It had not. Dr. MacClure, cooling off as he idled through the groups in the Japanese garden, chuckled despite himself. He had to admit to himself, now the die was cast, that he rather enjoyed the experience of feeling young again. He even looked up at the moon and for one mad, unscientific moment wished he were alone with Karen in this impossible little garden with its queer, tangy Japanese blooms.
2
The little bridge was convex and snubby; it bulged in absurd fashion, and Eva MacClure stood on the bulge leaning on the rail and staring darkly down.
The tiny water was black except where the moon lay, and there was so little of it that when something hungry came up in the middle of the moon and gulped, the gulp sent circles to the boundaries of the pool in three seconds. Eva knew it was three, because she counted them in one corner of her mind.
Everything was tiny here: the gnarly dwarf trees of ume — plum — with their sweet blossoms in the shadows beyond the bridge, the pool, the voices of Karen’s guests piping thinly out of the clothing gloom, the crinkly Japanese lanterns like miniature accordions strung overhead on invisible wires. Among the meticulous cameos of tsutsuji and shobu and fuji and botan — azalea, iris, wistaria, peony, all the Japanese flowers Karen loved — Eva felt like an overgrown schoolgirl in toyland.
“What’s the matter with me, anyway?” she thought despairingly as she watched a circle widen.
It was a question she had been asking herself for some time. Until recently she had been a healthy young vegetable ripening underground. She had felt no real sense of pain or pleasure; she merely grew.
“Biting people’s heads off!”
It was good soil Dr. MacClure had provided. Eva grew up in a Nantasket paradise, laved by salt winds made pleasanter by the lavish acrid smell of wild flowers. The doctor sent her to the best schools — schools he investigated suspiciously beforehand. He provided money, good times, wardrobe, the care of hand-picked women for her. He had made his motherless house a home for her; and he had inoculated her character against infection with the same sure knowledge with which he supervised the hygiene of her body.
Yet those were formative years and Eva experienced no biting emotion. She knew she was forming — even a plant must have a vague sensibility of its growth: like all growing things she felt life tracing its course through her body, doing extraordinary things to her, shaping and building her, filling her full of meanings too green for expression and destinations too far away to be more than glimpsed. It was an interesting time, even an exciting time; and Eva went about in a glow, happy only as a plant is happy.
But then, suddenly, something went dark about her, as if some monstrous light-organism had swallowed up the sun and bathed the world in evil, unnatural colors.
From a gay and lovely vegetable she became overnight a creature of moods, chiefly black. Food lost its savor. Fashions, which had always been exciting, became dull — she quarreled bitterly with her dressmaker; her friends, whom she had always managed beautifully, became intolerable — she lost two of them forever by telling them some plain truths about themselves.
It was all very mysterious. The theatre, the books she loved, the witcheries of Calloway and Toscanini, cocktail parties, the fascinating quest for bargains in the Boston and New York stores, the gossip, the dancing, the Causes she was always championing — all the interests and activities which had filled in the outline of her pleasant existence inexplicably began to fade together, as if there were a conspiracy against her. She even took it out savagely on Brownie, her favorite horse at the Central Park stables; and Brownie was so outraged that he dumped her unceremoniously into the middle of the bridle-path. It still ached where she had fallen.
All these wonderful symptoms, coming to a head in an unusually insidious spring in New York — Dr. MacClure had long since given up the Nantasket house except for occasional weekends — really reduced themselves to a simple diagnosis, if only Dr. MacClure had been ordinarily observant. But the poor man was too obsessed with his own excursions into romance these days to see farther than the end of his nose.
“Oh, I wish I were dead,” said Eva aloud to the little gulps in the pool; and for the moment she really did.
The bridge creaked, and from the way it trembled underfoot Eva knew a man had come up behind her. She felt herself growing warmer than the warmness of the evening warranted. It would be too silly if he—
“Why?” asked a young man’s voice. It was not only a man’s voice, it was a young man’s voice; and what was more embarrassing, the voice was quite hatefully amused.
“Go away,” said Eva.
“And have you on my conscience for the rest of my life?”
“Don’t be unpleasant, now. Go away.”
“See here,” said the voice, “there’s water right under you and you look pretty desperate. Were you thinking of suicide?”
“Don’t be absurd!” flared Eva, swishing around. “The pool isn’t two feet deep.”
He was a very large young man, almost as large as Dr. MacClure, Eva was chagrined to notice; and he was despicably good-looking. Not only that, he was dressed in dinner clothes, which somehow made matters worse. The same piercing keen-puckered eyes people remarked in Dr. MacClure beamed down at her; and altogether Eva felt like a child.
She decided to snub him, and turned back to the rail.
“Oh, come now,” said the large young man, “we can’t let it go at that. I have a certain social responsibility. If it wasn’t drowning, what was it to be — cyanide by moonlight?”
The obnoxious creature moved up to her side; she felt him. But she kept looking at the water.
“You’re not a writer,” said the young man reflectively. “Although the place is crawling with them. Too young, I’d say, and too desperate. The breed here to-night’s well-fed.”
“No,” said Eva icily, “I’m not a writer. I’m Eva MacClure, and I wish you would go away from here as fast as you can.”
“Eva MacClure! Old John’s daughter? Well!” The young man seemed pleased. “I’m glad you don’t belong to that crowd out there — I really am.”
“Oh, you’re glad,” said Eva, hoping it sounded as nasty as she meant it to sound. “Really!” It was getting worse and worse.
“Detest writers. Mumbo-jumbo artists, the whole crew. And not a good-looker in the crowd.”
“Karen Leith is very beautiful!”
“No woman’s beautiful past thirty. Beauty is youth. After that, make-up. What they call ‘charm’... I’d say you could give your future stepmother cards and spades.”
Eva gasped. “I think you’re the most — the rudest—”
“I see ’em with their clothes off,” said the young man negligently. “Same as the rest of us that way — more so.”
“You... what?” faltered Eva. She thought she had never met a more detestable person.
“Hmm,” he said, studying her profile. “Moon. Water. Pretty girl studying her reflection... Despite the gloomy philosophy, I’d say there was hope.”
“I don’t know why I’m talking to you,” said Eva in a muffled angry voice. “I’ve been watching the goldfish and wondering when the creatures sleep.”
“What!” exclaimed the detestable young man. “Then it’s a worse case than I thought.”
“Really—”
“Looking into a pool under the moon and wondering when goldfish sleep! That’s a worse sign than wishing you were dead.”