‘He lost his money,’ said Nelly. ‘The Paris people failed him. I’ve had to go short of things as well as he. But it’s no use trying to explain. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters very much now. It’s a mere incident to you of course; but incidentally it has destroyed a thing that was really beautiful — quite as beautiful I daresay as your wonderful dancing.’
Elise rose slowly to her feet at this. ‘That’s the worst of you good domestic women,’ she said. ‘There’s always a point where you begin to scold like fish-wives.’ She walked to the mantelpiece and back again, the texture of her gown hanging about her figure in clinging folds, folds that were as statuesque and classical as those that fall about the figures known as the Three Fates among the Elgin Marbles. ‘It’s all sex,’ she went on, standing erect in front of her visitor and looking down upon her. ‘Your anger against your husband; your anger against me. You talk of my heartlessness and cruelty. Do you suppose I asked your Richard to make love to me? Do you suppose I’d care a jot if he stopped making love to me tomorrow? I don’t care a fig about that, one way or another. That means nothing at all with men. You ought to know it means nothing; and you would know it, only you are blinded by sex. Suppose I were married to him and he was playing with you, I might be furious; I probably should be, but I shouldn’t deceive myself about it. I shouldn’t use grand language about it. I should know it was all this wretched sex illusion, his unfaithfulness and my wretchedness about his unfaithfulness — both of them illusion.’
Having uttered this tirade Elise looked at Nelly as if challenging her to respond. Nelly did not even lift her eyes. She seemed to look through the goddess-like figure before her as if it had been a thing of transparent mist.
‘You have killed my happiness,’ the young girl repeated. ‘You have killed it without scruple or thought. You have no human kindness in you. You are thoroughly heartless. You will always be a bad selfish woman, a woman without pity. And sooner or later your dancing will end. You will get stiff and heavy and dull. And then perhaps you will remember the girl whose heart you killed and who came to tell you what you had done!’
She rose from her seat as she spoke and the two women stood looking at each other with that deep look of infinite understanding and infinite contempt which is one of the most characteristic achievements of nature’s laws.
Elise, the artist, felt herself in this struggle weaker and less implacable than her more normal rival. And it was her sense of this advantage in the other that made her toss her proud head and burst into a bitter laugh.
‘You silly pretty child!’ she cried, moving towards the door.
Nelly followed her; but when the door had been opened and she stood on the threshold, the accumulated indignation within her burst forth. ‘I’m glad I came to you,’ she said bitterly. ‘I know you now for the kind of thing you are.’
‘What you really came for,’ retorted the dancer, ‘was to try and persuade me to give Richard up.’
‘You can’t give him up — because he’s never belonged to you. You’ve never loved him, not one little bit! And he — he’s only infatuated with you, as he might be with any other woman of your sort. There’s no real link between you and there never can be.’
‘There’s a much closer link between us than you can understand. But goodbye — I wish you joy of your preciouls possession.’
The dancer’s eyes were blazing with anger now. But Nelly looked straight into her face. ‘It may interest you to know that Richard and I are expecting to have a child. I ought not really to have risked the shock of this interview. You can better understand now, perhaps, how impertinent and ill-bred you seem to me in coming between us just now. You talked of illusion. But it seems to me that the illusion is yours and a crude and vulgar one. It is the illusion of thinking that you could do anything worse to me than destroy my happiness. That you have done by your interference. But your power for evil stops there.’
Having flung this parting shot the young girl turned her back on her enemy and without waiting for the elevator ran down the two flights of stairs and walked out of the building.
She moved now with a very different step from the one with which she had approached the place. Some curious power of battle seemed to possess her, quite different from anything she had felt before. She emerged into the great gaudy avenue with her nerves strung-up and her heart bitter and hard.
There was a child leaning over the stone fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel whose appearance made her, for a moment, recall what she herself had once been; a flicker of faint amusement crossed her face as she thought of those early days and how far she had travelled since then. Had all this happened in Sussex, she thought, would she have had the courage to fight so fiercely for her own hand as she was prepared to do now? Was she too, like the rest, acquiring a new spirit in this New World?
She paused and looked at the watch on her wrist. It was nearly two o’clock. She remembered that her husband’s train left at three. From where did these Atlantic City trains start? The Pennsylvania Station! Yes, that was it. She had seen someone off from that very place only a few weeks ago.
She mounted to the top of one of the green buses, and then left it at Thirty-third Street for a cross-town car.
Walking down the stately arcade of the grandest of all railway stations, she paused at the top of the great flight of granite steps leading into the enormous concourse.
She was impressed, even in the midst of her agitated thoughts, by the superb magnificence of that imperial architecture. The feelings that passed through her must have resembled those of some unhappy Celtic captive, conveyed with her unborn child into the forum of the classical city. In spite of herself she was conscious of a sort of exultation as she looked at these huge columns and embossed roof. Something in the tremendousness of that weight of primitive stone, measured and carved in such grand outlines, lifted her above herself and beyond herself. Here at any rate was a beauty and nobility that had something in common with her Sussex Downs.
What amazing cooperation between brain and hand had been needed to produce a thing like this! She found herself thinking suddenly of an argument in support of Karmakoff’s theories; an argument based on the difference between this building and the vulgar individualistic palaces on the avenue she had just left!
She lifted her head and tried to read the time by the huge clock which hung above her; but she was too close beneath it for the great hands to be intelligible. She felt as if she had indeed reached some fulcral or pivotal point in space where time issued its mandates but was itself obliterated by some formidable super-time.
She looked at her own watch. It was twenty-five minutes past two. The thought struck her, how living and human a thing a timepiece was, whether large or small, and how terribly like little goblins — so nice or so hateful — these ‘ones’ and ‘twos’ and ‘threes’ and all the rest of them were!
Suddenly she remembered she had had no lunch. After hesitating for a moment between the spacious restaurant on one side and the lunch counter on the other, she hurriedly entered the latter place. Seating herself on one of the revolving stools she ordered a cup of coffee and a roll. She was not sufficiently accustomed to this kind of public feeding to be quite at her ease. The long counters were not crowded; but to her English fancy every eye there was regarding her with a questioning stare, and the Negro who waited upon her embarrassed her by his Southern affability.