by Thomas Wolfe
She looked earnestly at him with an expression of such droll, beseeching inquiry that, unmasked for a moment, he laughed abruptly as he turned away, saying:
"Oh, I suppose so, Esther. I'll look after it."
Mrs. Jack went on down the hall, pausing just perceptibly as she passed her daughter's door. She could hear the girl's voice, clear, cool, and young, humming the jaunty strains of a popular tune:
"You're the cream in my coffee--you're the salt in my stew-w----"
A little smile of love and tenderness suffused the woman's face as she continued down the hall and entered the next door, which was her own room.
It was a very simple, lovely room, hauntingly chaste, almost needlessly austere. In the centre of one wall stood her narrow little wooden bed, so small and plain and old that it seemed it might almost have served as the bed of a medieval nun, as perhaps it had. Beside it stood the little table with its few books, a telephone, a glass and a silver pitcher, and in a silver frame a photograph of a girl in her early twenties--Mrs. Jack's daughter, Alma.
Beside the door as one entered there was an enormous old wooden wardrobe, which she had brought from Italy. This contained all her beautiful dresses and her wonderful collection of winglike little shoes, all of them made by hand to fit her perfect little feet. On the opposite wall, facing the door, between two high windows, stood her writing-desk. Between the bed and the windows there was a small drawing-table. It was a single board of white, perfect wood, and on it, arranged with faultless precision, were a dozen sharpened pencils, a few feathery brushes, some crisp sheets of tracing paper on which geometric designs were legible, a pot of paste, a ruler, and a little jar of golden paint. Exactly above this table, hanging from the wall in all the clean beauty of their strength and accuracy, were a triangle and a square.
At the foot of the bed there was a chaise-longue covered with a flowered pattern of old faded silk. There were a few simple drawings, on the walls, and a single painting of a strange, exotic flower. It was such a flower as never was, a dream flower which Mrs. Jack had painted long ago.
Along the wall opposite the bed stood two old chests. One of them, a product of the Pennsylvania Dutch, was carved and coloured in quaint and cheerful patterns, and this contained old silks and laces and the noble Indian saris which she often loved to wear. The other was an old chest of drawers, with a few silver toilet articles and a square mirror on its top.
Mrs. Jack crossed the room and stood before the mirror looking at herself. First she bent forward a little and stared at her face long and earnestly with an expression of childlike innocence. Then she began to turn about, regarding herself from first one angle, then another. She put her hand up to her temple and smoothed her brow. Obviously she found herself good, for her eyes now took on an expression of rapt complacency. There was open vanity in her look as she brooded with smouldering fascination on the thick bracelet around her arm--a rich and sombre chain of ancient India, studded with dull and curious gems. She lifted her chin and looked at her neck,, tracing out with her finger-tips the design of an old necklace which she wore. She surveyed her smooth arms, her bare back, her gleaming shoulders, and the outlines of her breasts and figure, touching, patting, and half-unconsciously arranging with practiced touches the folds of her simple, splendid gown.
She lifted her arm again and with hand extended, the other hand upon her hip, she turned about once more in her orbit of self-worship. Slowly she turned, still rapt in contemplation of her loveliness, then she gasped suddenly with surprise and fright, and uttered a little scream. Her hand flew to her throat in a gesture of alarm as she realised that she was not alone and, looking up, saw her daughter standing there.
The girl, young, slender, faultless, cold, and lovely, had entered through the bathroom that connected the two rooms, and was standing in the door, having paused there, frozen to immobility as she caught her mother in the act. The mother's face went blood-red. For a long moment the two women looked at each other, the mother utterly confused and crimson with her guilt, the daughter cold and appraising with the irony of sophisticated mirth. Then something quick and instant passed between them in their glance.
Like one who has been discovered and who knows that there is nothing more to say, the mother suddenly threw back her head and laughed, a rich, full-throated, woman's yell of free acknowledgement, unknown to the race of man.
"Well, Mother, was it good?" said the girl, now grinning faintly. She walked over and kissed her.
Again the mother was shaken with her hysteria of helpless laughter. Then both of them, freed from the necessity of argument by that all-taking moment, were calm again.
Thus was enacted the whole tremendous comedy of womankind. No words were needed. There was nothing left to say. All had been said there in that voiceless instant of complete and utter understanding, of mutual recognition and conspiracy. The whole universe of sex had been nakedly revealed for just the flick of a second in all its guile and its overwhelming humour. And the great city roared on unwittingly round that secret cell, and no man in its many millions was any the wiser about this primal force more strong than cities and as old as earth.
* * *
15. The Party at Jack's
Now the guests were beginning to arrive. The electric thring of the door-bell broke sharply and persistently on accustomed quietness. People were coming in and filling the place with the ease and familiarity of old friends. In the hallway and in the rooms at the front there arose now a confused medley of many voices--the rippling laughter and quick, excited tones of the women mingled with the deeper, more vibrant sonorities of the men. It was a mixture smooth as oil, which fused and mounted steadily. With every sharp ringing of the bell, with every opening and closing of the door, there were new voices and new laughter, a babel of new greetings, new gaiety, and new welcomes.
The whole place--all the rooms front to back--was now thrown open to the party. In the hall, in the bedrooms, in the great living-room, and in the dining-room, people were moving in and out, circulating everywhere in beautiful and spontaneous patterns. Women were coming up to Mrs. Jack and embracing her with the affectionate tenderness of old friendship. Men, drawn together in solemn discussion or in the jesting interplay of wit, were going in and out of Mr. Jack's room.
Mrs. Jack, her eyes sparkling with joy, was moving about everywhere, greeting people and stopping to talk to everyone. Her whole manner had a quality of surprised delight, as of a person who feels that wonders will never cease. Although she had invited all these people, she seemed, as she spoke to each in turn, as if she was taken aback by the happiness of an unexpected and unhoped-for encounter with an old friend whom she had not seen for a long time. Her voice, as she talked, grew a trifle higher with its excitement, even at times a little shrill, and her face glowed with pleasure. And her guests smiled at her as people smile at a happy and excited child.
Many were moving about now with glasses in their hands. Some were leaning against walls talking to each other. Distinguished-looking men were propped with their elbows on the mantel in the casual earnestness of debate. Beautiful women with satiny backs were moving through the crowd with velvet undulance. The young people were gathered together in little parties of their own, drawn to one another by the magic of their youth. Everywhere people were laughing and chattering, bending to fill glasses with frosty drinks, or moving around the loaded temptations of the dining-table and the great buffet with that "choosy" look, somewhat perturbed and doubtful, which said plainly that they would like to taste it all but knew they couldn't. And the smiling maids were there to do their bidding, and to urge them to have just a little more. All in all, it was a wonderful scene of white and black and gold and power and wealth and loveliness and food and drink.
Mrs. Jack glanced happily through the crowded rooms. It was, she knew, a notable assemblage of the best, the highest, and the fairest the city had to offer. And others were arriving all the time. At this moment, in fact, Miss Lily Mandell came in, and the tall, smoulderin
g beauty swung away along the hall to dispose of her wraps. She was followed almost at once by Mr. Lawrence Hirsch, the banker. He casually gave his coat and hat to one of the maids, and, groomed and faultless, schooled in power, be bowed greetings through the throng towards his hostess. He shook hands with her and kissed her lightly on one cheek, saying with that cool irony that was a portion of the city style:
"You haven't looked so lovely, darling, since the days when we used to dance the can-can together."
Then, polished and imperturbable, he turned away--a striking figure. His abundant hair was prematurely white, and, strangely, it gave to his clear and clean-shaven face a look of almost youthful maturity. His features, a little worn but assured, were vested in unconscious arrogance with the huge authorities of wealth. He moved, this weary, able son of man, among the crowd and took his place, assuming, without knowing he assumed, his full authorities.
Lily Mandell now returned to the big room and made her way languidly towards Mrs. Jack. This heiress of Midas wealth was tall and dark, with a shock of black hair. Her face, with its heavy-lidded eyes, was full of pride and sleepy eloquence. She was a stunning woman, and everything about her was a little startling. The dress she wore was a magnificent gown fashioned from a single piece of dull golden cloth, and had been so designed to display her charms that her tall, voluptuous figure seemed literally to have been poured into it. It made her a miracle of statuesque beauty, and as she swayed along with sleepy undulance, the eyes of all the men were turned upon her. She bent over the smaller figure of her hostess, kissed her, and, in a rich, yolky voice full of genuine affection, said:
"Darling, how are you?"
By now, Herbert, the elevator boy, was being kept so busy bringing up new arrivals that one group hardly had time to finish with its greetings before the door would open and a new group would come in. There was Roderick Hale, the distinguished lawyer. Then Miss Roberta Heilprinn arrived with Mr. Samuel Fetzer. These two were old friends of Mrs. Jack's "in the theatre", and her manner towards them, while not more cordial or affectionate than that towards her other guests, was a shade more direct and casual. It was as if one of those masks--not of pretending but of formal custom--which life imposes upon so many human relations had here keen sloughed off. She said simply: "Oh, hello, Bertie. Hello, Sam." The shade indefinable told everything: they were "show people"--she and they had "worked together".
There were a good many show people. Two young actors from the Community Guild Theatre escorted the Misses Hattie Warren and Bessie Lane, both of them grey-haired spinsters who were directors of the theatre. And, in addition to the more gifted and distinguished people, there were a number of the lesser fry, too. There was a young girl who was understudy to a dancer at one of the repertory theatres, and another woman who was the seamstress and wardrobe mistress there, and still another who had once been Mrs. Jack's assistant in her own work. For, as success and fame had come to Mrs. Jack, she had not forgotten her old friends. Though she was now a celebrity herself, she had thus escaped the banal and stereotyped existence that so many celebrities achieve. She loved life too well to cut herself off from the common run of warm humanity. In her own youth she had known sorrow, insecurity, hardship, heartbreak, and disillusion, and she had never forgotten it. Nor had she forgotten any of the people her life had ever touched. She had a rare talent for loyal and abiding friendships, and most of the people who were here to-night, even the most famous ones, were friends who she had known for many years, some of them since childhood.
Among the guests who now came streaming in was a mild, sad-faced woman named Margaret Ettinger. She was married to a profligate husband and had brought him with her. And he, John Ettinger, had brought along a buxom young woman who was his current mistress. This trio provided the most bizarre and unpleasantly disturbing touch to an otherwise distinguished gathering.
The guests were still arriving as fast as the elevator could bring them up. Stephen Hook came in with his sister, Mary, and greeted his hostess by holding out to her a frail, limp hand. At the same time he turned half away from her with an air of exaggerated boredom and indifference, an almost weary disdain, as he murmured:
"Oh, hello, Esther...Look"--he half-turned towards her again, almost as if this were an afterthought--"I brought you this." He handed her a book and turned away again. "I thought it was rather interesting," he said in a bored tone. "You might like to look at it."
What he had given her was a magnificent volume of Peter Breughel's drawings--a volume that she knew well, and the cost of which had frightened even her. She looked quickly at the flyleaf and saw that in his fine hand he had written primly: "For Esther--from Stephen Hook". And suddenly she remembered that she had mentioned to him casually, a week or two before, her interest in this book, and she understood now that this act, which in a characteristic way he was trying to conceal under a mask of laboured indifference, had come swift and shining as a beam of light out of the depths of the man's fine and generous spirit. Her face burned crimson, something choked her in the throat, and her eyes grew hot with tears.
"Oh, Steve!" she gasped. "This is simply the most beautiful--the most wonderful----"
He seemed fairly to shrink away from her. His white, flabby face took on an expression of disdainful boredom that was so exaggerated it would have seemed comical if it had not been for the look of naked pleading in his hazel eyes. It was the look of a proud, noble, strangely twisted and tormented man--the look almost of a frightened child, who, even while it shrank away from the companionship and security it so desperately needed and wanted, was also pleading pitifully: "For God's sake, help me if you can! I am afraid!"
She saw that look in his eyes as he turned pompously away from her, and it went through her like a knife. In a flash of stabbing pity she felt the wonder, the strangeness, and the miracle of living.
"Oh, you poor tormented creature," she was thinking. "What is wrong with you? What are you afraid of? What's eating on you anyway?...What a strange man he is!" she thought more tranquilly. "And how fine and good and high!"
At this moment, as if reading her own thoughts, her daughter, Alma, came to the rescue. Cool, poised, lovely, the girl came across the room, moved up to Hook, and said casually:
"Oh, hello, Steve. Can I get you a drink?"
The question was a godsend. He was extremely fond of the girl. He liked her polished style, her elegance, her friendly yet perfectly impenetrable manner. It gave him just the foil, the kind of protection, that he so desperately needed. He answered her at once.
"What you have to say quite fascinates me," he murmured in a bored tone and moved over to the mantel, where he leaned as spectator and turned his face three-quarters away from the room, as if the sight of so many appallingly dull people was more than he could endure.
The elaborately mannered indirection of his answer was completely characteristic of Stephen Hook, and provided a key to his literary style. He was the author of a great many stories, which he sold to magazines to support himself and his mother, and also of several very fine books. The books had established his considerable and deserved reputation, but they had had almost no sale. As he himself had ironically pointed out, almost everyone, apparently, had read his books and no one had bought them. In these books, just as in his social manner, he tried to mask his shyness and timidity by an air of weary disdain and by the intricate artifice and circumlocution of an elaborately mannered style.
Mrs. Jack, after staring rather helplessly at Hook, turned to his sister, a jolly-faced spinster with twinkling eyes and an infectious laugh who shared her brother's charm but lacked his tormented spirit, and whispered:
"What's wrong with Steve to-night? He looks as if he's been seeing ghosts."
"No--just another monster," Mary Hook replied, and laughed. "He had a pimple on his nose last week and he stared at it so much in the mirror that he became convinced it was a tumour. Mother was almost crazy. He locked himself in his room and refused to come out or talk to anyone fo
r days and days. Four days ago he sent her a note leaving minute instructions for his funeral and burial--he has a horror of being cremated. Three days ago he came out in his pyjamas and said good-bye to all of us. He said his life was overall was ended. To-night he thought better of it and decided to dress and come to your party."
Mary Hook laughed again good-naturedly and, with a humorous shrug and a shake of her head, moved away into the crowd. And Mrs. Jack, still with a rather troubled look on her face, turned to talk to old Jake Abramson, who had been holding her hand and gently stroking it during the last part of this puzzled interlude.
The mark of the fleshpots was plain upon Jake Abramson. He was old, subtle, sensual, weary, and he had the face of a vulture. Curiously enough, it was also a strangely attractive face. It had so much patience in it, and a kind of wise cynicism, and a weary humour. There was something paternal and understanding about him. He looked like an immensely old and tired ambassador of life who had lived so long, and seen so much, and been so many places, that even his evening clothes were as habitual as his breath and hung on him with a weary and accustomed grace as if he had been born in them.
He had taken off his top-coat and his silk hat and given them to the maid, and then had come wearily into the room towards Mrs. Jack. He was evidently very fond of her. While she had been talking to Mary Hook he had remained silent and had brooded above her like a benevolent vulture. He smiled beneath his great nose and kept his eyes intently on her face; then he took her small hand in his weary old clasp and began to stroke her smooth arm. It was a gesture frankly old and sensual, jaded, and yet strangely fatherly and gentle. It was the gesture of a man who had known and possessed many pretty women and who still knew how to admire and appreciate them, but whose stronger passions had now passed over into a paternal benevolence.
And in the same way he now spoke to her.
"You're looking nice!" he said. "You're looking pretty!" He kept smiling vulturesquely at her and stroking her arm. "Just like a rose she is!" the old man said, and never took his weary eyes from her face.
