The next night she pursued it. It did appear that Caroline, having withdrawn into Emmeline’s apartment, was offering Emmeline as a — well, as a wife. This bizarre act, looked at in one way, was an act of generosity. The flaw here was that Caroline was not given to acts of generosity. There was therefore some other motive at work, something that eluded Emmeline; and closing her eyes, she leaned back against the sofa, so that Martin saw very clearly, between her dark eyebrows, the two Caroline-lines, one slightly longer than the other. Martin saw something else: the completed direction of Emmeline’s thought. For if Emmeline was correct in her analysis, then it was clear that Caroline was offering Martin a substitute in the marriage bed — that she was presenting Emmeline as a sexual emissary. And an irritation came over Martin, at Emmeline’s failure to pursue her own thought to its deepest implication, along with gratitude for being spared that unthinkable discussion. But Emmeline was correct about one thing: Caroline was not generous. Why then would she practically thrust her sister into her own marriage bed? And was it possible that the lines of strain between Emmeline’s thick eyebrows were the sign of her secret knowledge, a knowledge she dared not confess to herself?
A night came when there was a second knock on the door. Martin looked at Emmeline, who looked at him anxiously from the sofa across from his chair, but even as he crossed to the door he knew who it had to be. Caroline was wearing a dark dress he had not seen before. She waited to be invited in and then walked in swiftly. Her hair was pulled back tightly from her face but a few tendrils had escaped at the back. Over one arm she carried a shawl. Martin closed the door and walked over to her, where she stood beside his chair.
“Sit down, Caroline. You look tired.”
Caroline ignored him and stood looking at Emmeline, on the sofa, who looked back at her. It seemed to Martin that the two sisters were unable to move, that a spell had been cast, a spell as in an old fairy tale — he tried to remember which one it was. Or did all fairy tales have spells? But within the motionlessness something was growing, something was swelling, Martin could feel it, and turning to Caroline he was struck by a faint glow on her cheek, so that the thought came to him that she looked marvelously healthy, as if lying on the sofa with her arm over her eyes had filled her with health, though an instant later it occurred to him that she was sick, that she really ought to be in bed. But it was Emmeline who looked worn and anxious, there on the couch, while Caroline glowed down at her from beside the chair. It struck him that she looked like a heroine on the stage. And immediately he sensed with his skin what was going to happen, what was bound to happen, what could never happen but was about to happen, it was all nonsense and yet he would have to do something about it, he would have to act fast, very fast, and he tried desperately to struggle out of the spell, as one might struggle up from deep water, while from beneath the shawl Caroline removed a gun, a foolish awkward gun, and with her face aflame, the face of a heroine, she pointed it at Emmeline, who remained motionless but drew her eyebrows together as if in pain. Then a dream-shot rang out, and Martin, still struggling out of the fairy-tale spell, saw high up on the far wall a piece of plaster trickling down, while Emmeline sprang up as if startled from sleep, and Caroline, who had fainted away at the loud sound, fell slowly to the rug, where Emmeline was already kneeling, calling quietly for a damp cloth.
28. The Grand Cosmo
MARTIN SAT IN A CORNER OF THE ROOF GARDEN of the New Dressler, in a gazebo striped with sun and shade, and raised to his eyes a pair of Jena field glasses. He had ordered the glasses from a German optical company, which advertised a finish of bright black enamel on all metal parts, high-power achromatic lenses ground from special optical glass manufactured in the Jena glass factory, and a covering of fine-grade morocco leather. Through the high-power lenses he directed his gaze eight blocks north toward a group of workmen who were standing near a heavy mat draped over a group of boulders in a deep excavation. They were blasting deeper, day after day, far down, for the new building was to have twelve underground levels and a basement; the consulting engineers had said it could be done. Aboveground the building would rise thirty stories, surpassing the New Dressler not merely in size but in every other way, for Martin had leaped beyond the idea of a hotel to something quite new. The leap had been greeted coldly by Lellyveld, who had refused to support the project unless Martin agreed to grant Lellyveld and White a forty percent interest in the building and the power to appoint the head of accounting — a deal strongly opposed by Rudolf Arling on the ground that Lellyveld wanted to gain control of the Cosmosarium and infect it with his mediocrity. Martin accepted Lellyveld’s offer instantly.
He could no longer discuss such matters with Emmeline, who after the inept shooting had resigned her position at the New Dressler to devote herself entirely to the care of Caroline. He had counted on her to return, after a short rest, but it became clear that a change had come over Emmeline: she refused to be alone with Martin, scarcely permitted herself to look at him, and so thoroughly played the part of the guilty woman taken in adultery that he became uneasy and irritable in her presence. As for Caroline, who confessed that the gun had come from Claire Moore in the days of their friendship, for Claire Moore believed in a woman’s right to self-protection, the shot had served to jolt her from her sofa-grave; she had returned to her apartment and her marriage bed as if she had come home from a little vacation at the seaside, with a touch of color and a handful of shells. But Martin, who was not unhappy to see an end to the sofa nonsense, felt a slight heaviness in the air of the apartment, now that Caroline had returned. Caroline alone, Caroline without the promise of Emmeline, was a quiet darkening of the air, a delicate and fine-dropped rain, lightly falling. More and more he found himself lingering in his rooms in the New Dressler, one of which he supplied with a bed. At first he had walked down to the Vernons for dinner each evening, with the old pleasurable sense that he was visiting them as a group, was somehow courting them all over again, but Emmeline’s fussy and over-anxious attendance on Caroline, Margaret’s habit of handling her pearls or fiddling with her dress sleeve as she glanced idly around the room, Caroline’s murmured sentences punctuated by long silences, all this grated on his nerves. He began working in his rooms through dinner or taking his meals alone at the New Dressler, so that he found himself eating with the Vernons only once or twice a week.