Twilight Sleep (Wharton)/Chapter 4
IV
IT would have been hard, Nona Manford thought, to find a greater contrast than between Lita Wyant's house and that at which, two hours later, she descended from Lita Wyant's smart Brewster.
"You won't come, Lita?" The girl paused, her hand on the motor door. "He'd like it awfully."
Lita shook off the suggestion. "I'm not in the humour."
"But he's such fun—he can be better company than anybody."
"Oh, for you he's a fad-for me he's a duty; and I don't happen to feel like duties." Lita waved one of her flower-hands and was off.
Nona mounted the pock-marked brown steps. The house was old Mrs. Wyant's, a faded derelict habitation in a street past which fashion and business had long since flowed. After his mother's death Wyant, from motives of economy, had divided it into small flats. He kept one for himself, and in the one overhead lived his mother's former companion, the dependent cousin who had been the cause of his divorce. Wyant had never married her; he had never deserted her; that, to Nona's mind, gave one a fair notion of his character. When he was ill—and he had developed, rather early, a queer sort of nervous hypochondria—the cousin came downstairs and nursed him; when he was well his visitors never saw her. But she was reported to attend to his mending, keep some sort of order in his accounts, and prevent his falling a prey to the unscrupulous. Pauline Manford said it was probably for the best. She herself would have thought it natural, and in fact proper, that her former husband should have married his cousin; as he had not, she preferred to decide that since the divorce they had been "only friends." The Wyant code was always a puzzle to her. She never met the cousin when she called on her former husband; but Jim, two or three times a year, made it a point to ring the bell of the upper flat, and at Christmas sent its invisible tenant an azalea.
Nona ran up the stairs to Wyant's door. On the threshold a thin gray-haired lady with a shadowy face awaited her.
"Come in, do. He's got the gout, and can't get up to open the door, and I had to send the cook out to get something tempting for his dinner."
"Oh, thank you, cousin Eleanor." The girl looked sympathetically into the other's dimly tragic eyes. "Poor Exhibit A! I'm sorry he's ill again."
"He's been—imprudent. But the worst of it's over. It will brighten him up to see you. Your cousin Stanley's there."
"Is he?" Nona half drew back, feeling herself faintly redden.
"He'll be going soon. Mr. Wyant will be disappointed if you don't go in."
"But of course I'm going in."
The older woman smiled a worn smile, and vanished upstairs while Nona slipped off her furs. The girl knew it would be useless to urge cousin Eleanor to stay. If one wished to see her one had to ring at her own door.
Arthur Wyant's shabby sitting-room was full of February sunshine, illustrated magazines, news-papers and cigar ashes. There were some books on shelves, shabby also: Wyant had apparently once cared for them, and his talk was still coloured by traces of early cultivation, especially when visitors like Nona or Stan Heuston were with him. But the range of his allusions suggested that he must have stopped reading years ago. Even novels were too great a strain on his attention. As far back as Nona could remember he had fared only on the popular magazines, picture-papers and the weekly purveyors of social scandal. He took an intense interest in the private affairs of the world he had ceased to frequent, though he always ridiculed this interest in talking to Nona or Heuston.
While he sat there, deep in his armchair, with bent shoulders, sunk head and clumsy bandaged foot, Nona saw him, as she always did, as taller, slimmer, more handsomely upstanding than any man she had ever known. He stooped now, even when he was on his feet; he was prematurely aged; and the fact perhaps helped to connect him with vanished institutions to which only his first youth could have belonged.
To Nona, at any rate, he would always be the Arthur Wyant of the race-meeting group in the yellowing photograph on his mantelpiece: clad in the gray frock-coat and topper of the early 'eighties, and tallest in a tall line of the similarly garbed, behind ladies with puffed sleeves and little hats tilting forward on elaborate hair. How peaceful, smiling and unhurried they all seemed! Nona never looked at them without a pang of regret that she had not been born in those spacious days of dogcarts, victorias, leisurely tennis and afternoon calls. . .
Wyant's face, even more than his figure, related him to that past: the small shapely head, the crisp hair grown thin on a narrow slanting forehead, the eyes in which a twinkle still lingered, eyes probably blue when the hair was brown, but now faded with the rest, and the slight fair moustache above an uncertain ironic mouth.
A romantic figure; or rather the faded photograph of one. Yes; perhaps Arthur Wyant had always been faded-like a charming reflection in a sallow mirror. And all that length of limb and beauty of port had been meant for some other man, a man to whom the things had really happened which Wyant had only dreamed.
His visitor, though of the same stock, could never have inspired such conjectures. Stanley Heuston was much younger—in the middle thirties—and most things about him were middling: height, complexion, features. But he had a strong forehead, his mouth was curved for power and mockery, and only his small quick eyes betrayed the uncertainty and lassitude inherited from a Wyant mother.
Wyant, at Nona's approach, held out a dry feverish hand. "Well, this is luck! Stan was just getting ready to fly at your mother's approach, and you turn up instead!"
Heuston got to his feet, and greeted Nona somewhat ceremoniously. "Perhaps I'd better fly all the same," he said in a singularly agreeable voice. His eyes were intent on the girl's.
She made a slight gesture, not so much to detain or dismiss as to signify her complete indifference. "Isn't mother coming presently?" she said, addressing the question to Wyant.
"No; I'm moved on till tomorrow. There must have been some big upheaval to make her change her plans at the last minute. Sit down and tell us all about it."
"I don't know of any upheaval. There's only the dinner-dance for Amalasuntha this evening."
"Oh, but that sort of thing is in your mother's stride. You underrate her capacity. Stan has been giving me a hint of something a good deal more volcanic."
Nona felt an inward tremor; was she going to hear Lita's name? She turned her glance on Heuston with a certain hostility.
"Oh, Stan's hints—."
"You see what Nona thinks of my views on cities and men," Heuston shrugged. He had remained on his feet, as though about to take leave; but once again the girl felt his eager eyes beseeching her.
"Are you waiting to walk home with me? You needn't. I'm going stay for hours," she said, smiling across him at Wyant as she settled down into one of the chintz armchairs.
"Aren't you a little hard on him?" Wyant suggested, when the door had closed on their visitor. "It's not exactly a crime to want to walk home with you."
Nona made an impatient gesture. "Stan bores me."
"Ah, well, I suppose he's not enough of a novelty. Or not up-to-date enough; your dates. Some of his ideas seem to me pretty subversive; but I suppose in your set and Lita's a young man who doesn't jazz all day and drink all night—or vice versa—is a back number."
The girl did not take this up, and after a moment Wyant continued, in his half-mocking half-querulous 45 voice: "Or is it that he isn't 'psychic' enough? That's the latest, isn't it? When you're not high- kicking you're all high-thinking; and that reminds me of Stan's news—"
"Yes?" Nona brought it out between parched lips. Her gaze turned from Wyant to the coals smouldering in the grate. She did not want to face any one just then.
"Well, it seems there's going to be a gigantic muck-raking—one of the worst we've had yet. Into this Mahatma business; you know, the nigger chap your mother's always talking about. There's a hint of it in the last number of the 'Looker-on'; here. . . where is it? Never mind, though. What it says isn't a patch on the real facts, Stan tells me. It seems the goings-on in that School of Oriental Thought—what does he call the place: Dawnside?—have reached such a point that the Grant Lindons, whose girl has been making a 'retreat' there, or whatever they call it, are out to have a thorough probing. They say the police don't want to move because so many people we know are mixed up in it; but Lindon's back is up, and he swears he won't rest till he gets the case before the Grand Jury. . ."
As Wyant talked, the weight lifted from Nona's breast. Much she cared for the Mahatma, or for the Grant Lindons! Stuffy old-fashioned people—she didn't wonder Bee Lindon had broken away from such parents—though she was a silly fool, no doubt. Besides, the Mahatma certainly had reduced Mrs. Manford's hips—and made her less nervous too: for Mrs. Manford sometimes was nervous, in spite of her breathless pursuit of repose. Not, of course, in the same querulous uncontrolled way as poor Arthur Wyant, who had never been taught poise, or mental uplift, or being in tune with the Infinite; but rather as one agitated by the incessant effort to be calm. And in that respect the Mahatma's rhythmic exercises had without doubt been helpful. No; Nona didn't care a fig for scandals about the School of Oriental Thought. And the relief of finding that the subject she had dreaded to hear broached had probably never even come to Wyant's ears, gave her a reaction of light-heartedness.
There were moments when Nona felt oppressed by responsibilities and anxieties not of her age, apprehensions that she could not shake off and yet had not enough experience of life to know how to meet. One or two of her girl friends—in the brief intervals between whirls and thrills—had confessed to the same vague disquietude. It was as if, in the beaming determination of the middle-aged, one and all of them, to ignore sorrow and evil, "think them away" as superannuated bogies, survivals of some obsolete European superstition unworthy of enlightened Americans, to whom plumbing and dentistry had given higher standards, and bi-focal glasses a clearer view of the universe—as if the demons the elder generation ignored, baulked of their natural prey, had cast their hungry shadow over the young. After all, somebody in every family had to remember now and then that such things as wickedness, suffering and death had not yet been banished from the earth; and with all those bright-complexioned white-haired mothers mailed in massage and optimisin, and behaving as if they had never heard of anything but the Good and the Beautiful, perhaps their children had to serve as vicarious sacrifices. There were hours when Nona Manford, bewildered little Iphigenia, uneasily argued in this way: others when youth and inexperience reasserted themselves, and the load slipped from her, and she wondered why she didn't always believe, like her elders, that one had only to be brisk, benevolent and fond to prevail against the powers of darkness.
She felt this relief now; but a vague restlessness remained with her, and to ease it, and prove to herself that she was not nervous, she mentioned to Wyant that she had just been lunching with Jim and Lita.
Wyant brightened, as he always did at his son's name. "Poor old Jim! He dropped in yesterday, and I thought he looked overworked! I sometimes. wonder if that father of yours hasn't put more hustle into him than a Wyant can assimilate." Wyant spoke good-humouredly; his first bitterness against the man who had supplanted him (a sentiment regarded by Pauline as barbarous and medieval) had gradually been swallowed up in gratitude for Dexter Manford's kindness to Jim. The oddly-assorted trio, Wyant, Pauline and her new husband, had been drawn into a kind of inarticulate understanding by their mutual tenderness for the progeny of the two marriages, and Manford loved Jim almost as much as Wyant loved Nona.
"Oh, well," the girl said, "Jim always does everything with all his might. And now that he's doing it for Lita and the baby, he's got to keep on, whether he wants to or not."
"I suppose so. But why do you say 'whether'?" Wyant questioned with one of his disconcerting flashes. "Doesn't he want to?"
Nona was vexed at her slip. "Of course. I only meant that he used to be rather changeable in his tastes, and that getting married has given him an object."
"How very old-fashioned! You are old-fashioned, you know, my child; in spite of the jazz. I suppose that's what I've done for you, in exchange for Manford's modernizing Jim. Not much of an exchange, I'm afraid. But how long do you suppose Lita will care about being an object to Jim?"
"Why shouldn't she care? She'd go on caring about the baby, even if . . . not that I mean. . ."
"Oh, I know. That's a great baby. Queer, you know—I can see he's going to have the Wyant nose and forehead. It's about all we've left to give. But look here—haven't you really heard anything more about the Mahatma? I thought that Lindon girl was a pal of yours. Now listen—"
When Nona Manford emerged into the street she was not surprised to meet Stanley Heuston strolling toward her across Stuyvesant Square. Neither surprised, nor altogether sorry; do what she would, she could never quite repress the sense of ease and well-being that his nearness gave. And yet half the time they were together she always spent in being angry with him and wishing him away. If only the relation between them had been as simple as that between herself and Jim! And it might have been—ought to have been—seeing that Heuston was Jim's cousin, and nearly twice her age; yes, and had been married before she left the schoolroom. Really, her exasperation was justified. Yet no one understood her as well as Stanley; not even Jim, who was so much dearer and more lovable. Life was a confusing business to Nona Manford.
"How absurd! I asked you not to wait. I suppose you think I'm not old enough to be out alone after dark."
"That hadn't occurred to me; and I'm not waiting to walk home with you," Heuston rejoined with some asperity. "But I do want to say two words," he added, his voice breaking into persuasion.
Nona stopped, her heels firmly set on the pavement. "The same old two?"
"No. Besides, there are three of those. You never could count." He hesitated: "This time it's only about Arthur—"
"Why; what's the matter?" The sense of apprehension woke in her again. What if Wyant really had begun to suspect that there was something, an imponderable something, wrong between Jim and Lita, and had been too shrewd to let Nona detect his suspicion?
"Haven't you noticed? He looks like the devil. He's been drinking again. Eleanor spoke to me—"
"Oh, dear." There it was—all the responsibilities and worries always closed in on Nona! But this one, after all, was relatively bearable.
"What can I do, Stan? I can't imagine why you come to me!"
He smiled a little, in his queer derisive way. "Doesn't everybody? The fact is—I didn't want to bother Jim."
She was silent. She understood; but she resented his knowing that she understood.
"Jim has got to be bothered. He's got to look after his father."
"Yes; but I—Oh, look here, Nona; won't you see?"
"See what?"
"Why—that if Jim is worried about his father now—Jim's a queer chap; he's tried his hand at fifty things, and never stuck to one; and if he gets a shock now, on top of everything else—"
Nona felt her lips grow hard: all her pride and tenderness for her brother stiffened into ice about her heart.
"I don't know. what you mean. Jim's grown up—he's got to face things."
"Yes; I know. I've been told the same thing about myself. But there are things one doesn't ever have a chance to face in this slippery sliding modern world, because they don't come out into the open. They just lurk and peep and mouth. My case exactly. What on earth is there about Aggie that a fellow can face?"
Nona stopped short with a jerk. "We don't happen to be talking about you and Aggie," she said.
"Oh, well; I was merely using myself as an example. But there are plenty of others to choose from."
Her voice broke into anger. "I don't imagine you're comparing your married life to Jim's?"
"Lord, no. God forbid!" He burst into a dry laugh. "When I think of Aggie's life and Lita's—!"
"Never mind about Lita's life. What do you know about it, anyhow? Oh, Stan, why are we quarrelling again?" She felt the tears in her throat. "What you wanted was only to tell me about poor Arthur. And I'd guessed that myself—I know something ought to be done. But what? How on earth can I tell? I'm always being asked by every- body what ought to be done . . . and sometimes I feel too young to be always the one to judge, to decide. . ."
Heuston stood watching her in silence. Suddenly he took her hand and drew it through his arm. She did not resist, and thus linked they walked on slowly and without further speech through the cold deserted streets. As they approached more populous regions she freed her arm from his, and signalled to a taxi.
"May I come?"
"No. I'm going to meet Lita at the Cubist Cabaret. I promised to be there by four."
"Oh, all right." He looked at her irresolutely as the taxi drew up. "I wish to God I could always be on hand to help you when you're bothered!"
She shook her head.
"Never?"
"Not while Aggie—"
"That means never."
"Then never." She held out her hand, but he had turned and was already striding off in the opposite direction. She threw the address to the chauffeur and got in.
"Yes; I suppose it is never," she said to herself. After all, instead of helping her with the Wyant problem, Stan had only brought her another: his own—and hers. As long as Aggie Heuston, a sort of lay nun, absorbed in High Church practices and the exercise of a bleak but efficient philanthropy, continued to set her face against divorce, Nona would not admit that Heuston had any right to force it upon her. "It's her way of loving him," the girl said to herself for the hundredth time. "She wants to keep him for herself too—though she doesn't know it; but she does above all want to save him. And she thinks that's the way to do it. I rather admire her for thinking that there is a way to save people. . ." She pushed that problem once more into the back of her mind, and turned her thoughts toward the other and far more pressing one: that of poor Arthur Wyant's growing infirmity. Stanley was probably right in not wanting to speak to Jim about it at that particular moment—though how did Stanley know about Jim's troubles, and what did he know?—and she herself, after all, was perhaps the only person to deal with Arthur Wyant. Another interval of anxious consideration made her decide that the best way would be to seek her father's advice. After an hour's dancing she would feel better, more alive and competent, and there would still be time to dash down to Manford's office, the only place—as she knew by experience—where Manford was ever likely to have time for her.