XXVI
NICK Lansing arrived in Paris two days after his lawyer had announcedhis coming to Mr. Spearman.
He had left Rome with the definite purpose of freeing himself and Susy;and though he was not pledged to Coral Hicks he had not concealed fromher the object of his journey. In vain had he tried to rouse in himselfany sense of interest in his own future. Beyond the need of reaching adefinite point in his relation to Susy his imagination could not travel.But he had been moved by Coral's confession, and his reason told himthat he and she would probably be happy together, with the temperatehappiness based on a community of tastes and an enlargement ofopportunities. He meant, on his return to Rome, to ask her to marryhim; and he knew that she knew it. Indeed, if he had not spoken beforeleaving it was with no idea of evading his fate, or keeping her longerin suspense, but simply because of the strange apathy that had fallenon him since he had received Susy's letter. In his incessantself-communings he dressed up this apathy as a discretion which forbadehis engaging Coral's future till his own was assured. But in truth heknew that Coral's future was already engaged, and his with it: in Romethe fact had seemed natural and even inevitable.
In Paris, it instantly became the thinnest of unrealities. Not becauseParis was not Rome, nor because it was Paris; but because hidden awaysomewhere in that vast unheeding labyrinth was the half-forgotten partof himself that was Susy.... For weeks, for months past, his mind hadbeen saturated with Susy: she had never seemed more insistently near himthan as their separation lengthened, and the chance of reunion becameless probable. It was as if a sickness long smouldering in him hadbroken out and become acute, enveloping him in the Nessus-shirt of hismemories. There were moments when, to his memory, their actual embracesseemed perfunctory, accidental, compared with this deep deliberateimprint of her soul on his.
Yet now it had become suddenly different. Now that he was in the sameplace with her, and might at any moment run across her, meet her eyes,hear her voice, avoid her hand--now that penetrating ghost of herwith which he had been living was sucked back into the shadows, andhe seemed, for the first time since their parting, to be again in heractual presence. He woke to the fact on the morning of his arrival,staring down from his hotel window on a street she would perhaps walkthrough that very day, and over a limitless huddle of roofs, oneof which covered her at that hour. The abruptness of the transitionstartled him; he had not known that her mere geographical nearness wouldtake him by the throat in that way. What would it be, then, if she wereto walk into the room?
Thank heaven that need never happen! He was sufficiently informed asto French divorce proceedings to know that they would not necessitatea confrontation with his wife; and with ordinary luck, and someprecautions, he might escape even a distant glimpse of her. He did notmean to remain in Paris more than a few days; and during that time itwould be easy--knowing, as he did, her tastes and Altringham's--to avoidthe places where she was likely to be met. He did not know where she wasliving, but imagined her to be staying with Mrs. Melrose, or some otherrich friend, or else lodged, in prospective affluence, at the NouveauLuxe, or in a pretty flat of her own. Trust Susy--ah, the pang of it--to"manage"!
His first visit was to his lawyer's; and as he walked through thefamiliar streets each approaching face, each distant figure seemedhers. The obsession was intolerable. It would not last, of course; butmeanwhile he had the exposed sense of a fugitive in a nightmare, whofeels himself the only creature visible in a ghostly and besettingmultitude. The eye of the metropolis seemed fixed on him in an immenseunblinking stare.
At the lawyer's he was told that, as a first step to freedom, he mustsecure a domicile in Paris. He had of course known of this necessity: hehad seen too many friends through the Divorce Court, in one countryor another, not to be fairly familiar with the procedure. But the factpresented a different aspect as soon as he tried to relate it to himselfand Susy: it was as though Susy's personality were a medium throughwhich events still took on a transfiguring colour. He found the"domicile" that very day: a tawdrily furnished rez-de-chaussee,obviously destined to far different uses. And as he sat there, after theconcierge had discreetly withdrawn with the first quarter's payment inher pocket, and stared about him at the vulgar plushy place, he burstout laughing at what it was about to figure in the eyes of the law: aHome, and a Home desecrated by his own act! The Home in which he andSusy had reared their precarious bliss, and seen it crumble at thebrutal touch of his unfaithfulness and his cruelty--for he had been toldthat he must be cruel to her as well as unfaithful! He looked at thewalls hung with sentimental photogravures, at the shiny bronze "nudes,"the moth-eaten animal-skins and the bedizened bed-and once more theunreality, the impossibility, of all that was happening to him enteredlike a drug into his veins.
To rouse himself he stood up, turned the key on the hideous place, andreturned to his lawyer's. He knew that in the hard dry atmosphere of theoffice the act of giving the address of the flat would restore some kindof reality to the phantasmal transaction. And with wonder he watched thelawyer, as a matter of course, pencil the street and the number on oneof the papers enclosed in a folder on which his own name was elaboratelyengrossed.
As he took leave it occurred to him to ask where Susy was living. Atleast he imagined that it had just occurred to him, and that he wasmaking the enquiry merely as a measure of precaution, in order to knowwhat quarter of Paris to avoid; but in reality the question had been onhis lips since he had first entered the office, and lurking in his mindsince he had emerged from the railway station that morning. The factof not knowing where she lived made the whole of Paris a meaninglessunintelligible place, as useless to him as the face of a huge clock thathas lost its hour hand.
The address in Passy surprised him: he had imagined that she would besomewhere in the neighborhood of the Champs Elysees or the Place del'Etoile. But probably either Mrs. Melrose or Ellie Vanderlyn had takena house at Passy. Well--it was something of a relief to know that shewas so far off. No business called him to that almost suburban regionbeyond the Trocadero, and there was much less chance of meeting her thanif she had been in the centre of Paris.
All day he wandered, avoiding the fashionable quarters, the streetsin which private motors glittered five deep, and furred and featheredsilhouettes glided from them into tea-rooms, picture-galleries andjewellers' shops. In some such scenes Susy was no doubt figuring:slenderer, finer, vivider, than the other images of clay, but imitatingtheir gestures, chattering their jargon, winding her hand among the samepearls and sables. He struck away across the Seine, along the quaysto the Cite, the net-work of old Paris, the great grey vaults of St.Eustache, the swarming streets of the Marais. He gazed at monumentsdawdled before shop-windows, sat in squares and on quays, watchingpeople bargain, argue, philander, quarrel, work-girls stroll past inlinked bands, beggars whine on the bridges, derelicts doze in the palewinter sun, mothers in mourning hasten by taking children to school, andstreet-walkers beat their weary rounds before the cafes.
The day drifted on. Toward evening he began to grow afraid of hissolitude, and to think of dining at the Nouveau Luxe, or someother fashionable restaurant where he would be fairly sure tomeet acquaintances, and be carried off to a theatre, a boite or adancing-hall. Anything, anything now, to get away from the maddeninground of his thoughts. He felt the same blank fear of solitude as monthsago in Genoa.... Even if he were to run across Susy and Altringham, whatof it? Better get the job over. People had long since ceased to take ontragedy airs about divorce: dividing couples dined together to the last,and met afterward in each other's houses, happy in the consciousnessthat their respective remarriages had provided two new centres ofentertainment. Yet most of the couples who took their re-matings sophilosophically had doubtless had their hour of enchantment, of beliefin the immortality of loving; whereas he and Susy had simply and franklyentered into a business contract for their mutual advantage. The factgave the last touch of incongruity to his agonies and exaltations, andmade him appear to himself as grotesque a
nd superannuated as the hero ofa romantic novel.
He stood up from a bench on which he had been lounging in the Luxembourggardens, and hailed a taxi. Dusk had fallen, and he meant to go back tohis hotel, take a rest, and then go out to dine. But instead, he threwSusy's address to the driver, and settled down in the cab, resting bothhands on the knob of his umbrella and staring straight ahead of him asif he were accomplishing some tiresome duty that had to be got throughwith before he could turn his mind to more important things.
"It's the easiest way," he heard himself say.
At the street-corner--her street-corner--he stopped the cab, and stoodmotionless while it rattled away. It was a short vague street, muchfarther off than he had expected, and fading away at the farther end ina dusky blur of hoardings overhung by trees. A thin rain was beginningto fall, and it was already night in this inadequately lit suburbanquarter. Lansing walked down the empty street. The houses stood a fewyards apart, with bare-twigged shrubs between, and gates and railingsdividing them from the pavement. He could not, at first, distinguishtheir numbers; but presently, coming abreast of a street-lamp, hediscovered that the small shabby facade it illuminated was preciselythe one he sought. The discovery surprised him. He had imagined that, asfrequently happened in the outlying quarters of Passy and La Muette,the mean street would lead to a stately private hotel, built upon somebowery fragment of an old country-place. It was the latest whim of thewealthy to establish themselves on these outskirts of Paris, wherethere was still space for verdure; and he had pictured Susy behindsome pillared house-front, with lights pouring across glossy turf tosculptured gateposts. Instead, he saw a six-windowed house, huddledamong neighbours of its kind, with the family wash fluttering betweenmeagre bushes. The arc-light beat ironically on its front, which hadthe worn look of a tired work-woman's face; and Lansing, as he leanedagainst the opposite railing, vainly tried to fit his vision of Susyinto so humble a setting.
The probable explanation was that his lawyer had given him the wrongaddress; not only the wrong number but the wrong street. He pulled outthe slip of paper, and was crossing over to decipher it under the lamp,when an errand-boy appeared out of the obscurity, and approached thehouse. Nick drew back, and the boy, unlatching the gate, ran up thesteps and gave the bell a pull.
Almost immediately the door opened; and there stood Susy, the light fullupon her, and upon a red-checked child against her shoulder. The spacebehind them was dark, or so dimly lit that it formed a black backgroundto her vivid figure. She looked at the errand-boy without surprise, tookhis parcel, and after he had turned away, lingered a moment in the door,glancing down the empty street.
That moment, to her watcher, seemed quicker than a flash yet as longas a life-time. There she was, a stone's throw away, but utterlyunconscious of his presence: his Susy, the old Susy, and yet a new Susy,curiously transformed, transfigured almost, by the new attitude in whichhe beheld her.
In the first shock of the vision he forgot his surprise at her being insuch a place, forgot to wonder whose house she was in, or whose wasthe sleepy child in her arms. For an instant she stood out from theblackness behind her, and through the veil of the winter night, a thingapart, an unconditioned vision, the eternal image of the woman andthe child; and in that instant everything within him was changed andrenewed. His eyes were still absorbing her, finding again the familiarcurves of her light body, noting the thinness of the lifted arm thatupheld the little boy, the droop of the shoulder he weighed on, thebrooding way in which her cheek leaned to his even while she lookedaway; then she drew back, the door closed, and the street-lamp againshone on blankness.
"But she's mine!" Nick cried, in a fierce triumph of recovery...
His eyes were so full of her that he shut them to hold in the crowdingvision.
It remained with him, at first, as a complete picture; then gradually itbroke up into its component parts, the child vanished, the strange housevanished, and Susy alone stood before him, his own Susy, only his Susy,yet changed, worn, tempered--older, even--with sharper shadows underthe cheek-bones, the brows drawn, the joint of the slim wrist moreprominent. It was not thus that his memory had evoked her, and herecalled, with a remorseful pang, the fact that something in herlook, her dress, her tired and drooping attitude, suggested poverty,dependence, seemed to make her after all a part of the shabby house inwhich, at first sight, her presence had seemed so incongruous.
"But she looks poor!" he thought, his heart tightening. And instantlyit occurred to him that these must be the Fulmer children whom shewas living with while their parents travelled in Italy. Rumours of NatFulmer's sudden ascension had reached him, and he had heard that thecouple had lately been seen in Naples and Palermo. No one had mentionedSusy's name in connection with them, and he could hardly tell why hehad arrived at this conclusion, except perhaps because it seemed naturalthat, if Susy were in trouble, she should turn to her old friend Grace.
But why in trouble? What trouble? What could have happened to check hertriumphant career?
"That's what I mean to find out!" he exclaimed.
His heart was beating with a tumult of new hopes and old memories. Thesight of his wife, so remote in mien and manner from the world inwhich he had imagined her to be re-absorbed, changed in a flash his ownrelation to life, and flung a mist of unreality over all that hehad been trying to think most solid and tangible. Nothing now wassubstantial to him but the stones of the street in which he stood, thefront of the house which hid her, the bell-handle he already felt inhis grasp. He started forward, and was halfway to the threshold when aprivate motor turned the corner, the twin glitter of its lamps carpetingthe wet street with gold to Susy's door.
Lansing drew back into the shadow as the motor swept up to the house. Aman jumped out, and the light fell on Strefford's shambling figure, itslazy disjointed movements so unmistakably the same under his fur coat,and in the new setting of prosperity.
Lansing stood motionless, staring at the door. Strefford rang, andwaited. Would Susy appear again? Perhaps she had done so before onlybecause she had been on the watch....
But no: after a slight delay a bonne appeared--the breathlessmaid-of-all-work of a busy household--and at once effaced herself,letting the visitor in. Lansing was sure that not a word passed betweenthe two, of enquiry on Lord Altringham's part, or of acquiescence on theservant's. There could be no doubt that he was expected.
The door closed on him, and a light appeared behind the blind of theadjoining window. The maid had shown the visitor into the sitting-roomand lit the lamp. Upstairs, meanwhile, Susy was no doubt running skilfulfingers through her tumbled hair and daubing her pale lips with red.Ah, how Lansing knew every movement of that familiar rite, even to thepucker of the brow and the pouting thrust-out of the lower lip! He wasseized with a sense of physical sickness as the succession of rememberedgestures pressed upon his eyes.... And the other man? The other man,inside the house, was perhaps at that very instant smiling over theremembrance of the same scene!
At the thought, Lansing plunged away into the night.