After My Fashion (22 page)

She called to Thérèse and scolded her for not having brought in dinner; and she insisted, when the servant did bring it, that Richard should begin his meal while she changed her clothes.

While he ate she kept running in, in her dressing gown and with loosened hair, to make sure he was doing justice to Thérèse's cooking. She snatched her own meal by hurried mouthfuls in this way; Richard never forgot the mingling of childish excitement and royal graciousness with which she filled his plate and his glass and bent over him with fleeting kisses as she did so, her bronze-coloured hair hanging in heavy braids upon her white shoulders.

They had just time for a last cigarette together before she had to leave. Richard, laughing at her protests about being too heavy, drew her down upon his knees and teased her about the shameless way she had reddened her lips. ‘It's your fault,' she whispered. ‘You've kissed away every bit of natural colour out of me!'

She would not let him enter the theatre again that night, but before they parted at the stage door she made him promise to come to tea on the following day.

‘It doesn't matter how early or how late you come,' she assured him. ‘There's no performance tomorrow and I'll keep myself free for you from four o'clock on. So don't get worried. Come just as soon as you can get away.'

It was not till he found himself in the Seventh Avenue subway that Richard remembered that he had been expected home at half-past six.

It occurred to him then, as he sat staring at advertisements of soap and toothpaste, cold-cream and hair-wash, that Nelly was to have made some especial vegetarian dish in his honour, the recipe for which she had obtained from one of her uptown friends.

He got out at Sheridan Square and walked down Varick Street.

Far off, in front of him, he could see the colossal bulk of the Woolworth Building, in and out of the very body of which the huge procession of wagons, drays and motor-lorries, which poured up and down from north to south, seemed to be moving. Normally this stream of rattling trucks and wagons, driven by reckless brawny youth, some of them still clothed in heterogeneous patches of khaki, was a cause of nervous misery to him.

He gazed in astonishment at the unmoved equanimity with which the tiny school children, going to the high school in Hudson Square, crossed that roaring street. American children, he thought, must be born with some self-protective membrane, impervious, like the shell of the oyster, to all rending shocks of noise!

But today he seemed to possess within himself a resistant power more effective than any oyster shell, inasmuch as it was able to carry, so to speak, the war into the enemy's camp and find grist for its mill in the most rending and tearing sights and sounds.

As he swung down Varick Street brandishing his stick – a stick bought under the shadow of Selshurst Cathedral – he actually exulted in all the sights around him. He exulted in the rawness of the iron frameworks, in the great torn-out gaps, like bleeding flesh, that were being laid bare in the sides of the old Dutch houses, in the subterranean thunder and the whirling puffs of air and dust that came up through the subway's gratings. He exulted in the huge grotesqueness of the gigantic advertisements, in the yells of the truck drivers, in the flapping clothes lines, in the piled-up garbage, in the hideous tenements and vociferous children. He suddenly became aware that in all this chaotic litter and in all this reckless, gay, aggressive crowd, there was an immense outpouring of youthful energy, an unconquerable vitality, a ferocious joyousness and daring.

The individual separate person, with his ways and his caprices, was certainly hammered and battered here into a horrible uniformity. But the stream of humanity, considered in its ensemble, had a tornado-like force and swing and amplitude. If the exquisite
was pounded out of existence, the fidgety, the affected, the meticulous, the conceited, was certainly allowed no mercy.

He stumbled along the rough uneven sidewalk and finally threaded his way through a long line of arrested vehicles to the corner of Charlton Street.

He opened the door with his latch key and ran upstairs.

He found Nelly extended on the sofa white as a sheet and with her eyes tight shut.

He rushed to her side and falling on his knees took her hand and called her by name.

She opened her eyes and looked at him with a bitter smile. She snatched her hand away and drew back from his touch.

He was so relieved to find that her immobility was a deliberate and not an unconscious thing that he got up from his knees and began talking loudly and freely, walking up and down the room.

‘I was very lucky tonight,' he said, using the crude diplomacy of his earlier days and trying to undermine her suspicions by a mask of nonchalant candour. ‘I met an actress I know and got treated to a wonderful dinner; champagne and all that sort of thing. Upon my soul I believe it made me a bit tipsy. I'm not used to this wining and dining.'

Nelly's face had changed from its ghastly pallor to an unnatural flush. She moved her head and made a little gesture with her hands that might have meant anything or nothing.

‘But I thought,' went on Richard, still walking up and down the room as if to gather confidence by the sound of his own footsteps, ‘that in our present state of finances it would be absurd to leave a good dinner unenjoyed.'

‘You left
my
dinner unenjoyed,' murmured his wife. ‘I had it ready for you by half-past six: I waited and waited for you. And then, when I did eat, I was faint and sick. I waited so long. I got nervous and scared. I was afraid something had happened. Kiss me Richard please, and don't tell me any more.'

He stopped by her side and bent over her and kissed her tenderly. The particular scent used by Elise Angel still hung about his clothes and she drew away from him with a quick start.

‘You've been making love to someone!' she cried. ‘Oh Richard, how could you do it?'

That refrain ‘how could you do it?' – hadn't he heard it, just an hour or so ago, on the lips of the other?

‘My actress reeked with every kind of scent,' protested Richard. ‘They all do, you know. Why, you yourself were buying something of the sort the other day. I expect we shall have you using rouge soon!'

His air of bullying levity did not conceal from Nelly the fact that something quite serious had occurred to him. He was a different person from the Richard who had left her that morning.

‘You've been making love to someone,' she repeated. ‘But it doesn't matter. I'm too tired to talk about it now. So don't tell me any more. I think I shall go to bed if you don't mind. It upset me a bit waiting so long. It isn't nice to have to wait so long.'

She raised herself up with a weary effort as she spoke. ‘No, no, my dear,' she repeated, ‘you can't fool me like that. You've been making love to someone while I was waiting and waiting for you. You had quite forgotten my existence.'

‘I don't see,' said Richard, beginning to assume an irritated and scolding tone, ‘why I shouldn't have my friends just as you have yours. How do I know what people you see up there in Canyot's studio? I don't ask you inquisitorial questions when you come back to me.'

‘You have no need,' she answered with a sad little smile, sitting on the edge of the sofa and propping her chin upon the palms of her hands. ‘But it's no matter. I don't care what you do. I don't want you to tell me anything. All
that
came to an end long ago when I found you were writing to someone. I ought to have known something of this kind would happen. I suppose I couldn't expect anything else. I
did
think, though, just a little, that since I am as I am you wouldn't have done anything like this – yet.'

He was just about to pour forth a torrent of false asseverations when there came a ring at the street door. ‘What's that?' he whispered looking at her in a frightened nervous way. He vaguely expected some drastic agitating message from Elise Angel.

She got up quickly and walked with steady steps to the mirror. ‘Open the door, Richard, will you please, and bring him in.'

‘Who is he? Is it Canyot?'

She smiled at him out of the mirror, as she arranged her hair –
her old mocking elf-smile. ‘Bring him up and you'll see, my dear. No – it's not Robert.'

Greatly puzzled but at the same time a little relieved Richard ran down and opened the door. He came up escorting a tall slender girl, quite unknown to him, who was at once greeted by Nelly as ‘Catharine dear'. ‘Where is Ivan then?' she asked. ‘I thought it was
his
ring.' Catharine Gordon looked round the room with an expression of amused suspicion. ‘You're not hiding him up somewhere are you?' she said. ‘This is Mr Storm, I suppose?' And she gave Richard a firm boyish grip and fixed on him a pair of laughing grey eyes.

‘Oh, I suppose Ivan's gone off somewhere else,' she said; and without further invitation proceeded to take off her hat and fling herself down in the only available armchair. She seemed to exercise a kind of fascination upon Nelly, who promptly seated herself on the arm of her chair and began toying with her silver bracelets, the weight and number of which gave to her long brown wrists an almost oriental appearance.

‘What will you do if you don't see him tonight?' inquired Nelly.

‘What shall I do?' repeated Catharine Gordon. ‘What would
you
advise me to do?' And she turned round suddenly upon Richard whom Nelly had just now a tendency to treat as if he were thin air, rather than a tired, excited, agitated, uneasy man of forty-five.

Richard who was standing at the window drew near to her and surveyed her curiously. She had the longest legs of any girl he had ever seen and she stretched them out now in front of her as if they had been the legs of some young athlete.

‘You must tell me more details,' he said, indicating by the way he looked at her and by the interest in his voice that she had made an impression upon him.

‘Don't tell him anything,' threw in Nelly. ‘Why should you? It'll do him good to get a little bewilderment. Just go on talking to me.'

‘But I should like to tell him,' said Catharine, crossing one leg over the other and clasping her long brown fingers behind her head. ‘I should like to hear what he'd say.'

Nelly at this got up from the arm of the chair. ‘Oh well,' she said, ‘if you're going to start confessing your sins to Richard I'd better make the coffee.' She retreated into their little kitchen.

Catharine did not seem the least perturbed by this outburst. On the contrary, she turned to Richard with quite an intimate gesture.
‘Come and sit down,' she said; ‘there's plenty of room for two thin people like us.' Then she added in a low quick whisper, ‘You must be very kind to Nelly these days; the poor darling looks worried.'

Richard had a taste that evening of what real Bohemian life in New York is like, and it amused him that it should have come to him through Nelly.
If these are the sort of people she meets in Canyot's
studio
, he thought,
I certainly needn't agitate myself about Elise
.

‘… And so I said I'd be down here tonight and he said he'd look in too, though he had to be some place else for dinner; the French Pastry Shop I think it was, or the Five Steps Up, and I knew he
might
change his mind if Lucretia dragged him round to her rooms, but the chances are she'd hardly dare to do that, as it would be breaking up the party and leaving Tassie Edstein, and even Lucretia would scarcely go
quite
so far, so I fancy he'll turn up all right; it's absurd if he doesn't, because he knows he'll have to make it up sooner or later and the sooner he does it the less I'll punish him; have you a cigarette? Oh, imported English ones! That's lovely.'

Richard's mental confusion was not greatly cleared up by this breathless discourse. A certain Lucretia was evidently no prude and a certain Tassie was evidently a maiden who couldn't be left unprotected in the streets of New York.

He hazarded a leading question to this long-legged damsel whose athletic person was giving him at that moment what children call pins and needles, as she leaned against him as if he were a convenient piece of furniture, completely devoid of normal sensibility.

‘Who is this you are speaking of, this man you are expecting here?'

‘Who is it?' She jumped up from his side and ran, or rather bounded, into the kitchen. ‘You've never told him about Ivan!' she cried indignantly. ‘Here have I been chattering on for the last half hour and I find he doesn't know who Ivan is! Do you and he go round with different crowds?'

Nelly's answer was interrupted by such a burst of laughter that Richard could not catch its purport. The two women then launched into a whispered colloquy punctuated by little smothered shrieks of amusement.

What children they are
, he thought, stretching himself out in his
big chair and lighting another cigarette.
If it were Canyot and I
making that coffee, we should be either propitiating one another's
vanity with the most pompous earnestness, or we should be quarrelling
like the devil!

They came back into the room at last, with the coffee not quite spoilt by so elaborate a preparation. At that very moment the doorbell rang again. Richard ran down to open it, full of curiosity to see this much talked-of Ivan. As he descended the stairs he could not help thinking with what completely different an eye he regarded everything in the world, now that he had seen Elise.

He opened the door to the stranger; who walked in with hardly a gesture of thanks. When the door was shut he turned upon Richard and showed himself under the electric light of the little hallway to be a man of about thirty with a pointed black beard and a head of small stiff black curls. His eyes were at once dreamy and alert; dreamy on the surface of them and profoundly alive beneath the surface. ‘Is she up there?' he inquired.