Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 3/Chapter 2
IN A corner, and a little apart from the general hilarity of Mrs. Allyngton's "tea," Claire sat asking herself why she made the exertions. At almost twenty-five, she was able to occupy her mind seriously with this puzzle and at the same time to produce the amount of chatter necessary to prevent the two gentlemen attending her from suspecting that either she or they were less lively than the liveliest of the party. Simultaneously she could take stock of everyone in the place, observing swiftly how well or ill such a one was "looking"; who talked to whom; how Mr. So-and-So's flirtation with Mrs. Thus-and-Thus progressed; what every woman wore and that the painted table Mrs. Allyngton had added to the "Regency treatment" of the apartment was probably spurious.
Most of the women present were young wives about Claire's age; some of them were several years younger; two or three were a few years older; and she had known nearly all of them in their previous state of candidacy for the matrimonial condition. They had passed out of the preparatory period, and she hadn't; so that her relation to them was a little like that of a student, still in school, to former classmates who, after a thrilling Commencement, have become graduates gloriously preoccupied with their new world. Companion initiates in an experience superior to hers, they seemed to have fulfilled their destiny, and to be at last properly and completely alive; while she, avoided by this common, happy destiny, was left outside, not yet really alive and never to be, indeed, if that destiny should still avoid her or she reject it. The latter alternative was the kinder, and already she knew that some of these friends were beginning to say of her: "It isn't for lack of asking."
She was still with them but no longer of them, though they were obviously as fond of her as ever. They were always pleased to have their husbands dance with her; and she foresaw that as the years went by they would find an "odd man" for her whenever they could. At present she was still almost too amply able to supply the "odd man," herself; and here she felt another difference between her condition and that of the graduates: it seemed to her that in spite of their superior advantages she understood men—even the husbands of some of her friends—better than they did. Apparently, marriage often involved a kind of blindness.
One of the men now chattering with her, over his third cocktail, was in reality, Claire thought, a total stranger to his wife, a pretty woman twittering with a group at Mrs. Allyngton's piano. This man had tried to kiss Claire the first time he found himself alone with her, and the only reason he hadn't tried again, she knew, was that she had thereafter successfully avoided being alone with him. Two or three of the other men present, she had cause to be aware, would do the same thing if she gave them half a chance to hope that they could "get away with it." Another, an immaculate fat man, had annoyed her with confidential witticisms of double meaning until she stopped him. These were but sporadic indications of the nature of the beast, as she realized; but they certainly meant something; and her deduction was that most men were grosser and more predatory than their wives suspected. Without effort, she attracted men—attracted them sometimes to her own discomfort; but, in general, and as a woman, she believed that she did not really like them.
She attracted men, but she no longer attracted boys; she had been through the experience of perceiving that. With her mother, she had returned to the Maine coast for the past two summers, and had found herself "too old" for the Beach Club dances. A person of fifty, seeing her beside one of the girls who prevailed at these dances, could not have decided which was the elder: to his eye Claire showed not any outward sign at all of her maturity; but the dancing boys knew instantly that she was "too old" for them. Youth has its own divinations; and, for these boys—some of them her own age—Claire was already an "old girl."
"Twenty-five!" she thought, now, biting again upon this sore tooth. Twenty-five would make her an "old girl" indeed; but it should not make her marry. She knew well enough why these women at Mrs. Allyngton's had married these men. Some of them had married in a kind of contagion because they were of the marrying age and because "all the rest" were getting married. Some of them had dallied, then married almost in a panic, grasping at anything as they saw "twenty-five," or worse, approaching; she had been a bridesmaid for "old girls" thus frantically marrying and had shed tears, really of rage, for them.
Angered but vague, she supposed the whole affair of marriage to be "something probably biological." The young had to get out of the nest: the boy learned to forage for himself; but the girl's part was ignominious: she had to find a forager—and ride him! A whole epoch in a woman's life was devoted to the competition, the struggles against her companions to obtain a forager;—hysterically affecting gayety all the while, she must scramble and fight to get him, never letting him perceive that it wasn't he who did the scrambling. The elation of newly engaged girls had sometimes made Claire sick with pity for her sex: it seemed to her that what she read in the roseate look of the maiden betrothed was, "I've got mine!"
Having got theirs, they were generous to Claire: they wanted her to get hers, though she needed no forager and could still choose which one of several she would take, if she wished. She had been fortunate enough to have the foragers scrambling for her, indeed; and what she was resolved to resist was the contagion: she was bitterly resolved not to be married because "all the rest" were married or getting themselves married. Almost despairingly, she asked for a better reason.
A dozen of "all the rest" were here in Mrs. Allyngton's apartment, this afternoon, and, as she looked at them, she wondered that such a contagion could reach her from them; for undeniably she felt it. She was intimate with them, and several of them still thought of her as "best friend"; but the intimacy was merely habit, she perceived—a habit sprung from chance propinquities and parental associations. She and these best friends of hers had shared experiences: they had stepped together into the arena and had formed the intimacies of a band of young gladiators. When they found themselves pitted against one another they had fought according to their own code, though most of them had half-forgiven some rather tricky wounds;—but what Claire had come more and more keenly to realize was that she had little true congeniality with any of them. Why then did she bore herself by remaining intimate with them? Why did she still make exertions not to be "left out"? Why on earth had she bothered to come here this afternoon?
For Mrs. Allyngton's "tea" was only the daily "cocktail party." The "conversation" was but the noise that mechanically grew louder and less coherent as the chemical action of gin inevitably operated the mechanical action of vocal organs. Daily these people met somewhere to put themselves through these same chemic mechanics: they seemed to need to drug themselves in order to bear one another's society, and since they were as dull as that, Claire thought, what wonder their lives were as chemic mechanical as their parties! Well, why in the world did she still go to the parties?
She couldn't answer her own question; but she was certain that she hadn't come, this afternoon, because Walter Rackbridge would be here. Mr. Rackbridge was he who had delivered the ultimatum expiring at nightfall of this same day, and the last person with whom she desired to hold converse. Yet here he was, a comely, thin, dark bachelor of thirty with a haggard eye; and, upon his arrival in Claire's corner, the two attendant gentlemen at once intelligently went forth to riot mildly in other regions. She was left tête-à-tête with him and in an unhappy mood.