Suddenly bored with the disheveled Turkish Room, he shoved the tabouret out of the way and eased himself into his hat and coat.
During the drive from Schultz’s Hotel down Third Avenue, Fey passed a small church she had never seen before. Acting automatically and without conscious thought, she directed the cabby to stop, and she dismissed him.
She entered the dark, deserted church and knelt down in one of the pews. No prayers came. Her mind was numb. Gradually the enveloping numbness effaced the impulse which had brought her into the church. Her muff slipped from her fingers and the sharp edge of the prayer board bit into her knees.
At seven, the sacristan touched her on the shoulder, and said that he must lock up. She gave him a dazed look and, gathering her fallen muff, purse, and gloves, she hurried out of the church. She walked the twelve blocks home, and during the walk the numbness melted and she began to feel a sensation of comfort and release. The obsession for Terry was gone. The incident, sordid as it had been, was therefore not a sin. Things like that happened. Everyone suspected that the beautiful Mrs. Johnson had had several such episodes. Nobody knew for sure, of course, and nobody would know of this. Simeon could not be hurt in any way, and from this moment, now that the spell was lifted, she could make him happier than ever before, shelter him in her true and grateful affection.
See, she told herself, when she reached home to find that Simeon had not yet returned from the office, all is made easy for you. There is not the slightest danger of discovery, nor reason to feel guilt. That hour had no significance. One must be realistic nor ever look back. On that part of my life, too, the door is shut forever.
The feeling of relief and comfort grew, and she dressed carefully for dinner. Then she played and sang with Lucita, and when Simeon finally arrived, heavy and silent as he had been the night before, she greeted him normally and even won from him a smile or two. It was not until she sat down to dinner that she found that her hands were wet and that the smell of food disgusted her, but this uneasiness soon passed.
At three o’clock on the following afternoon, Simeon paid Terry eight thousand dollars, and received in return an ambiguous paper which said, ‘For value received, I agree to remain outside of New York City, and that the name of Simeon Tower shall never be mentioned by me at any time or any place, either directly or by innuendo.’ And he signed it Xavier Terence Dillon.
‘He’ll make you sign something, of course,’ Lemming had said in a morning meeting. ‘That can’t be helped, but there won’t be much danger; he’ll be no more anxious to put down the facts than you are.’ So Terry had signed, but not without an angry demand for the full ten thousand.
‘You may believe it or not, as you like, but eight is all I can raise at the moment. And that’s what you’ll take,’ Simeon said, and he said nothing more, but looked out the window, his face gray and set while Terry harangued and threatened. When Terry finally received the thick roll of bills, he took them resentfully, for with his usual optimism he had been so certain of the whole amount that this seemed like actual loss, and would Lemming believe it—Lemming, who expected ten per cent?
‘There’s a seven-forty for Buffalo leaves the Grand Central Depot tonight, from there you can make connections with Chicago,’ said Simeon.
Terry nodded sulkily.
‘There’ll be a man at the depot to be sure you get on that train. Now, get out!’
Terry went. In the outer office he whispered to Lemming, ‘I only got eight,’ and was at once sorry he had not said seven or six.
‘You’re a fool!’ snapped Lemming. ‘I told you——’ He glanced at the shut mahogany door. ‘ Never mind now. Go to your room at the hotel and stay there. He’s probably got you tailed. I’ll be there later.’
‘But how about you—won’t he find out? ’ And I hope he does, thought Terry viciously.
‘I can take care of myself,’ said Lemming, but he smiled, for he saw that this big stupid tool of his needed managing. ‘I’ve got a new idea,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll talk about it. It’s good.’
For ten days Simeon and Fey were happy. For both in their separate worlds fear retreated. The private detective reported that Dillon had duly taken the train for Buffalo and Simeon felt a relief so immense that it also reflected on his financial situation. The Huntington outfit in California were definitely interested in a merger, new feelers came through almost daily, thus providentially confirming the bluff offered Stevens at Continental Trust for the extraction of the last loan. And construction on the Gulf and San Diego was at last proceeding rapidly after the firing of the construction superintendent, who had evidently been enjoying a program of monstrous graft and subtle inaction, dictated somehow, no doubt by Gould, though Simeon could not prove it. And a trip West was indicated. To Simeon in this new buoyant mood it seemed incredible that he had delayed this so long; that bogged down in that morass of muzziness and fear he had felt compelled to flounder in the four walls of his office—and the Stock Exchange—negotiating, worrying, accepting second-hand reports, pouring more and more money into his sagging stocks. Stop worrying and act! That was the secret. Start in two weeks, take the Transic to Galveston, inspect the G. and S.D. personally, then on to see Huntington. A couple of months would about do it. Fey wouldn’t mind too much, being left. But he’d never left her before——His mind slid over and passed beyond an obstacle, the actual physical sensation of deadlock, never objectively examined. He floated high on freedom and certainty, and beneath in the structure none of Life’s foundations were threatened, after all. Health much improved. Social achievement—more assured than ever. And Fey—tender and responsive. He upbraided himself for his recent brusqueness to her, and his brief incredible suspicions. She was, as she had always been, a perfect wife, and he loved her the more for having protected her from an ugly menace.
Both Simeon and Fey, therefore, followed the will o’ the wisp, called a ‘fresh start,’ and their speeding feet were winged with a tenuous optimism.
One Monday night they attended a performance of Aïda in their box at the Academy of Music, and that tragic, lovely opera affected even the fashionable Monday night audience. Nobody had yet arrived in time to hear the ‘ Celeste Aïda,’ of course, and the usual whispers, flirtations, and visiting back and forth between boxes continued during the next three acts, but the final duet of the dying lovers managed to silence them all. Mrs. Astor inclined her famous black wig and listened. The Bulls and the Van Vrandts and the Snellings listened, Ward McAllister ceased checking the list of the Patriarch Ball which was to follow, and listened uneasily. ‘O Terra Addio,’ sang the poignant commingled voices of the eternal mystery of love and death, and Simeon, looking at his wife’s rapt face, clumsily reached for her hand. She leaned back in her chair against his shoulder, her hand responding to his with an almost convulsive grip.
In their carriage on the way to Delmonico’s for the ball, the emotions released by the music made him articulate.
‘You’re beautiful tonight,’ he whispered. ‘I’m so proud of you. D’you really love me, Fey? D’you love your old codger of a husband?’
‘Oh, Simeon, you know I do. More than ever before.’
‘We do seem closer lately,’he said. ‘I was pretty crotchety for a while, I’m afraid.’
‘Of course. You weren’t well. Oh, we’re’going to be very happy, my Simeon.’
She put her hand through his arm, looking up at him with a confiding sweetness.
She still looks so young, he thought, like an innocent girl. She is still so young. He straightened his shoulders and raised his chin.
‘Fey—after my Western trip—shall we go off together this summer? To Scotland, say—look up your people. Would you like that? ’
‘Oh, yes! I’d love it. But Newport and the summer season—I thought you wanted to be there.’
‘We’ve reached the point where we won’t lose ground if we aren’t there for a couple of months.’ He spoke in solemn triumph. ‘ Besides, I’ve let Pembro
ke have the yacht for the season. I thought we wouldn’t be needing it.’
She looked at him quickly. He never told her his plans until they were decided, and there was nothing strange in his chartering out the Inveraray if they were going to Europe. She must have imagined something strained in his voice.
They had drawn up before the canopy, and the doorman was running down the red carpet intent on reaching the barouche door and a tip before the Tower footman could get off the box.
‘The first waltz with you, dear?’ said Simeon, adjusting his muffler and opera hat.
‘All of them if you wish,’ she answered, smiling. ‘I like dancing with you so much.’
She means it, he thought, with a glow of gratitude. All these years she’s never made me jealous, never looked at another man, though plenty of ’em have made sheep’s eyes at her.
They progressed through the private entrance and up the stairs to the dressing-rooms to leave their wraps. Fey soon emerged, looking radiant in her moire gown the color of wood violets. It lent purple lights to her gray eyes and a blacker sheen to her hair.
He noticed the admiring looks from the little knot of tail-coated gentlemen awaiting their own ladies by the door, and he basked in the flattery of her indifference to this admiration. Amongst the group of men he saw Johnson and Haines, cuckolds both of them, for all that they were tail and young, cuckolds and everybody knew it. He looked at them with a contemptuous pity and led Fey into the ballroom.
Chapter Nineteen
ON TUESDAY, March the sixth, the Towers expected a small dinner party. The numbers were small, only three other couples, but their importance was great, and acceptances from the Sylvester Bulls and the Van Vrandts marked another upward notch for the Towers. That these people attended one’s balls, or even teas and luncheons, conferred no such mark of intimacy as their presence at a small dinner party. The third couple consisted of Ward McAllister and a new protégée of his, the young widow of a southern aristocrat, a Mrs. Colefax.
‘Do ask her, dear lady,’ McAllister had said to Fey. ‘You’d like each other, I’m sure. She has a background much like yours was, don’t you know.’
Fey laughed as she passed this on to Simeon. ‘The only difference being, of course, that she’s a genuine Southern widow,’ she said, and then could have bitten her tongue out. Simeon was very angry.
She apologized and placated him, but she could not resist saying, ‘I never do make a mistake in public, and I should think sometimes when we’re alone together we might let down and just be ourselves.’
‘That’s a very stupid remark,’ he said coldly.
‘Yes, dear. I’m sorry. Forget it. Now the menu for this dinner——Did you tell me that Mr. Van Vrandt can’t abide oysters? ’
Why is he still afraid? she thought. We’re safe now. This very dinner party shows how safe we are. The memory of Terry glided through her mind and out again like a little brown snake. And those days when she had seen Terry seemed months, years away. It was finished because she wished it to be finished. The little brown snake was once more locked in its box. It was easy to forget Terry, since the cure had been complete. Both the passion and its converse— the hatred which she had so long felt for him—had fused into a dead indifference. And nothing told her that this fusion had occurred too late. No sense of warning now, no confused dreams or intuitions. She skimmed along the surface, planned dinner parties for Simeon, and Punch and Judy parties for Lucita. She looked forward to the European trip in the summer, to the excitement of buying Parisian clothes, as much as to the pleasure of seeing her father’s boyhood home. She slept well and she ate well, and she told herself that this was contentment at last.
By eight o’clock all the guests were assembled in the south drawing-room, the ladies making, as McAllister lost no time in pointing out, ‘A highly beauteous bevy.’ Fey was in golden orange satin. Sophie Bull had worn her Worth import, a silver plush trimmed with thirteen yards of swaying taupe fringe, the back drapery and overskirt tastefully caught up here and there by cut-steel bows. Sophie’s blonde hair, too, was crimped, festooned, and braided with an ingenuity her maid could never have achieved. She had, therefore, called in Eglantin, the coiffeur, for the occasion, and Fey was duly flattered that a diner intime at the Towers’ should call forth a première toilette. These phrases had, of course, been introduced by Ward McAllister, but now that more and more people ran over to Paris for a month or two, he sometimes encountered subversive competition.
He was encountering it now from Mrs. Van Vrandt, who remarked, ‘Our young hostess looks very well, I think, très soignée. Quite'séduisante in that jaune d’orée gown.’
‘Indeed, yes,’ said McAllister hastily, twirling his imperials and wishing he might talk to that sweet little widow, Mrs. Colefax. But Mrs. Van Vrandt was an imposing matron, and she had been a Livingston.
‘Rather bare, though, this drawing-room,’ continued the lady, reverting to English. ‘For people of wealth.’ She stared around disapprovingly. Only five pictures on the walls, and only one whatnot. No Rogers groups, no Dresden shepherdesses on the mantel beside the glassed-in clock, no hassocks or tabourets on the singularly inconspicuous carpet.
This sparseness was Fey’s fault. She tried hard to keep the house furnished like the fashionable ones she visited, but her early years in interiors so different continually defeated her. A welter of objects and colors made her miserable, and all Simeon’s lectures on the beauties of obvious opulence did not convince her.
‘One hears that it is becoming the fashion in Paris to have emptier rooms, dear Mrs. Van Vrandt, but of course you’d know, having spent last September there,’ said McAllister, neatly scoring.
Fey, Sophie Bull, and Mrs. Colefax were discussing children and servants, the age-old resort of ladies whose men have coalesced by a fireplace to discuss business, as Van Vrandt, Sylvester Bull, and Simeon were now doing.
Fey had long since discovered that she could contribute to the servant or child problem while thinking very hard about other things. Tonight she thought a trifle nervously about the coming dinner. She had a competent butler and chef, and she and Simeon had worked out the menu and wines, but these people and McAllister in particular were extremely critical. And the reputation for serving fine food was one of the chief ways of maintaining pre-eminence. Stone should be announcing soon. She gave a furtive glance at the clock.
‘Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither——’
Fey started, and gazed at the speaker in astonishment. Mrs. Colefax had said that, in response to a vague politeness of Sophie Bull’s to the effect that the war had been terrible, and one did feel so sympathetic to all the poor rebels now, and how were things in Virginia?
‘That’s Whitman, isn’t it?’ cried Fey, remembering the thrill of excited discovery in Mr. Tibbins’s bookstore, so long ago.
Penelope Colefax’s eyes lit. ‘Do you read Whitman? I admire him so much, for all he’s a’— she smiled—‘a Yankee.’
Why, she’s different from these others, thought Fey, seeing for the first time intelligence and a kind of poised force beneath the pretty stylish surface.
‘Mr. Bull would never, never let me read that Mr. Whitman, he’s quite naughty, isn’t he?’ said Sophie roguishly.
Neither woman paid attention to her, though they smiled politely. Both were savoring that first rare moment of kinship, of recognition.
‘Do you remember any more of it?’ asked Fey.
‘A little,’ Mrs. Colefax nodded, answering Fey’s urgency, and sensitive at once to the unexpected deeper note. She said, in her soft Virginia voice,
‘“Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither—
Your schemes, politics fail, lines give way, substances mock and elude me,
Only the theme I sing, the great and strong possess’d soul eludes not...”
I forget the rest, except the last line—
“When shows break up, what but One’s-Self is sure?”’
&
nbsp; There was a small silence. ‘Yes,’said Fey,‘thank you.’ And where was it gone, that triumphant certainty that had once sprung from these lines for her? Where was that crystal hardness, that passionate integrity, she had felt in response?
‘Very pretty,’ said Sophie Bull, moving restlessly. Really Mrs. Tower and Mrs. Colefax were acting a little strange, staring at each other and reciting poetry about being sure of one’s self. ‘I like Longfellow,’ she said. ‘ So inspiring. “Tell me not in mournful numbers,” you know. Susie’s learning it by heart to recite for her Papa’s birthday. Really that child has the most remarkable memory, only the other day her governess was saying that she had never seen a child who could——’
‘Dinner is served, madam,’ said Stone, bowing in the doorway.
Fey rose, with the other ladies. Be my friend, she said, silently to Penelope Colefax. You’re real, and I’m not any more. Be my friend, help me.
She gave a welcoming smile to Mr. Van Vrandt and accepting his portly arm followed her guests downstairs to the dining-room.