IF one were to tabulate truisms no doubt the prickly wall, towering to the ether, that surrounds the ego, no matter how close its human relationships, would be first on the list. Polly had made up her mind to marry Geoffrey Pelham and felt no misgivings, for life had given her confidence in herself and her power to charm. For five years men had admired, loved, pursued her, and when she wanted a thing it was hers; why not? Nor was there a rival in the field. If Geoffrey had been captivated by Gita for a time it was quite patent he had given her up as a bad job. Who wouldn’t? Both her mother and Elsie had made a mistake. She hadn’t been asleep this last week, she had kept a sharp eye on Gita, missing no change of expression nor inflection. Gita had prowled about the house for the most part, looking sullen and anxious. Pelham might have been an automaton for all the effect he had on her. Gita was not in love with him, probably never would be in love with any man, unless remorse drove her back to Eustace; who would be a greater fool than she took him to be if he didn’t make the most of his helpless dependence and the great wrong she had done him. And Geoffrey was as indifferent to Gita as she to him. Whether he had discovered he was in love with one Mary Endicott Pleyden she was not yet sure; but that he lingered longer and longer at the manor after his visits to Eustace were concluded, and that he sought her as a matter of course, and looked care-free and often exhilarated in her society, was as plain as the nose on her face. And they would be together in intimate association, for weeks. Her brow was smooth, the corners of her mouth curled upward.
Gita had given Geoffrey to Polly with a grand gesture, convinced on her part that she alone was the obstacle to the happiness of her friend. In her brief interviews with her wounded husband’s surgeon the conversation had been strictly technical. Nor had his cool impersonal gaze wavered for a second, nor followed her. It was more likely to follow the enchanting Miss Pleyden. He had come to his senses. Odd if he hadn’t.
But they knew even less of what was going on in Geoffrey’s mind than they did of each other. Nor had he the remotest idea of what either of them was up to. If he had guessed that they were calmly, more or less, arranging his destiny for him he would have resented it for a moment and then laughed.
That Gita loved him, however collaterally, he had never had the happiness to suspect; although he had known that night as they sat opposite in the dim drawing-room, disguised as their more picturesque ancestors, he would have attempted to win her if she had been free—yes, won, in the end, for he had felt that curious vibration between them. And even after that amazing assertion of hers at the Pleydens’ he refused to believe that Polly’s regard for him was anything but bright friendship spiced with coquetry. He had immense confidence in himself as a surgeon, but had given too little time or thought to women for the fostering of conceit. He was quite unlike the vapid men of her circle—he had heard or read somewhere that all society men were vapid—and he amused this brilliant rather metallic little butterfly for the moment.
She certainly amused him, let him down, sent him back to his work refreshed; and during this last week she had been as spring-water in a thirsty desert. That Polly was too proud to reveal a glimpse of her deeper feelings, or even to betray sentiment until he gave her her cue, was the last thing that would have occurred to him. Love alone would have shattered his obtuseness and his love-stream was flowing turbulently in another direction.
After that first meeting in his mother’s house he had found himself thinking of Gita at the most unexpected and inopportune moments. She projected herself abruptly upon his mental retina when he was sterilizing his instruments preparatory to an operation, discussing a case gravely with his chief, taking his brisk morning walk, relaxing his mind at the play, trying to fall asleep. He had been profoundly annoyed, but attributed the phenomenon to her unusual appearance. Those fierce black eyes and extraordinary eyelashes, that spirited head that looked as if it were about to lift her shoulders and fly upward, would probably haunt any man. No doubt she had a personality as remarkable, although she had said nothing he could remember, merely asked a good many questions. But what it might be did not interest him in the least. He would not care if he never met her again. His mind that night had been like an inadvertently exposed plate and the impression it had received would fade in due course.
When her unexpected invitation to the Christmas party arrived he had accepted it in the hope that a second meeting would lay the ghost. But when he had entered that great hall lit with pine torches, flaring down on men and women in white wigs and bygone costumes, as gorgeous a scene as even that old manor house, famed for its hospitality in the days of Colonial governors, had ever witnessed, two centuries seemed to drop out of life; and as he stood in the shadow, watching the mock-stately evolutions of the minuet, a fine haze like a golden cobweb stole over his brain, and he had a quiet conviction he had been there before and was here again for some more definite purpose. Earlier, he had half laughed, half frowned at his reflection in the mirror; but even then it had seemed to him his transformation was so complete as to create a doubt if he would be able to shake off this new personality on the morrow. He certainly would never cease to wonder that for one night in his life he had been handsome.
The romp that finished the minuet had brought him out of his hallucination and he had moved forward merely to find his hostess and do his first duty as a guest. After that he would look on for a while, enjoying the beauty of the pageant, and then slip out. There was no place in such a scene for him.
When he had stood staring for a moment at Gita, hardly knowing what banalities he might be uttering, again with that iridescent cobweb flung over his brain and that curious beating of old memories beneath, his impulse was to flee incontinently. But after a dance with Miss Pleyden, during which he believed that ridiculous illusions had fled forever, he had deliberately sought Gita in the drawing-room, determined to have done with nonsense forthwith.
He was a practical man in a practical age, a surgeon with a brilliant future, a man who wanted no woman in his life to distract him, certainly not the wife of Eustace Bylant. A surgeon, of all men, should find nothing romantic in the most resplendent of women. He had cut too many of them up. They were all made precisely alike inside and if they varied in texture of skin and in feature, inches and symmetry, the best of them could be classified into types and their original purpose hadn’t deviated by a hair’s breadth. To idealize them was as nonsensical as to idealize passion and call it spiritual love. Even what personality they might possess was due to the balance of hormones in their ductless glands. Anything further was the result of imitation and artifice. Women somewhere in the dawn of time had concocted a set of tricks and some were more skillful in the use of them than others, some had a more arresting beauty, some a more powerful magnetism (super-active generative hormones), but not one of them, unless possessed of interesting abnormalities, would cut up differently from the other. They were the vehicles of the race, nothing more. Cut out the sexual organs of the most beautiful woman in the world and she would wither like a rose broken on its stem. Take them out in childhood and she would be a neuter and semi-imbecile or worse. There would be no more “soul” in her, no more ego, nor personality, than in a cadaver on the operating-table. Sterilize the Graafian follicles with the X-ray, coincidentally stimulating and proliferating the interstitial cells, and a faded woman’s beauty would not only be restored but more likely than not she would possess a magnetism lacking when the function was divided. Perhaps develop a higher “spirituality,” soaring mute aspirations: sublimation of the sex-urge.
His scientific mind restored to its balance, he walked into the drawing-room where Gita sat with the candle-light playing on her white wig and golden gown, flickering in the depths of her black eyes, and, without more ado, fell incurably and uncompromisingly in love.
Afterward he wondered how he had managed to confine himself to an oblique declaration, refrained from pouring his passion over her in a flood. But he had clung tenaciously to the thought of Eustace Bylant, even when she casually announced that she was entering upon a travesty of marriage. That had filled him with exultation but left him as little at liberty to speak.
At the altar he renounced her, although he felt as if the world were sinking under him and left him forever suspended in space. But he looked forward to the sanity of the morrow, to daylight, to the unpicturesque garb of his matter-of-fact era. Thankfully he remembered he was to operate on a woman for cancer at ten o’clock.
He managed to shut Gita out of his thoughts for a week, and then welcomed her back. And he thought of her not only as a woman but as a case. He understood that case thoroughly. He also knew its cure, but he was helpless even if she loved him and she did not; although he never doubted he could win her if it were not for the malignancy of Fate. If her husband were any man but his best friend!—but like all men’s men of breeding he had a high and inexorable code.
His outbreak at Mrs. Pleyden’s had been irresistible. Well, let her know it. Why not? He was entitled to that much. And he approached her on the night of her party no more than courtesy demanded, and devoted himself to Polly, who always diverted him.
He had asked no questions of Elsie that night he had been summoned to the manor to save Bylant’s life, but he had thought of little else, arriving at conclusions not far from the truth. Whether she had recognized Bylant or believed him to be a felonious intruder, she had defended not her house from outrage but her body; that body a peculiar neurosis had made more sacred than virtue itself. He fancied he could reconstruct the scene! Eustace had been a brute and a fool and got his just deserts. As a man he might sympathize with him but as a scientist he felt only arrogant contempt.
By this time he knew Gita’s history. What either she or Polly had not confided in moments of expansion, Elsie’s keen analytical mind had divined, and she had found both pleasure and profit in discussing the girl with her brother. Pelham felt an immense pity, and if a surgical operation would have cured her he would have contributed his services as impersonally as when he cut a neat incision and extracted a poisonous appendix. But the knife must come out of the blue. It must find its own way—down through the stagnant waters, and release the sap underneath.
He might have been the man to watch it fall if he had not been compelled to walk down that staircase beside her holding the candelabra over her head and feeling as if he were sinking under the weight of the stone in his breast. If the time were two centuries earlier he would have snatched her from Eustace at the foot of the stair and dashed off with her into the darkness. But illusions had fled. That golden haze had gone whence it came. Men had become mere travesties of themselves.
Although his imagination had shown unexpected activities he indulged in no longings to mount with Gita into the empyrean and dwell with her in spiritual contact. He was a man and he wanted her, comprehensively, exclusively. And he wanted her because he loved her; he was suffering from no mere gust of passion. His scientific balance might be restored, he might converse with himself as reasonably about the fatal similarities and prosaic purpose of woman, but he had never denied (being by no means lacking in observation) that men, at times, were intensely personal in their selection; and whether this were due to a sudden alliance between the generative cells and the unconscious, or eugenic suggestion, or fetishes, or propinquity, or a pretty face, or a restless longing for completion, or whatever, the fact remained that man, sometime during his life, unless thymo-centric, wanted one woman in particular and moved heaven and earth to get her. Well, he had come to that pass, and by what special set of phenomena induced was a matter of no interest to him. He wished that codes had never been invented. Certainly that he had met Gita Carteret before he had known Eustace Bylant.
He had suffered torments enough during that winter in New York. Gita and Eustace in that narrow house! Companions, friends, almost intimates. How could the man fail to win her? He began with everything in his favor, and if a man could not convert a friend into a lover when he lived under the same roof with her he must be a poor apology for one. And Geoffrey had the highest admiration for Eustace Bylant.
He had sometimes gone out at night and stood in front of that narrow house, paralyzed in a sort of nightmare; then fleeing like a man possessed. Once he collided with a policeman and had some trouble explaining himself, for the hour was two and he guessed that his eyes were as wild as his thoughts.
But on the night after he extracted the bullet from Bylant’s body he knew that one phase of his torments had been a waste of nerve-energy. Gita could not have been more cruelly indifferent if she had wounded a criminal just out of Sing Sing. And he had received a subtle message from that golden gown and powdered hair. That she had been indulging in an orgy of intimate psychology, his future as well as her own disposed of in rough outline, he was mercifully ignorant, but that the masquerade was in some way connected with himself and the night they had hovered on the verge of an understanding, he knew as well as if she had told him.
But on this he dared not dwell. She was still Bylant’s wife, and Bylant was his patient. He devoted his skill to saving the man’s life, avoided Gita, and turned to Polly for distraction. And for all he knew Gita might really be consumed with remorse; or if undergoing a profound revulsion of feeling, needed only that first interview with her prostrate husband to melt into pity and the determination to atone with a lifetime of friendly devotion. Not love. If that had been latent it would have sprung to life in the moment she had turned on the light and seen him wounded and unconscious at her feet. But there was small consolation in the thought that even if Eustace, pursuing his new advantage, called in the services of an endocrinologist, it would avail him nothing unless Gita loved him. And Gita was by no means the type of woman to translate pity into love. But she might immolate herself, nevertheless.
He had walked with Polly during that interview, hardly knowing whether his answers to her lively sallies were rational or mere sputterings from an overcharged brain. She had told him finally he was absent-minded and run off to her car.
And when he looked in through the window and saw Gita sitting in that high-backed chair like an image of arrogant fate he knew that Eustace had lost again.