At any rate he was able in that hour, as he had never been able before, to gather up into some sort of perspective his former life in Paris, his marriage to Nelly, and his love affair with the dancer. I will make this night, he thought, as he passed the illuminated front of the Greenwich Village Theater, a new start for my poem. I will get some of that young fellow’s fancies into it. And I will tell Elise that she was right and I was wrong.
Chapter 18
Two days later, after Richard had left for the office, Nelly was called up on the telephone by Catharine Gordon who told her that she and Ivan were at the hospital and that Roger Lamb was dead.
Catharine informed her that Karmakoff was taking her down to Atlantic City to get a breath of sea air, and that she had already spoken to Richard ‘over the phone’.
Nelly got a queer startled sensation from Catharine’s words which had ended with incoherent emotion. She stood for a few minutes by her kitchen tap, fumbling with the breakfast things and mechanically putting into the water some plates which she had already washed. An infinite sadness invaded her heart. It seemed incredible that this self-possessed boy, who had talked to them so quietly in that very room only forty-eight hours ago, was now as far divided from her as her own father.
The news about Atlantic City was a shock to her too. She wondered if Karmakoff and Catharine had secretly got married. If not — was this naïve passionate creature self-possessed enough to risk the sort of transient affair which such an excursion suggested?
Nelly had come to feel a maternal tenderness for the erratic young girl; and though Ivan was no pleasure hunter, she could hardly imagine him committing himself to any lifelong attachment.
She did not go so far as to accuse Karmakoff of exploiting the girl’s emotional agitation over Lamb’s death to his own amorous advantage; but she wished Catharine had come straight to her from the hospital instead of going off like this.
But perhaps it was only for the day. There were plenty of late trains back from the famous resort and, after all, it was likely enough, in the easy moral atmosphere in which they lived, that all the harm that could happen had happened already.
She turned with a heart full of vague forebodings to her housework in the little apartment. She could not quite explain to herself the sort of melancholy which descended upon her. It seemed something more than the boy’s death, more than Richard’s unfaithfulness, more than Catharine’s danger, more than her natural apprehensions about her own future. She reverted to each one of these matters, trying to get at the secret of what she felt, but it escaped her each time. It seemed to be something impersonal, a sort of universal misery in things, a kind of freemasonry of tragedy into which, by the medium of her own distress, she had been formally admitted. Whatever it was, it seemed to grow upon her as the morning went on, gathering in intensity and volume, as if actual vibrations of misery were rolling, wave after wave, over her brain. She had felt something like this once before, during the war; but she had got rid of that by digging frantically in her father’s garden. Here, in a New York apartment, there was no garden to dig in. It was about half-past eleven. She was already vaguely beginning to wonder whether she had the spirit to cook herself any lunch when the telephone rang. Lifting the receiver she was surprised to hear her husband’s voice.
Richard hated telephoning. This was the first time, as it happened, that these two had ever talked together in this way.
She was still more surprised when she heard him say that he thought of following Ivan and Catharine down to Atlantic City and spending the night there. She was indeed so startled by the tone of his voice, which sounded abrupt and strange out of the receiver, that she could do nothing but say ‘yes — yes — yes—’ without any comment. He must have been anxious enough to avoid any comment, for he rang off suddenly in the end, having told her that the train he intended to take left at three o’clock.
Nelly sat down on the nearest chair, nonplussed, puzzled, bewildered, indignant. Had the death of Roger Lamb affected Richard as much as Catharine? But why Atlantic City? There were surely other places, country places in New Jersey, he could have rushed off to? Had Lamb’s death driven them all crazy? Surely Karmakoff and Catharine didn’t want him down there with them? And then, all in a moment, it dawned upon her that he was using the two lovers merely as a clumsy excuse, as an awkward blind, for his own devices. What he was really up to, no doubt, was going down there with Elise Angel! Lamb’s death had made him restless and defiant, as it had made these others restless and defiant, and he had resolved to follow their example and take some wilful plunge. It was curious that that boy’s death, instead of lifting them all into a calmer, clearer state of mind, seemed to have driven them into fiercer acts of self-assertion than they had ever dared to risk before!
The girl felt almost tempted, as she sat on the high chair by the table resting her chin in her hands, to attribute all these feverish movements to some influence of Roger Lamb emanating from the invisible world.
Was this capricious and chaste spirit trying to communicate to them all some utterly subversive doctrine of human relations, some secret of the abyss that contradicted all the normal traditions? Was the real law of the system of things nothing less simple than that every living person should fight unscrupulously for his own hand?
She rose to her feet and moved to the window. The little street below her was quiet enough; but from the great neighbouring thoroughfare came the roar of the motor-lorries carrying their merchandise from the warehouses and wharfs of the downtown quarter to the uptown department stores.
Along with that harsh persistent rumble, the very beating of the bold heart of the adventurous city, came a sort of challenge to her courage. Dared she too, as these others had done, shake off the fatalism of the Old World and strike resolutely and swiftly for what she wanted?
She turned from the window and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was only a quarter to twelve. Richard’s train did not leave for three hours yet.
She stood in the middle of the room biting her lip and pondering deeply. Then with a sudden start she rushed into her bedroom and began putting on her outdoor shoes and her best hat.
A great and desperate resolution had formed itself in her mind. She would go and see Elise Angel.
The effort with which she prepared for this daring move was the most extreme she had ever made. It was like the effort required by an unarmed hunter who walks straight up to a crouching tiger, seeking to dominate it with his eyes.
She was out of the house by the time the chimes in the Metropolitan Tower sounded twelve o’clock. She took the subway at Houston Street and sat bolt upright in the crowded car, her lips tightly compressed and her heart violently beating. What she felt in her inmost soul was that she was fighting for her unborn child, and this thought gave her a defiant courage.
She got out at Columbus Circle and proceeded to walk resolutely eastwards, skirting the southern edge of Central Park.
She was not oblivious to the aggressive newness of everything round her and the crushing challenge of the huge hotels and the portentous apartment houses.
Through the iron railings she could see great blocks of huge grey stone emerging from the midst of enbrowned grass and melancholy shrubs.
It was as if the skeleton bones of the primitive rock basis of all this grandiose architecture were insisting upon its own share in this orgy of triumphant matter. Nelly felt as though all this iron and marble and stone were consciously piling itself up against her frail human weakness. She touched the park railings with one of her hands and a stain of dusty rust came off upon her glove. Never had she felt so entirely alone in the world. She experienced a sickening sensation of nostalgia, of longing for her Sussex hills. Tears came into her eyes as she thought of her father, unable to help her, however desperately she called for help. The longing for home grew so intense as she moved on, between the rocks of the park and the mountainous buildings that she was conscious of a definite pain in the pit of her stomach, something quite distinct from the sense she had of bearing the burden of her child.