You lifted your coffee cup, whipped into silence by her smiling brutality; and doubtless you looked whipped, for she pushed back her chair and came around the table and kissed you on top of the head.
“Bill dear, I do Want to be your wife,” she said.
All day long at the office, and the night and day following, you pretended to consider what you were going to do, knowing all the time that it was already decided. You had supposed that she would want a starched and gaudy wedding, but it was in a dark little parsonage parlor somewhere in South Jersey, with Dick and Nina Endicott as witnesses, Erma made her marital investment less than one month later.
It was Larry who introduced Major Barth to you and Erma; brought him out one evening for bridge. There was nothing impressive about him, except his size — almost massive, well-proportioned, with a little blond mustache that looked like a pair of tiny pale commas pasted couchant, pointing outwards, against his youthful pink skin. You would not have noticed him at all, among the crowd, but for the subsequent comedy.
The big handsome major began to be much in evidence, but still you took no notice; Erma’s volatile and brief fancies in the matter of dinner guests and dancing partners were an old story to you. Then, returning home one evening at nearly midnight, on mounting to your rooms on the third floor you saw light through the keyhole as you passed Erma’s room on the floor below, though John had told you that she was out and would not return until late.
In the morning you arose rather later than usual, and you were in the breakfast room with your emptied coffee cup beside you, just ready to fold up the Times and throw it aside, when you heard footsteps at the door and looked up to see Major Barth enter, twinkling and ruddy.
“Good morning,” he said pleasantly; and added something about supposing you had gone to the office and wishing he had one to go to.
It so happened that that evening you and Erma were dining out. As usual she came to your room and tied your cravat.
“Tim interrupted your breakfast, didn’t he?” she smiled.
In front of the mirror, with your back to her, you arranged your coat.
“And is he — that is — are we adopting him?” you inquired.
She was silent. Then she said:
“Sometimes you frighten me, Bill. You feel things too well, much too well for a man. How long have we been married, a year and a half? Yes, eighteen months. We’ve had dozens of house guests, some under rather peculiar circumstances, like the Hungarian boy last winter, and you’ve never lifted an eyelid. But you feel Tim at once; you’re much too clever.”
You were now dressed, and stood by the chair looking down at her, your hands in your pockets. “And after last night I am supposed to breakfast with him and discuss yesterday’s market? Not that I’m pretending any personal torment, but when that jackass walked in on me this morning I felt like an embarrassed worm. What do you want me to do? Shall I go and live at the club? Do you want a divorce?”
“Come on,” said Erma, “we’ll be late.”
It petered out to no conclusion.
It was a few years after that you moved to Park Avenue. You had been married five years!
“I’ve never lived in anything between a hotel room and a house,” said Erma. “The word apartment has always sounded stuffy to me. If we don’t like it we can probably sell without much loss.”
“I think we may scrape along somehow,” you remarked drily, “with nineteen room and eight baths.”
The arrangement was ideal, with your rooms on the upper floor, at the rear; and the night you first slept there you complacently accepted Erma’s suggestion that all knocking should be at your door. It had already been so, in effect, for two years; this merely formalized it.
She must have spent close to half a million furnishing that apartment. More than ten years of your salary. You figured it up with her once, but that was before the hangings had come over from Italy and the pictures and stuff she bought later in London. Why? She hadn’t gone in for the big show after all; there were too many rules to suit her. You never knew who you might find when you went home to dinner — anybody from that French duke with his cross-eyed wife down to some bolshevik professor. A whole tableful. Then for a month at a stretch you’d dine at the club, preferring that to a solitaire meal at home, while she would be off chasing restlessly after something which she never found.
Nor did you; you weren’t even looking for anything. Though you did one evening see something that stopped you and set you staring in the whirling snow. After a too ample dinner at the club you had gone out for a brisk walk in the winter night and, striding along Fifty-seventh Street, were suddenly in front of Carnegie Hall. A name on a poster caught your eye: Lucy Crofts. It was a large poster, and her name was in enormous black letters.
The date was in the following week.
Twelve years ago, you thought, it seems incredible. She’s nearly thirty. Over thirty! Lucy, Lucy! Yes, call her now. If you could get her back as she was — you don’t want much, do you? Let her come in now and run up the stairs to you, and you take her up and introduce her, politely — Lucy, this is—
XI
He was moving up the second flight, into the semi-darkness, slowly and wearily. Involuntarily his left hand went into his trousers pocket and came out holding a ring with two keys on it, and still involuntarily his fingers selected one of the keys and turned it to the correct position for insertion in the keyhole.
He felt the key in his hand and looked down at it, wondering how it had got there...
That evening at the recital the expectation was dead before you saw her. You arrived early, to be sure of not missing Lucy’s entrance, and the two sturdy matrons on your right told each other all you didn’t care to know. One of them had heard her play in Vienna and had later met her in Cannes; the other had known her husband, who had left his estates in Bavaria to be with her on her American tour. Never had there been so devoted a husband, she declared.
And so on.
She was very beautiful, superbly dressed, perfectly composed. The audience loved her at once. You were thrilled for a moment as she stood at ease, graciously inclining her head to the applause; then as she sat down and began to play you felt bored and indifferent. This trained woman playing Mozkowski to a full house — what a place to come to, to find Lucy!
After the first intermission you did not return.
That winter Erma suddenly took it into her head to give Margaret and Rose a lift. She and Jane have always been funny together — in a way they genuinely like each other, but from the first they’ve always backed off a bit, as much as to say, you may be all right but just keep off my grass if you don’t mind. She didn’t get far with Margaret either — Margaret’s a strange kid and a good deal of a fool, thinking she’s in love because Doctor Oehmsen has articles in the American Science Journal.
But Rose jumped at Erma’s first gesture. Erma soon got fed up with her clever tricks, but Rose held on till she got what she wanted.
At first you thought she was after Dick, and maybe she was, but if so she soon found that Mary Bellowes was ahead of her. Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes — it looked very imposing on the announcement, almost as imposing as one of her grand entrances into a drawing-room. Instantly Erma was on to her the first time Dick brought her around.
Later, after they had gone, you told Erma that Dick deserved better, and that as an older sister it was up to her to save him from so unpleasant a fate. She replied that the remark was your record for stupidity.
The wedding was as different as possible from your and Erma’s rustic nuptials; no Jersey parsonage for Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes. You were best man, and when at a solemn moment Erma made a grimace and winked at you, you almost dropped the ring. They took a mansion on Long Island and four or five floors on the Avenue, and for the first time Dick began to take an interest in the private ledger. But even her furious assaults could not greatly disturb the serenity of those colossal columns; and they were restored again to assured security within the year, when Dick declared to you one day at lunch: “Bill, every woman alive ought to be locked up in a little room and fed through a hole in the wall.”