EIGHT or ten of the guests were up in Bylant’s rooms playing poker and refreshing themselves at will. Extravagantly as they admired Gita they were a little in awe of her in her own house, and when under her eye assuaged their thirst discreetly. Bylant had a wide bed and a divan, if they were forced to remain for the night, and he could sneak them downstairs in the morning before his wife was awake.
Gita had given several parties during the winter but refused to ask more than forty at a time. She disliked crowded rooms, where the selfish appropriated the chairs and sofas permanently, while the others were forced to stand about or wander. A few always retired to her ark, those who liked to hear themselves talk and two or three who had formed the habit of listening. A mutually interested couple generally migrated to the ecclesiastical chest in the hall. In the large drawing-room and connecting dining-room the rest of the guests sat comfortably, drank the cocktails and whisky and soda passed by the host and gave a divided attention to the spontaneous performances of the livelier members of the company. There was a good deal of music tonight, a diseuse was convulsing and brief, there were impromptu little plays and much staccato talk. One distinguished exponent of bald realism untempered by art, too swiftly susceptible to synthetic gin, stole upstairs early in the evening and appropriated the divan for the night. A dark young actress, famous as a stage adventuress, who barely tolerated any man but her husband and drank nothing stronger than root-beer, curled up in an easy chair and went to sleep; her invariable habit. Polly had steered Dr. Pelham into a corner behind the piano and kept him there, and Elsie, who was helping Gita play hostess, watched her brother out of a corner of her eye. Many celebrities were present: Gora Dwight, a novelist both popular and important; Lee Clavering, whose play had been a Broadway sensation since September; Marian Starr Darsett; De Witt Turner and his wife, Suzan Forbes; Potts Dawes; Max Durand; Fellowes Merton; Helen Vane Baker, of two worlds, and Peter Whiffle.
While a young musical-comedy actress was giving the convolutions of a skirt-dance, spontaneously invented, Gita found an empty chair behind a door and indulged in a yawn. She suddenly felt bored with New York and parties. And clever people could be as monotonous in time as the more stereotyped society to which Mrs. Pleyden had introduced her. What did it all amount to? They went on like this winter after winter and not one of them looked blasé, not even Marian Starr Darsett, who was reputed to be entering upon her hundred-and-ninth love-affair. But they all had some gift, or used their brains otherwise to a definite purpose. Hers was like a whirlpool, careering round and round in circles and to no purpose whatever. The simile stopped at the vortex; she never got as far as that!
Next winter? And next? And next? The prospect was appalling. . . . However, after six months in the country—reactions were automatic. . . . She had arranged for several house-parties—and felt disposed to withdraw the invitations. But that would leave her alone with Eustace. He bored her less than anyone, but if he kept up that ridiculous game she’d explode before they’d been isolated in the manor a week. His “wooing,” tentative so far as became the first stage, had shown him to be possessed of more charm than she had suspected, but she preferred him without it. How could they ever get back to their old relationship when the game was given up as a bad job? She hated make-believe anyway. She was made for realities. . . . Realities? What were they? In this sort of life, anyhow? Perhaps, after all, she’d have been better satisfied with life if she had been forced to take a job in San Francisco.
Although she had had spasms of restlessness and dissatisfaction of late, not to mention certain abrupt flights of imagination, she had felt nothing of the sort when she had stood before her mirror a few hours earlier and put the finishing touches to her toilette. Her gown was white and silver and vastly becoming. She wore all her pearls, and had applied a light touch of powder. But as she sat there behind the door, almost concealed from her guests, she lost all interest in her beauty. Polly was far prettier than she and always looked her most dazzling in red. Tonight she wore a quaint flaming head-dress and little gold curls escaped everywhere. She hadn’t left Pelham’s side for a moment since they entered at nine o’clock, and it was now a quarter to twelve. And he looked anything but bored.
“Why are you hiding, Miss Carteret?” De Witt Turner was looming over her, his great bulk encased in loose tweed. If he possessed evening clothes he never wore them. “Your party is a stunning success as usual. I hope we haven’t tired you out.”
“Not a bit of it. Do sit down.”
The only unoccupied chair was one of the small upright contributions from Brittany, and Turner disposed himself carefully; then finding it more secure than most ancient furniture, hunched down and lit a cigarette. “Do you know what I’ve been wondering?” he continued. “If by any chance you brought over those ancestral costumes of yours? We might all dress up again and improvise a sort of Colonial farce. I rather yearn for my flounces.”
Gita smiled up at him without effort; he was one of her favorites. “Too bad. They’re down at the manor.” And then she surprised herself by announcing: “I’ve locked them in their chests for good and all. They’ll never be worn again in my time. You see . . . it would be a pity to cheapen the first impression. Don’t you think so?”
“Artistically you’re right, no doubt. But it seems rather a pity—sort of waste. Perhaps that’s rather hypocritical of me. We all enjoyed looking like bloods for once, to say nothing of imagining ourselves handsome. The men, I mean. I think I prefer women in their modern frocks and short hair. But Dr. Pelham, for instance, will never look like that again unless you relent.”
To Gita’s annoyance she felt herself blushing, a new and ridiculous habit of hers. There had been a time when she prided herself upon a fine static red and laughed at girls whose color changed with every passing emotion. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to,” she replied tartly. “Surgeons are scientists, you know, and scientists have no use for anything so frivolous as fancy dress. About the most matter-of-fact men in the world, I should think.”
“Um. Science requires imagination of a certain sort and surgery is nervous work. The most temperamental man I know is a surgeon.” His glance traveled to the corner behind the piano. “Scientists have even been known to fall in love. I should say Pelham had some use for Miss Pleyden. What do you think?”
“Isn’t Polly lovely!”
“She is, indeed. No wonder he’s bowled over.” But like Mrs. Pleyden, he had seen certain straying glances from Pelham’s unambiguous eyes. He had also noted the blush. Gita was a puzzle to him and he sometimes suspected she was still a puzzle to his friend, known as her husband. As a novelist he would have liked to solve it. His fiction, although it dealt with the prosaic realities of life, and he handled sex without tongs, was pervaded by a haunting almost poignant beauty, which drove from his inner being not from his theme. He was in no danger of falling in love with Gita, being quite satisfied with “Miss Forbes,” and, like musicians, preferring to find beauty on the abstract plane; but he never saw this particular beauty with her lofty “springing” little head, her black flashing eyes that seemed to carry back no farther than her mind, her curious aura of virginity, her contradictory magnetic personality and undeviating aloofness, and a certain checked sweetness with it all, without the sensation that some musical instrument within him was vibrating to new harmonies, and he longed to grasp and immortalize them. In other words he would have liked to make her the heroine of a novel.
But the music was too elusive. He only faintly guessed what she suggested. She looked one thing and was so indisputably something else. Once he had tried to pump Elizabeth Pelham, but that loyal friend had laughed at his assumption of mystery. Gita was just Gita. One answer to the riddle, no doubt, was that the girl didn’t know herself. Something had arrested her development, and the man she had married that night when she came down the stairs and made himself nearly bawl outright with her astounding beauty, had as yet taught her nothing. He had met her several times before the wedding and many times since, and although she no longer treated every man as a possible enemy, she had changed not at all in essentials.
But was she on the verge of a change of some sort? He noted that she looked tired and rather melancholy for the first time since he had known her . . . less assured. An ardent feminist, he believed in women taking precisely the same liberties with orthodoxies as men had done since the beginning of time; and if this entrancing creature had found she was mistaken and contemplated throwing over poor old Eustace, why not? Men were pretty philosophical these days—taking a leaf out of the age-old Book of Woman—and although it would come hard on Bylant, no doubt, if he found she preferred another man, he’d renounce her without whimpering. . . . But . . . would she? . . . did she? . . . or, why not? He felt there was a key to the riddle somewhere and wished he knew her history. But he knew nothing beyond the bare facts that she had been born and brought up in Europe, had lived for a time in California, and arrived in New Jersey shortly before her grandmother’s death.
“What are you thinking of?” asked Gita, smiling. “You haven’t said a word for five minutes.”
“You. I was wondering how long we’d have you with us.”
“What an idea. You’ll probably sit with me in this room at precisely the same hour next year.”
“The slight bitterness of your accent confirms my misgivings. I doubt if you’ll be in this house.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, frowning.
“Well, that you’ve been fumbling, so far—not even experimenting, like most women.”
“I don’t like either word.”
“Neither really should apply to you. You’re extremely clear-sighted about most things, but there’s a catch somewhere. I can’t get it. I’d like to, and I too am fumbling, just now. At all events that is the way you impress me, and I’ve a hazy idea that you’ll come out of the fog before long.”
“Come out of the fog?” Gita stared at him under lowered brows and then jerked her head. “I forgot you were a maker of phrases.”
“Only when I’m sweating at the typewriter. I assure you that was spontaneous—and seems to fit you.”
“ ‘Out of the fog.’ ” Her voice sounded dazed. “Do you mean I don’t know where I am?”
“Something like that. You’re a riddle to yourself, as you are to other people.”
“That is not true! I know myself perfectly.”
“Then you dwell in another dimension from the rest of us.”
Gita colored angrily. “By that, I suppose, you mean I am even more conceited than the rest of you. Quite a feat!”
He laughed good-naturedly. “Quite, indeed. And you’re not. But you’re very honest. Do you really believe you’ve explored yourself thoroughly—made a complete chart of all the subterranean streams, and peaks—sort of magnet for fogs? Now, do you?”
Gita moved uneasily. “Yes, I do. I’ve had a very wide and varied experience of life that you know nothing about. No one has ever had an opportunity to gauge herself more exhaustively than I.”
“Ah! I’m not surprised to hear you say that. . . . You suggest a play in four acts with a prologue and epilogue. . . . But I can’t make even a guess. Have you ever been in love?” he asked bluntly.
Gita drew herself up haughtily. “That question was in excessively bad taste.”
“We’ve abandoned taste with other old clichés.” But he took the edge from this announcement of an unassailable fact with a disarming smile. “And if you haven’t, you will, you know. You’re not in the least in love with Eustace, and you’ve got it coming—when the fog lifts.”
He was angling, and had hoped for a minnow, but was by no means prepared for a whale. Gita turned white, then almost purple; her eyes shot red sparks and her mouth drew back until it made an ugly grimace. For a moment he thought she was going to strike him. A curious devastating force seemed to emanate from her and he turned hot all over, as if his skin had been seared. He was almost terrified but had the presence of mind to move forward; if his face were slapped his ignominy would not be too public at least.
The expression lasted but an instant and her face settled into a mask of fear; he had the impression that she was no longer aware of his presence. “If I thought that,” she articulated, “I’d go out and kill myself. It is the most hideous fate that can befall a woman, the most loathsome and degrading. But—thank God!—I’m not capable of it.”
There was another lightning change and he was staring, almost open-mouthed, at the Miss Carteret to whom he was so agreeably accustomed. “You psychological novelists,” she said complainingly, “with your everlasting probing, get on my nerves. And your assumption that you can make a fashion of bad taste even more. The radical is not in the saddle yet, and even when he is, there will be groups in which manners and codes will survive and become the standard once more when the same old wheel has finished the same old revolution. Look at France.”
He smiled amusedly. “Perhaps. But freedom of speech and of thought seems to me of more consequence than taste. . . . But I wouldn’t offend you for the world,” he added hastily. “Nor, for a jugful, have you other than you are.”
“Thanks.” She rose, and smiled as he rose also. “Odd, you never forget your own manners. What a lot of self-posers we are! I see that supper is being brought in and I’m sure you want yours.”
“Whew!” Turner almost whistled as he stood where she had left him. “Whew!” And he wondered if he had had a glimmer. . . .