“My dear Harry!… You know nothing about women.”
“Don’t I?”
“A primrose!…”
She laughed gently, insinuatingly, lingeringly, derisively, as she looked downward at him from the mantelpiece. She was delighted, and her frank delight charmed him. How she ate up that unfortunate, that highly unfortunate, primrose! She was murderous; but he couldn’t help feeling that she had made something truly exquisite of murder—as instinctive and graceful as a lyric.
“A primrose!” she repeated gaily. “But, of course, I see what you mean. You are sweet, Harry. But your beautiful tenderness deserved something better. She has, I know, an engaging naïveté of appearance and manner. But surely you aren’t so innocent as to suppose that it isn’t practiced? Are you?”
“Yes and no. Of course, what one calls a manner is always, to some extent, practiced. But if you mean she is insincere with me, no. She is perfectly sincere. Good heavens, Gertrude, have I got to tell you again that she’s in love with me—frightfully in love—as I am with her? One can’t fake love, you know. And what on earth would she want to fake it for—assuming that she could?”
“That’s easy enough. She wants your money. She wants your prestige. She wants your social position—such as it is. She’d give her eye-teeth to be married to you, whether she loved you or not.”
How sharply she pronounced the word “teeth,” and with what a brightening and widening of her incomparable eyes! Really, she ought to be in a zoo. She reminded him of that leopard he had seen the other day, when he had gone with his two little nieces to the Bronx. He had sat there, in his cage, so immobile, so powerful, so still, so burning with energy in his spotted brightness; and then, without the smallest change of expression, he had uttered that indescribably far-away and ethereal little cry of nostalgic yearning, his slit eyes fixed mournfully on Alison. Good heavens—it had curdled his blood! For all its smallness and faintness and gentleness, it had been a sound of magnificent power, a prayer of supernal depth and force. Wasn’t Gertrude’s magic of exactly the same sort? It was in everything she did. She was not beautiful, precisely—she was too abrupt, too forceful, too sharp, for that. Despite her grace, and the undeniable witch-charm of her face, her intensity gave her whole bearing an odd angularity and feverishness. He even felt, occasionally, that she might some day, all of a sudden, go quite mad. Stiff, stark, staring mad. Lycanthropy? For certainly it wouldn’t surprise one to hear her howl like a wolf. And this animal madness in her spirit was a part of, if not the very base of, her extraordinary power to fascinate. One followed her queer evolutions as if hypnotized. If she entered a room, one looked at no one else. If she left a room, one felt as if one’s reason for being there had gone.
“I wish I could make you see her properly,” he mourned, stretching out his legs toward the fire.
“Go ahead!… Try.”
“But what’s the use? You seem determined—for whatever reason—not to see her.”
“Not in the least. I’d like to believe you—I’d like nothing better.”
“Women will never, never, never do justice to those members of their own sex who attract men in the perfectly natural way that May does. Of course she attracts men—and of course she knows it. How could she help it? Can the crocus help it if the sparrow wants to tear her to pieces? It’s not a trick or a falsity in her. She’s as naturally affectionate, and as guileless in her affections, and as undiscriminating, I might add, as a child of six. And one can see, with a little divination, that she has been painfully hurt, over and over again, by this habit of hers of wearing her heart on her sleeve. She gives her soul away forty times a day, just out of sheer generosity, just because she has such a capacity for love; and she is rewarded by a suspicious world with jeers and mud. That’s always the way it is. The counterfeit makes its way. And the genuine is spat upon.”
“How tactful you are to me!”
“Aren’t I!”
“I distrust, profoundly, that madonna type. Really, my dear Harry, it’s too easy.”
“You couldn’t do it!”
“No, thank God, and I don’t want to. I’d rather be honest.”
They were silent, and in the pause the black marble clock on the mantel struck the half-hour. Gertrude’s face had become smooth and enigmatic. Abstractedly, she gazed down at her gray-slippered foot, turning it this way and that to make the diamonded buckle sparkle in the firelight. What was she thinking about? What was she feeling? What waxen puppets was she melting in the powerful heat of her imagination? He waited for her next move with an anticipation which was as pleased as it was blind. One never knew where Gertrude would come up next. But one always felt sure that when she came up she would come up with the sharp knife in her mouth and the fresh pearl in her hand.
“I have the feeling that she wouldn’t even be above blackmail. Or a breach-of-promise suit. I hope you don’t write her incriminating letters!”
“Oh, damn!”
“But go ahead with your charming portrait, your pretty Greuze portrait. I’ll really do my best to be credulous.”
“My dear Gertrude, if you could have seen her in that wood, last week, looking for Mayflowers under the dead leaves!…”
It was hopeless, perfectly hopeless, in the light of that baleful smile! He wanted to shut his eyes. It was like trying to sleep under a spotlight. Was there no refuge for poor May?… For it had been enchanting—enchanting. He had never expected again, in this life, to encounter a human spirit of such simplicity and gaiety and radiant innocence. That moment, now forever immortal in his memory, when he had found a nest of blossom among the brown pine-needles, and she had come galloping—positively galloping—toward him, with a dead oak branch in her hand! And the pure ecstasy of her young delight as she stared at the flowers, bending over and putting one hand lightly on his arm!
Gertrude collapsed into her chair, helpless with amusement; giving herself up to her laughter, she made him feel suddenly ashamed of that remembered delight.
“Oh—oh—oh—oh!” she cried.
“Well!”
“The shy arbutus!… Forgive me, Harry, but that’s too funny. How old are you?”
He flung his cigarette at the back-log and grinned.
“I knew it was no use,” he grumbled amiably. “I can’t make you see her, and it’s no use trying.”
“Well—I can see this much. You are in love with her. Or you couldn’t possibly be such a fool. But it’s precisely when you’re in love that you need to keep your wits about you. Or the wits of your friends.… You mustn’t marry her, Harry.”
“Well—I don’t know.”
“No!… It would be ruinous.”
“Would it? How can you be so sure?”
“You think, I suppose, that life would be insupportable without her.”
“An agony that I can’t bear to think of. And to think that some other man—!”
“I know the feeling. I’ve been in love myself.”
“It’s pretty bad.”
“Of course it is. Ever time. But that doesn’t prove anything. Not a single thing. That sort of agony is largely imagination.… Do you really think you’ll marry her?”
“Well—I haven’t exactly asked her to. But I shouldn’t wonder if I would.”