t get away. She’s in the last throes of a book, you know--or maybe you don’t know; you’ve become an expatriate, haven’t you?” Gasping, lisping, gushingly affectionate because she was speaking to me instead of talking about me, she eventually came to the point and invited me to dine with her at our old haunt, one of those establishments run by an Italian whose name it would be a shame to give. There was much to hear, she assured me; things had been popping, as they could pop only in New York. “But I’ll tell all, in the taxi,” she promised. “Only, the drive will be short, and the tale is long.”

In New York, the tale is always long, but one gets it in fragments delivered between the necessary snatches of sleep and the attenuated diet of the New Yorker determined to be slim. Molly explained that she was at liberty to introduce me, in a way of speaking, to the city that had so radically changed, so phenomenally grown, during my protracted stay abroad: she had finished the proofs of a volume of her poems and, she added, as usual when she had sojourned in the empyrean, she felt the need of a strongly human contact. I informed her that on my own part I had come back to write a book about the ways and mistakes of Americans in France; one had to get out of a place in order to write a novel about it. When conversing with Molly Underhill, the trick was to watch her face; her expression might not harmonize with her words. I was at a disadvantage when she drawled: “And then, my lamb, you purpose leaving New York in order to write a book about us? Oh, you’ll get stories out of us! You can’t conceive of the racket instituted by our crowd; and Eva Litchfield is our pacemaker. I suspect it’s because of an underlying discontent with her failure in the marriage line.”

Molly forced information only upon reluctant listeners. It was as if I harboured no curiosity that I asked: “Why do you call it a failure?”

“The look in her mother-in-law’s eye,” chuckled Molly; and hung up. She had a lip-licking chuckle. It prepared me to combat whatever position she had taken in regard to Eva Litchfield. I did not go so far as to decide to range myself squarely on Eva’s side, it being problematical if a fight were raging around her or if she herself had precipitated some squabble among her friends. This point time, and no human reasoning, would clear up. In our crowd, one always disputed, but the gage of battle, promptly trampled underfoot, was soon overlooked, the war cry settled on when all was over.

The frantic American spirit of crowding into a day all that should be spread over a week caught me up and swept me out to be lost in a sea of controversial gossip. I found my time arranged for; I was to rush from one engagement to another without the necessary pauses in which to piece together my impressions of things told me. I was to lunch with Charles Glidden the novelist, in a “quiet little place where we can talk about Eva Litchfield’s married life.” I was to go to Sutton Place for cocktails with Florence Quincy the short-story writer, who would invite only a few people “so that we can talk about poor Eva’s fiasco.” In regard to Eva Litchfield, conditions in New York had not changed. From all sides would come allusions to her, stray information about her, acrimonious or friendly discussion of her. If she failed to set the pace in the sense alluded to by Molly Underhill, she set it in the way of arousing unflagging talk. She had, always, so set it. She was one of the women--lucky or unlucky, as one might consider them--who are discussed. I wished immensely to hear the latest arguments for and against her. I burned with curiosity, composed of friendship and of that prying interest of the novelist, to know the details of her marriage, which had taken place shortly after my departure for a stay of two years in France. Not having returned to New York for the purpose of finding out, today I realised that this was what I must find out. It became a piece of news that New York withheld only to drop on my head when I should be off my guard. The tales I was to hear would be partisan tales; the truth was the brick held in reserve. For, odious as I felt myself in wanting to know, I still feared to hear the truth. That I was promptly to hear everything else was left in no doubt; underlying the various invitations there was the projected weaving into a whole piece of those vicarious hints, those veiled prognostications, those omens of the future as read from the signposts of the immediate past, that our friends had left behind their occasional European travels. Authors do not write chatty letters to each other: they save their lucubrations for the printed work; and what they had dropped in the course of the necessarily hurried talk of casual encounters as we drifted anchorless had not exposed what might be the trouble between Eva Litchfield and Nicholas Van Suydam.

I said to myself: “Dinah Avery, my good woman, you had best furbish your own ideas--your recollections--before swimming out to sea. For swim out to sea you must, and will, before the day is over.” From the thirtieth-floor windows of my small apartment I looked at the sky-line whose fame was flashing around the world and was physically shocked: had corresponding changes taken place in my friends? With that sky-line assaulting my nerves it required no wide digression to speculate about Eva’s husband: he was one of the rising young architects of the city, and that the steel ribs of one or more monsters had been plucked from the side of this Adam was probable. I recalled him as a handsome man who lacked hardness of fibre. How could he bring about a drastic change in Eva? Life failed to scratch the surface of her absorption in her work. Her experiences were of the soul and not of the body. She was capable of going through matrimony without experiencing with her body the slightest nervous reaction. Her soul might be bruised and her mind astounded, but no physical impression would have been made on her; she would still show to the world, and even to those friends in her confidence, a face almost nun-like in its essential purity. No man could hurt Eva for all time, I reflected comfortably: and at once I recalled the comment made on her by the caricaturist, Justo Zermonte. Zermonte had said without apology what many men had suspected but hesitated to acknowledge: Eva was a crystal, and a blow might leave her unscratched while the next blow might strike on the line of cleavage and shatter her.

As usual when she was being discussed, Spencer Mapes the essayist had been eager; he had an insect-like persistence in stinging; but he might have been as impersonally curious as Zermonte when he asked: “Where would that blow have to strike--the shattering blow, I mean?”

According to a trick of his, Zermonte was sketching on the back of a menu card and did not lift his eyes. He shrugged. Those human beings whose lines of cleavage had been struck the shattering blow were more vulnerable to caricature, and therefore more interesting to him, than the unbroken Eva Litchfield; he could not understand the writer’s desire to peel off the skins of the onion, for only the dreadful core was in his line. But Spencer Mapes of the literary mind continued to speculate; he seemed to buzz, when he so discussed his friends. “If the crystal were to be heated?” he suggested. Zermonte regretted that, not being a lapidary, he did not know. “I was wrong, of course,” Mapes kept at it. “A crystal can’t be heated.”

Eva had sat looking at them while they so arranged her under a microscope. She smiled with a faint amusement that could have been genuine but that was merely her lovely indifferent agreement on a point which failed to interest her; she had but a slight sense of humour. Humour would have marred the delicacy of her feeling for beauty. She tolerated no realism. Characteristically she suggested: “Why not have said a diamond? The diamond is eternal.” Nicholas Van Suydam, indeed, could not hurt her. She did not care whether her happiness were eternal if only her work would be.

But Molly had said, “The look in her mother-in-law’s eye.” I felt as if I were at the motion pictures, as if I were managing the picture; for I cranked the projecting machine a little further and saw, clearly and accurately, Nicholas Van Suydam’s mother as I had seen here in fact.

His publishers had given a tea to our favourite Englishman. The entresol of the Savoy Plaza roared with our lifted voices, and smelled of dying flowers, and occasionally someone paused long enough absent-mindedly to eat a sandwich. Eva Litchfield had taken possession of Nicholas Van Suydam and, as I recall, was in a less crowded room talking with him. She had not captured him against his will; never had I seen a young man so fatuously lifted above himself by a woman’s notice. Eva was a delicate thistledown blowing across his path, dazzling him, luring him. While I stayed, they did not again mingle with the crowd. And Spencer Mapes lingered near the door through which they had disappeared, leaning against the white woodwork with his own handsome head thrown back--not brooding but waiting.