VERA
By this time I had become a frequent visitor in the Galt household. A summer had passed since my first appearance there. The second time I came to dinner Vera presented herself, though tardily. As she entered the dining room Galt rose and made her an exaggerated bow, which she altogether disregarded.
“All got up this evening!” he said, squinting at her when she was seated. That she disregarded, too, looking cold and bored. She wore a black party gown of some very filmy stuff, cut rather low, with an effect of elaborate simplicity. A small solitary gem gleamed in her blue-black hair and a point of light shone in each of her eyes. She was forbiddingly resplendent, with an immemorial, jewel-like quality. She derived entirely from her mother and in no particular resembled her father. He tried another sally.
“Isn’t it chilly over there by you, Vera child?” he asked, ironically solicitous.
Instantly she replied: “Yes, father dear. Won’t you bring me my scarf, please.”
After that he let her alone. When dinner was over he took me off to his room again and we passed another evening with the railroads.
No dinner passed without some glow of the feud between Galt and Vera. They seldom saw each other at any other time. Her habits were luxurious. She never came down to breakfast. He delighted to torment her and always came off with the worst of it. Perhaps he secretly enjoyed that, too. She was more than a match for him. Their methods were very different. He taunted and teased, without finesse. She retorted with cold, keen thrusts which left him sprawling and helpless. In a pinch she turned upon him that astonishing trick she had of looking at people without seeing them. The experience, as I knew, was crushing. It never failed to make him fume.
Gradually I perceived the nature of their antagonism. Natalie was her father’s play-fellow, but Vera fascinated him. He admired her tremendously and feared her not a little. She baffled, eluded and ignored him. The only way he could get her attention was to bully her, which he did simply for the reason that he could not let her alone. But there was something on her side, too, for once I noticed that when he had failed to open hostilities she subtly provoked him to do so. Probably both enjoyed it unconsciously.
Between the sisters there was a fiercely repressed antagonism. Natalie was four years the younger and much less subtle, but in the gentle art of scratching she was the other’s equal. Both were extremely dexterous and played the game in good sportsmanship.
“I saw Mr. Shaw at the matinée today,” Natalie announced one evening. After a slight pause she added: “He seems miraculously recovered. I never saw him looking so well.”
I happened to catch a twinkle, where of all places but in the eyes of Gram’ma! She looked for an instant quite human. But it was too late to save me, for I had already asked: “What was he ill of?”
“Something that’s never fatal, apparently,” said Natalie, demurely, fetching a little sigh. Then I understood that what a person named Shaw had miraculously recovered from was an infatuation for the elder sister. And for my stupidity I got a disdainful glance from Vera.
Another time Natalie said to Vera: “I shall see the handsome Professor Atwood tomorrow. May I tell him you are mad about him?”
“Yes, dear,” said Vera. “He will draw the right conclusion.”
The barb of that retort was hidden, but it did its work. Natalie blushed furiously and subsided.
Mrs. Galt surveyed the field of these amenities with a neutral, mind-weary air. She never took part, never interfered, would not appear to be even listening, though in fact she missed nothing, and never failed in the embarrassing after-moment to provide a lightning conductor, a swift bridge or a rescue raft, as the need was. She seemed to do this mechanically, with not the slightest effort. And although her topics were commonplace that was not necessarily an indication of what her mind was like. The want at those moments was for easy, thoughtless conversation, and therefore trite subjects served best. Her own interest in them was never sustained. Having cleared the air she retired within herself again. One wondered what she did with her mind the rest of the time. Lost it perhaps in wonder at life’s baroque, uncontrollable projections.
One evening as dinner was finishing Vera looked at me across the table and said: “Won’t you come sometime to tea when father can’t have you all to himself? He hates tea.”
I was startled and absurdly thrilled; but the curious feeling was that I became in that instant an object of curiosity and solicitude mingled, as one marked by fate for a certain experience. I got this particularly from Natalie who glanced first at me with an anxious expression, and then at her sister.
“We are always at home Sunday afternoon,” said Mrs. Galt.
I was the only caller the next Sunday. Galt did not appear. Tea was served in that middle room, between the parlor and dining room, which was a domain over which Vera exercised feudal rights. That was why it was more attractive than any other part of the house. It expressed something of her personality. Conversation was low-spirited and artificial. Natalie was not her sparkling self. Mrs. Galt was in her usual state of pre-occupation, though very gracious, and helpful in warding off silences. I do not know how these things are managed. Presently Vera and I were alone. I asked her to play. Her performance, though finished and accurate, was so empty that I said without thought: “Why don’t you let yourself go?”
“Like this?” she said, turning back. And then, having no music in front of her, she played a strange tumultuous Russian thing with extraordinary power. I begged her to go on. Instead she left the piano abruptly and stood for a minute far away at the window with her back to me, breathing rapidly, not from the exertion of playing, I thought, but from the emotional excitement of it. Then she called me to come and look at a group of Sunday strollers passing in the street,—three men and two women, strange, dark aliens full of hot slothful life. The men around their middles wore striped sashes ending in fringe, and no coats, like opera brigands; the women were draped in flaming shawls. All of them wore earrings.
“What are they?” she asked.
Immigrants, I guessed, from some odd corner of Southern Europe, who hadn’t been here long enough to get out of their native costume.
“They will be drab soon enough,” she said, turning away.
I wanted to talk of her playing, being now enthusiastic about it, but she put the subject aside, saying, “Please don’t,” and we talked instead of pictures. There was a special exhibition of old masters at the Metropolitan Museum which she hadn’t seen. Wouldn’t I like to go? It came out presently that she painted. I asked to see some of her things and she got them out,—two or three landscapes and some studies of the nude. She had just begun working in a life class, she said.
“Very interesting,” I said, trying to get the right emphasis and knowing instantly that it had failed. She gathered them up slowly and put them away.
“They are like your playing,” I added, “as you played at first.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean you somehow hinder your self-expression.”
“I do not let myself go? Is that what you mean?”
“Precisely. What are you afraid of?”
“Then you believe in letting oneself go?” she asked.
“Well, why not?”
“Suppose one isn’t sure of one’s stopping places?”
We became involved in a discussion of the moralities, hitherto, present and future, tending to become audacious. This is a pastime by means of which, in first acquaintance, two persons of opposite sex may indulge their curiosity with perfect security. The subject is abstract. The tone is impersonal. Neither one knows how far the other will go. They dare each other to follow, one step at a time, and are both surprised at the ground they can make. There is at the same time an inaudible exchange, which is even more thrilling, for that is personal. This need never be acknowledged. If the abstract does not lead naturally to the concrete, then the whole conversation remains impersonal and the inaudible part may be treated as if it had never occurred. That is the basic rule of the game.
Her courage amazed me. I began to see what she meant by supposing that one might not be sure of one’s stopping places. She had been reading France, Stendhal, Zola, Shaw, Pater, Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche.
Mrs. Galt reappeared. “We are debating the sins of Babylon,” I said. She smiled and asked me to dinner.
That was the beginning. We went the next Sunday to the Metropolitan Museum and one evening that same week to the theatre. What we set out to see was an English play that everyone was talking about. At the last minute she asked if the tickets might be changed. And when I asked her where she would go instead she naïvely mentioned a musical comedy much more talked about than the English play for very different reasons. Afterwards when I asked her what part of the show she liked best she said: “The way people laughed.”
Life transacting thrilled her. Contact with people, especially in free, noisy crowds, produced in her a kind of intoxication. We walked a great deal in the pulsating streets, often till late at night, and that she enjoyed more than the play, the opera or any other form of entertainment. Her curiosity was insatiable. She was always for going a little further, for prying still deeper into the secrets of humanity’s gregarious business, afraid yet venturesome and insistent. She would pick out of the throng whimsical, weird and dreadful personalities and we would follow them for blocks.
Once at a corner we came suddenly upon a woman importuning a man. She was richly gowned and not in any way common. He was sinister, sated and cruel. She had lost her head, her pride, her sense of everything but wanting him. We were close enough to hear. He spoke in a low, admonishing tone, imploring her not to make a scene. She grew louder all the time, saying, “I don’t care, I don’t care,” and continued alternately to assail him with revealing reproaches and to entreat him caressingly, until they both seemed quite naked in the lighted street. The man was contemptible; the woman was tragic. I took Vera by the arm to move her away, but she was fixed between horror and attraction and stood there regarding them in the fascinated way one looks at deadly serpents through the glass at the Zoo. The man at last yielded with a bored gesture, called a cab, whisked the woman into it, and the scene vanished. Vera shuddered and we walked on.
We explored the East Side at night, visiting the Chinese and Jewish theatres, Hungarian coffee houses and dance halls. Nobody had ever done this kind of thing with her before. It was a new experience and she adored it. Of what she did with it in her mind I knew almost nothing. Emotions in the abstract she would discuss with the utmost simplicity. Her own she guarded jealously.
One evening late, with a particularly interesting nocturnal adventure behind us, we stood in the hallway saying good-night. We said it and lingered; said it again and still lingered. She was more excited than usual. Her lips were slightly parted. She almost never blushed, but on rare occasions, such as now, there was a feeling of pink beneath the deep brunette color of her skin.
Her beauty seemed of a sudden to expand, to become greatly exaggerated, not in quality but in dimensions, so that it excluded all else from the sense of space. The sight of it unpoised me. And she knew. I could feel that she knew. My impulse toward her grew stronger and stronger, tending to become irresistible. This she knew also. Yet she lingered. Then I seized and kissed her. At the first touch her whole weight fell in my arms. Her eyes closed, her head dropped backward, face upturned. She trembled violently and sighed as if every string of tension in her being snapped.
How little we can save of those enormous moments in which the old, old body mind remembers all that ever happened! What was it that one knew so vividly in that co-extensive, panoramic, timeless interval, and cannot now recall?
The first kiss goes a journey. The second stays on earth. The first one is a meeting in the void. Then this world again.
“Vera! Vera!” I whispered.
Her eyes opened.... The look they gave me was so unexpected, so unnatural in the circumstances, that I had a start of terror lest she had gone out of herself. Then I recognized it. This was she whom I had forgotten. These were those impervious, scornful carnelian eyes you could not see into. The old hot and cold feeling came over me again. And though she still lay in my arms, not having moved at all, it was now as if I were not touching her, as if I never had. I released her. Without a word she turned and walked slowly up the stairway out of sight.
The next whole day was one of utter, lonely wretchedness, supported only by a feeling of resentment. I found myself humming “Coming Through the Rye,” and wondering why, as it was a ditty I had not remembered for years. Then it came to me why,—“If a body kiss a body need a body cry?” What had I done that was so terrible after all?
I went to the Galts’ for dinner uninvited, as now I often did. Vera did not appear. She was reported to be indisposed. I passed the evening with Galt in his study, and left early. Natalie was alone in the parlor, reading. She came into the hall as I was putting on my coat and laid a hand on my arm, consolingly.
“You won’t stop coming, will you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“They always do,” she said. “And some of them are so nice, like you.”
“Natalie, what are you talking about?”
“Father would miss you terribly,” she said.
I promised whatever it was she wanted. She shook hands on it and watched me down the steps.
The next evening I called after dinner. Vera was out. I wrote her a note of expostulation, then one in anger, and a third in terms that were abject; and she answered none of them.
In this state of suspense an enormous time elapsed, three weeks at least. For me Vera was non-existent in her father’s house. When I was there for dinner she never came down. There was a pretense that her absence was unnoticeable. Nobody spoke of it; nobody mentioned her name. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I could not rid myself of the notion that I had become an object of sympathy in the household.
One afternoon I had been in to see Galt, who was ill, and as I let myself out through the front door there was Vera at the bottom of the steps in conversation with a huge blond animal of the golden series, very dangerous for dark women. She saw me obliquely and turned her attention more to him with a subtle excluding gesture. Evidently she wished me to pass. Instead I waited, watching them, until he became conscious of the situation and cast off with a large various manner which comprehended me. As she came up the steps toward me, slowly, but with unblurred, definite movements, hard to the ache of desire yet soft and voluptuous to the forbidden sense of touch, with a kind of bird-like beauty, I could not for a moment imagine that I had ever kissed her, much less that she had responded to a ruffling caress. I forgot what I was going to do, or by what right I meant to do anything. I was cold and hopeless, with a sudden sense of fatigue, and might have suffered her to pass me in silence as she wished to do but for the look she gave me on reaching the top. That was her mistake. It was the old impersonal, trampling look, to which anger was the one self-saving reply. I took her by the arm and turned her face about.
“We are going for a walk,” I said, moving her with me down the steps.
I counted upon her horror of a scene to give me the brutal advantage, and it did. She came unresistingly. Yet it was in no sense a victory. She submitted to a situation she could not control, but contemptuously, with no respect or fear for the force controlling it. We walked in silence to a tea shop in Fifth Avenue; and when we were seated and the waiter came her respect for appearances made her speak.
“Just some tea, please,” she said, sweetly. And those were the only words she uttered.
Her defense was to stare at me as if I were reciting a tedious tale. It bored her. Once I thought she repressed a yawn. That was when I began to say the same things over again. She was without any vanity of self-justification. Not for an instant did she avert her eyes. She looked at me steadily, unblinkingly, with a kind of reptilian indifference. She could see into me; I could not see into her. At the end I became abusive. Then if at all there was a faint suspicion of interest.
“A fool there was who loved the basilisk,” I said. “He who plucks that icy flame will be destroyed but not consumed.... Shall we go?”
I like still to remember that she did not smile at this idiotic apostrophe. Every man, I suppose, says a thing like that once,—if he can. We rose at once. We walked all the way back in silence. I did not go in, but handed her up the steps and left her without good-night.
On the next day but one a note came. Would I meet her for tea at the same place?
She was prompt and purposeful. She waited until tea was served, then put it aside, and spoke.
“Why do all men, though by different ways, come to the same place?”
“I know nothing about all men,” I said. “It’s enough to know about myself. I’m not very sure of that.”
“They all do,” she said, reflectively.
“But I want to marry you,” I said, with emphasis on the personal pronoun.
“Yes; ... that, too,” she said, with a saturated air.
“Oh, weary Olympia!” I said. “How stands the score? How many loves lie beheaded in your chamber of horrors? Or do you bury them decently and tend their graves?”
“You try me,” she said, with no change of voice or color. “It is very stupid.... Man takes without leave the smallest thing and presumes upon that to erect preposterous claims. Take our case. I begin by liking you. I invite you to a friendship. You are free to accept or decline. You accept. Wherein so far have you acquired rights in me? We find this relation agreeable and extend it. All of this is voluntary. Nothing is surrendered under compulsion. We are both free. Then suddenly you overwhelm me by a sensuous impulse. It is a wanton, ravishing act. I resent it by the only peaceable means in my power. That is, I avoid you. Immediately you assail me with violent reproaches, as by a right. Is it the invader’s right of might? Is human relationship a state of war?... Don’t interrupt me, please.... And now, when I have come to say that under certain conditions I am prepared to make an exception in your forgiveness,—for Heaven knows what reason!—you taunt me of things you have no right to mention. They are mine alone.”
There was a retort, but I withheld it. How shall man tell woman she hath provoked him to it? If he tell her she will wither him. Yet if the sight, smell and sound of her provoke him not, then is she mortally offended. He shall see without looking and be damned if he looks without seeing. It is so. But she divined my thoughts.
“If a woman gives it is quite the same,” she went on. “Only worse, for in that case he presumes upon what he has received by favor to become lord of all that she has.”
“I lie in the dust,” I said.
“I know the pose,” she said, with a lighter touch. “Happily it is absurd. If it were not that it would be contemptible.”
“Well, pitiless woman, what would you have a man to be and do? Let us suppose provisionally that I ask out of deep, religious curiosity. I may not like the part. How should a man behave with you?”
“I dislike you very much at this moment,” she replied. “By an effort I remember that you have saving qualities. Did you hear me say that I was prepared to make an exception?”
“It may be too late,” I said. “What are the terms? You said under certain conditions.”
She frowned, hesitated and went on slowly.
“It is my castle. You may dwell there, you may come and go, you may make free of it in discretion, agreeably to our joint pleasure, provided you forego beforehand all rights accruing from use and tenure.”
We debated the contract in a high, ceremonious manner. It was agreed that the bargain, if made, should terminate automatically at the instant I should presume to make the slightest demand upon her.
“As if for instance I should demand the key to the chamber of horrors,” I said, whimsically.
“Exactly,” she replied.
I stipulated, not in earnest of course, that she should make no demands upon me.
“That was implied,” she said. “We make it explicit.”
When at last I accepted unreservedly she put forth her hand in a full, generous gesture; and the pact was sealed.
We walked homeward on a perfectly restored basis of friendship, changed our minds at the last minute, went instead to a restaurant, then to the theatre, and passed a joyous evening together.