Kitabı oku: «The Monster», sayfa 4
VI
That morning Leilah had two appointments, one with a modiste, the other with Violet Silverstairs. She did not feel equal to either. The episode of the previous evening had been to her like the supreme torture which medieval legislation devised. It was all she could bear – and more!
When, abruptly, she found herself face to face with Verplank, it was as though she were confronted by the dead. The sense of it numbed her, and the numbness was heightened by a horror that has no name. Into the seats of thought there entered the realisation that, in spite of all, she still loved him, that in spite of all he still loved her. In the core of these convictions fear entered, fear of him, fear of herself, a sensation of common peril and mutual perdition so blinding that Barouffski’s rudeness she barely noticed, and it was with a look the damned may have that she saw Verplank turn with Violet Silverstairs, and go.
As they passed, Barouffski, with the air of one commenting on a triviality, remarked:
“How odd it is that the Joyeuses should care to hobnob with demi-castors. Shall we go?”
That demi-castors meant bounders generally, and, in this instance, specifically, she would, ordinarily, have been insufficiently familiar with the slang of the boulevards to know. But she did not hear. Moreover, the remark required no reply. Even otherwise she was unable to speak, and it was not until Barouffski reiterated his suggestion that mechanically she acceded to it with a movement of the head.
Her demeanor then in traversing the salons, her leave-taking of the duchess, her bearing in descending the stairs, were as mechanical as her reply to Barouffski, and it was not until after the motor had dropped him, as he had asked that it should, at the door of the Little Club, that, at last alone, the mental anchylosis fell by.
At once in a sort of retrograde vision, she relived the past. There had been the flight from Coronado, the halt at Salt Lake, the descent into Nevada, the divorce, the journey abroad, the platonic marriage to Barouffski. These – the succeeding episodes in the drama of her life – were so many hostages to joy, barricades thrown one after another between Verplank and herself, and unavailingly thrown, since, with but a look, they were almost destroyed.
They had seemed wholly impregnable, but she knew then that unless reinforced by surer bars, they would one and all collapse. At the foreknowledge of that she appreciated what the heroines in the old tragedies endured, when circled by the seven-times-twisted coil of fate. Yet, though they had yielded, she would not yield, and it was with this determination that she alighted in the rue de la Pompe.
The house there had a church for neighbour, and stood between a court and a garden. Before the court was a high, white wall. The garden extended back to the parallel street, where, also, was a wall. The entrance to the court was a double doorway, the entrance to the garden was an iron gate. Between the gate and the house were large urns, a marble bench, a marble chair, most noticeably the kennels of two mastiffs, pets of Barouffski who, at whatever hour he returned at night, had them loosed. They were, he declared, a great protection, as indeed they were – for him. Apart from the occasional barking of these dogs, barring also occasional music from the church, usually the garden was quiet. But that was in the order of things. It lacked both stable and garage. These had been secured elsewhere.
Except for that detail, the arrangements generally were satisfactory. The house was commodious, agreeably furnished. On the ground floor were the usual offices, beneath which the servants slept. On the floor above were the salons and dining hall. Above these were the bedrooms. On this upper floor the apartment which Barouffski occupied gave on the street, while Leilah’s overlooked the garden.
Adjacent to her suite was a stairway designed for servants, but which, because of its convenience, she occasionally used. It led directly to the dining hall, and from there she could descend into the garden.
It had a superior advantage. It enabled her to avoid the hazards of the main stairway, which was used by Barouffski, whom nearer acquaintance had discovered to her without the mask – without one mask, that is – for histrion that he was, he had many, but the best, the feigned nobility of noble pride, the assumed parage, had gone.
In its place was a smile, constant, equivocal, ambiguous, a smile such as the consciously damned may display. It gave Leilah little creeps. She dreaded it, dreaded him, dreaded both, what is worse she dreaded instinctively, without knowing why. The man was amiable, serviceable, gallant. He wore his domino not faultlessly perhaps but with the fine air of a bravo who, when the time comes, will knife you, yes, but who in so doing will rather require that you admire the chasing on the handle of the blade. As yet the knife was concealed. But Leilah felt that it was there. He knew it was. Occasionally he fingered the point.
Hitherto he had lived by expedients. A golden six had been tossed him. He had pocketed it. For him the economic problem of life was solved. He asked little else, merely that the solution should endure and that his dignity, of which he had a humorous conception, be outwardly preserved. In addition to his dignity, or to his idea of it, he had another attribute. He was not exacting. It is a great charm in any one. But with him it did not extend to money. Freely he demanded it, freely she gave and it was precisely when he demanded it that she felt, and he felt, too, the point of the knife.
On this evening when, after the usual din at the doors, the motor entered the court and she alighted at the perron, two footmen busied themselves in aiding her.
Leilah passed through the dining room to the garden where for a while she walked along the path that led from the house to the gate.
The garden was cloistered, the night serene. The influences of both affected her. The darkness put her thoughts into relief, the solitude relaxed the tension of her nerves.
Another thing was helpful, the determination which she had reached, though for that determination to be maintained there must, she saw, be further hostages, new barricades. But what further hostages could she give she wondered, what firmer barricades was it possible to erect? Barring flight or an appeal to Verplank, some message begging him to leave Paris, she could not imagine any. Flight she had already tried, but not flight to some one of the world’s far away places where any one may be lost forever. It was a miserably dismal thing to do, she reflected, a thing so dismal and so miserable that she doubted her ability to do it.
As she thought it over she wondered if in some former existence she could have injured Verplank and whether it were by way of retribution that he had the power to tempt and torture her now. Tenets of this character the Vidyâ advanced and as she had told Tempest, she had come to believe in that Scripture as many do in the Bible, though as many also do without being able to accept it entirely, without being able to accept for instance stories such as that of Jonah and the whale which none the less all would accept were it known how profound is the symbolism behind them. With like reservations, Leilah accepted the Vidyâ. She was very ignorant as women in her station generally are and the reservations were due to that ignorance and also to the demand which the doctrine made on her imagination. But though she was ignorant she was conscious of it and consciousness of ignorance is usually the condition precedent to enlightenment.
Now, in considering the episode of the evening, she asked herself whether she was warranted in accepting this creed of past lives. At the Joyeuses, during the announcements of resonant names, Tempest had said that unless we swallow the ridiculous dogma of a soul specially created at every birth and unless too we are indecent enough to fancy the Deity waiting for that purpose on the passions and caprices of man, we have to accept it, have to accept with it the corollary of past actions and their consequences, have to accept, too, the deduction that, in accordance with our past actions, it is we who reward or punish ourselves, we who become avenging furies or angels of light.
Leilah wished that she could have discussed the matter more fully with Tempest yet she felt that what he had said was logical, but if it were true, then the parallel doctrine that all misdeeds and with them all misfortunes spring from desire must be true also, in which case, before their consequences can be effaced, all misdeeds must be atoned. But how can they be atoned? she asked herself. Presently she remembered. According to the Vidyâ, any desire no matter what, desire for pleasure, for gain, for attainments, for honours, even the desire for spiritual perfection, even the desire for the lack of desire, must be extinguished before old scores are paid. That was the way she saw, the only way. The debtor must sacrifice himself to himself.
But, uncertain still, she went over the matter again, putting to it little tests, passably naïf yet serviceable to her. She had ardently desired to marry Verplank, then, desiring as ardently a barricade against him, she had married Barouffski. In the one case the result had been catastrophic; in the other, calamitous. Doubtless she had sinned in the past and these disasters, brought about by her own desires, were her punishment. There were other things that she had desired. She had wanted to be loved, she had wanted to be thought a beauty, and not only her love had shamed her but soon she might be ashamed to show her face. At the thought of these things she realised anew and more profoundly than ever that selfish desire is the root of evil and that only in its extirpation may peace be had. But coincidently she realised also that any such extirpation was beyond her. Heredity, environment, the circumstances of her life, had given an impetus to desire which she could not arrest. She liked wealth, ease, pretty clothes, becoming hats, the society of agreeable people. She liked the world and in liking it she feared that she liked also the flesh, it might be even that she liked, too, the devil. Yet, she must not, she knew.
In telling herself that, she thought of the Church. The Church was so much more comfortable. There you were not asked impossibilities, the one requirement was to throw yourself in her arms and repent. As the facile process occurred to her she recalled George Moore’s story of Evelyn Innes. That masterwork seemed to tell her to do as the heroine had done and go in a convent.
Perhaps she might, she thought. Perhaps she must.
Several times already she had crossed and recrossed the garden. Now she found herself at the farther end facing the iron gate. Leilah opened it, walked to the corner and returned.
The little tentative evasion had been successful. At any time, unseen even by a servant, she could leave the house, disappear utterly, be forever ingulfed. But the knowledge that she could escape into darkness and be lost there, offered little more than a choice between tears. It presented a form of suicide which was superior only to actual death. She hoped she might be spared it. She hoped an appeal to Verplank would suffice, though in what manner it could best reach him, or, for that matter, reach him at all, she found it difficult to decide. To make it personally was impossible. To attempt it through Violet Silverstairs would involve an explanation and that was impossible also. The idea of employing one of her women occurred to her. There were manifest objections to such a course, though the particular woman whom she had in view she trusted entirely.
Slowly she returned to the house and went to her room. There, when at last the servants had gone and she was alone, she knelt on a prie-dieu and, to the Watchers of the Seven Spheres, prayed for the earthly peace of her soul and of his. She knew that no prayer could affect them, she knew that they are not to be propitiated or coerced, but it soothed her as prayer, in raising the vibrations, does soothe the distressed. The prayer concluded she began another. She prayed that sometime she might be somewhere, on some plane, where all things broken are made complete and found again things vanished.
Then, the solace of it still upon her, suddenly she saw by what the prayer had been induced. The consciousness confused and presently, in the melancholy sotto-voce of thought, she told herself that to extinguish that desire, she would have to be in Dharmakaya – the mystic state where there is oblivion of all things here.
“Here!” she caught herself repeating. For, at once, a passage from the Upanishads prompting, she remembered that here means Myalba, which is hell, the greatest of all hells and, for those of this evolution, the only hell there is.
VII
It was on the morning succeeding these incidents that Leilah felt unequal for the appointments she had made. But however she felt, she always did what she had planned. In this instance nature punished her. On the way to the first appointment, a malaise overtook her, enveloped her, beat at her and although, gradually, it fell by, she was still conscious of it when, in the rue Cambon, the motor stopped at the modiste’s door.
“The fitting of madame la comtesse Barouffska!” a fair young girl in black immediately and authoritatively announced.
Before landscapes of silk, in the delight of new modes, customers were sunning themselves. At the announcement they turned, while Leilah, conducted by another girl who had advanced to meet her, crossed the laboratory of enchantments and entered an adjoining room.
But, for the moment, the fitting was delayed. The première was elsewhere occupied. When presently she appeared she excitedly exclaimed:
“I hope I have not detained madame. I am desolated if I have. But! But! If madame knew! One is literally torn to pieces! All day long it is nothing but Ernestine that dress! Ernestine, that robe! Ernestine, that costume! Ernestine this! Ernestine that! Truly madame, there are moments when I say I die! I go crazy!”
Abruptly dropping her voice, she added: “But pardon, I monologue.”
At once, indicating a gown which an assistant had brought, she exclaimed again:
“It will ravishingly become madame.”
The gown, a work of the best Parisian art, suggested something of the immateriality of a moonbeam, and as the assistant, a girl with a tired face and circled eyes, held it for inspection, it gleamed.
Leilah looked at it, wondering the while where she would wear it, whether indeed she would wear it at all. Then, before a sheet that had been placed on the floor and on which the assistant arranged the gown in a circle she proceeded to undress.
To the amateur in feminine beauty, there are few spectacles more attractive than that of an attractive woman clothed in lingerie and a hat. This spectacle Leilah presented.
The première exclaimed at it. “Madame la comtesse has a figure truly divine. But! But! Who could have laced her?”
“I was not very well this morning,” Leilah replied. “I told my women not to make me too tight. But you can take me in I think about an inch.”
“Marguerite,” said the première, “draw the stays a little closer.”
The girl with the tired face undid the corset and pulled at the strings. But she pulled awkwardly, perhaps too suddenly.
Leilah gasped, turned, sat down and fell forward. The première hurried to her. She had fainted.
“The smelling salts!” the première cried. “The smelling salts! Cognac! Get some cognac!”
With one hand she was supporting Leilah, with the other she gesticulated at Marguerite who, hurriedly from the mantel, fetched a vinaigrette which Ernestine then took and sniffed at.
“She’s coming to,” said the assistant.
Ernestine waved the vinaigrette. “The gods be praised!”
For Leilah now had opened her eyes. Wearily she looked about, straightened herself and sighed.
“I must have fainted.”
“It is nothing madame,” Ernestine anxiously protested. “Truly nothing and yet so modish. Yesterday the Princesse de Solférino fainted. The day before it was the turn of the young Duchesse de Malakoff. Such a good augury for these ladies! Like them madame is perhaps – ”
But Leilah now was making an effort to rise.
Abandoning the vinaigrette Ernestine aided her.
“Madame will perhaps wish the fitting postponed. Yes, is it not? It might further fatigue madame. To-morrow – no, to-morrow I regret but in the afternoon I have three appointments and in the morning there is the trousseau of Miss Smith of New York who is to marry an English lord. Marguerite!” she interrupted herself to exclaim. “The costume of madame!”
Then, as the assistant also assisted Leilah, reflectively the première resumed:
“I hear that every New York young lady loves a lord. But – ”
She hesitated. Visibly the vision evoked, confused. Yet, after a second’s pause, rallying, she continued.
“Perhaps it is not every New York young lady who has a lord to love. Perhaps many of them love the same lord.”
Discreetly she smiled. “And that must be so nice for him!”
Considering Leilah, she concluded:
“But another day – ”
Of it all, Leilah heard but that. “Yes,” she answered, “another day.”
Then, presently, after more attentions, the première accompanied her to the door.
“Rue François Premier,” Leilah told the groom.
The machine shot ahead. Arrested shortly by a congestion of traffic, it halted before a window behind which Verplank and Silverstairs sat.
Leilah, unconscious of their presence, gazed at the murky cinematograph of the street, filled at this hour with faces sordid, petulant, indifferent, or frankly gay; with the passing forms of workmen, idlers, shopgirls, vagabonds; the swarming Parisian crowd which did not, she believed, contain one soul as miserable as her own.
The congestion relieved, the motor shot on. Leilah leaned back. It was not so long ago that she was on her way from New York to Coronado. She was happy then, happy with a happiness so perfect that it lifted her into the ultimate ecstasies which love and life comport. It was not so long ago, only six short months, only that brief eternity of sorrow which, unended yet, had been the damning penalty of that joy.
“In this life ye shall have tribulation,” the Christ had said, and truly said, and as she rememorated the significant menace, she wondered whether for such as she, tribulation ended here. But her creed assured her. From the Vidyâ she had acquired faith in fate, the belief rather that we make our own destiny, that it is by our own hands that our lives are cast in places pleasant or the reverse, that our conduct in one life creates the conditions of our existence in another, that anything experienced now is the effect of a cause set going in the past, that happiness is the recompense of beneficence, deformity the result of cruelty, melancholy the penalty of evil thoughts. But whether retribution pursued its victim into future planes or abandoned them when they died, depended, she also believed, on how they faced it here, and it was in this idea that, during the unended sorrow, she had found the strength to bear its coils.
The motor stopped. She told the groom to wait. Presently she was among the subdued tints and harmonised furnishings of the drawing room of her friend.
At once, clearly in her limpid voice, considering her with brilliant eyes, Violet Silverstairs aimed and fired.
“You’re a liar!”
At the shot Leilah attempted to smile, and though she failed, it was not because she fancied there could be any reproach in the term, but because latterly she had been unable to smile at all.
“You’re a liar,” Violet repeated. “Also, you are late.”
“I know I am late and I am sorry,” Leilah withdrawing her gloves, replied. “But how am I a liar?”
“Come to luncheon and you will precious soon find out. I had some eggs for you, eggs à l’Aurore Boréale. I had a sweetbread. I had – I have forgotten what else. Now I have nothing. Everything is spoiled.”
Violet Silverstairs was perhaps imaginative. There were eggs, very good eggs too, though whether prepared in the Aurora Borealis fashion is perhaps beside the issue. Moreover there was a sweetbread, one that had been germinated on salt meadows and which was not spoiled in the least. In addition there were the other things which she had forgotten and all of them appetising in the extreme. It was an excellent luncheon, perfectly served in a beautiful room. But it was a luncheon for Sybarites, not for the suffering. After the first morsel Leilah was unable to eat.
“Where is Silverstairs?” she asked when that morsel had been consumed.
“With your ex.”
Leilah put down her fork. “With Gulian?”
Violet laughed. “Have you more than one? But it was just through him that your lie cropped out. Last night he swore by bell, book and candle that you had never told him why you cut and ran.”
It was at this juncture that Leilah found herself unable to eat. Instantly her mind shot back. She was at Coronado again, in the sunshine and frippery of her sitting room. She could see Verplank as he left it, see the letters that had been brought, see herself as she opened one of them, that one which with its enclosures she had redirected and left for him. The possibility never before conjectured, that he had not received it girdled her with a zone of ice. For a moment she looked fixedly at one of the windows through which the pale daylight fell. In the beautiful room, companioned by her nearest friend, she felt that sense of utter loneliness which in the great crises of life is experienced by all. Yet was it true?
“Violet!” she cried. “You are jesting.”
But the lady, determined then or never to learn the truth, cocked an eye at her. “I am not, nor was he.”
At that, Leilah felt the girdle of ice sending its shivers through her. The plan she had made must, she saw, be foregone. If Verplank did not know why she had separated from him, never would he leave Paris until he did. But what must he have thought, she agonisedly reflected, and what must he think!
Violet, who had been watching her, said:
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Leilah taking up her fork again, tried for countenance sake, to affect to eat. The effort was beyond her. She put it down.
“I can’t,” she at last replied.
Violet, her brilliant eye still cocked, almost winked.
“Yes, you said that before. But you see, don’t you know, that whether you can or cannot tell me, you will have to tell him and, in the circumstances, would it not be best to have me do it for you? To be sure, if you had taken my advice and omitted to marry Barouffski, I would say, have it out with him yourself. But your marriage does not seem to have simplified matters, which, so far as I can make out, are now pretty thoroughly mixed.”
The lady spoke better than she knew. Matters were complicated though how profoundly she had no idea, nor was Leilah aware that the situation, already tortuous, was to become even more intricately labyrinthine.
“Of course,” Violet, in her bell-like voice, threw out, “after running away, getting a divorce and marrying another man, I can fancy that you don’t much want to see him. But, really, you owe it to yourself to give the reason, particularly as it is he who is to blame.”
At this, Leilah, who had been looking down into her prison, looked up. “I never said so.”
“No, but was it necessary? Even nowadays, even in the States, a woman does not cut and run because butter won’t melt in her husband’s mouth. She does so because she has, or thinks she has, a grievance and the man, if he is a man, ought to be given an opportunity to apologise, however imaginary the grievance may be.”
Leilah shook her head. “There can be no apology here.”
Violet laughed. “That is just what I would say if I had gone and done it. Then it would be for Silverstairs to try on his knees to get me to listen to one – provided, of course, that in the interim I had not taken over another man, for in that case I verily believe he would wring my neck. But you need fear nothing of the sort from Verplank. He seemed anxious only to wring Barouffski’s.”
Leilah made another futile effort with her fork. Absently she answered:
“I don’t believe he knew who he was.”
“You don’t! After his telling him! But, apropos, what became of d’Arcy? I thought you and he were safely tucked away in a corner, otherwise never in the world would I have marched your Number One up to your Number Two.”
“D’Arcy!” Leilah repeated. She had barely heard. She scarcely knew what she was saying, still less what was being said.
“Yes, le beau d’Arcy. Marie de Fresnoy told me that the other day at the races he was about to pay a ragamuffin of a girl for a flower, when she said: ‘I’d rather you kissed me.’ Fancy that! She told me too that a man who had a husband’s reasons for wanting to kill him, was afraid to say a word. It appears he is a dead shot. But it appears also that your lovely Barouffski is one of the best swordsmen here. Verplank had better look out. To return though to our Chablis Moutonne. What will you do?”
Leilah, her thoughts afar, made no reply.
“What will you do?” Violet repeated.
From afar the question floated, descended, trod among the tender places of Leilah’s soul. At the pain of it she winced. “God help me, I do not know.”
Violet, cocking an eye again, insinuated: “Let me take a hand.” She paused, then, for clincher, threw out: “He dines here to-morrow.”
“Here!” Leilah exclaimed, half rising, fearful now that at any moment he might appear. “Here! With you?”
Violet nodded. “Why yes. Why not? If I can’t confess you, perhaps I can him. At any rate I can try. You can’t blame me for wanting to, either. You abandoned him on your honeymoon. You won’t tell me why and he says he don’t know. But he must suspect. He must have concluded that you left him for this, that or the other. I want to find out what his this, that and the other are and then make my own selection. It is true he did say that it was because of Barouffski. But that’s all gammon. You never saw Barouffski until you got here. There is something else and what that is I want to find out. No, you can’t blame me. It is the instinct of self-preservation. If I don’t get at the bottom of it soon, I shall simply go mad.”
A laugh, clear and musical, wound up the lady’s chatter. She had no more idea of going mad than she had of jumping out of the window. But she wanted to know and that was only human.
But now, Leilah, who a moment before had half risen, stood up. “Violet, I am not well, you must let me go. Yes,” she added as the lady remarked that on the morrow she might appear in the rue de la Pompe. “Yes, yes.”
She would have said yes to anything. Hurriedly she got away.
Without the motor waited.
“Home,” she told the groom.
A little before she had thought herself the most miserable of beings. But however deep the hell, there is always a deeper one. Add uncertainty to distress and the sum of it is sorrow multiplied by the infinite. That hell, that sorrow was or seemed to be, hers. She did not know where to go, what to do, to whom to turn.
The pitiable plan of flight returned to her. Again she put it aside. She could not adopt it now. Besides, though she owed a duty to herself, she owed another to Verplank. In what manner he had failed to receive the letter, it was impossible for her to imagine, but the fact that he had not received it, hurt her doubly, hurt her for herself, hurt her for him. Had it reached him, both would have been spared this pass. But it had not reached him and since then what must he have thought of her? What!
The query, which kept repeating itself, tortured her and on that torture was superposed the precarious problem of his enlightenment. See him she could not. To write was beyond her ability. For there are things no pen should write as there are others no tongue should tell. None the less the truth she knew must reach him and would do so best, she thought, through some channel similar to that from which the letter had proceeded, from a source either indifferent or inimical to them both.
At the auto-suggestion, her thoughts fluttered, scattered, grouped, then suddenly regrouping, produced a name. Beneath her breath she uttered it.
“Barouffski!”
It was not in provision of this that she had married him. At the time no such possibility had even impossibly loomed. But she had married him precisely as she had obtained a divorce, in order to barricade the future from the past; in order also for the fleshpots which she craved – peace and security. She had not had much of either. None the less, the primary object which she had sought had, in its accomplishment, persisted. He was a barricade. He was her official and paid protector.
For the task therefore which she could not perform, he seemed naturally indicated. What alone gave her pause was the certainty that he would enjoy it. She could see him, see his ambiguous smile, see his green eyes aglow, his cruel and sensual mouth distended.
From the picture she turned. Beyond was a church, the frontal draped with black. The motor had stopped. It had reached the house in the rue de la Pompe and pending the opening of the doors, whirred as it blocked the sidewalk.
It was then that she turned. Beside her, arrested by the car, stood Verplank.
After walking up from Voisin’s with Silverstairs he had left him a moment earlier at Tempest’s.
But the great doors had opened. Before Verplank could speak, the machine slid in. As it entered the court, the doors closed noisily.
