But there were necessary accommodations,
there always had been; Nick in old times, had been
the first to own it.... How they had laughed at
the Perpendicular People, the people who went by on
the other side (since you couldn’t be a good
Samaritan without stooping over and poking into heaps
of you didn’t know what)! And now Nick had
suddenly become perpendicular....
Susy, that evening, at the head of
the dinner table, saw in the breaks between
her scudding thoughts the nauseatingly familiar
faces of the people she called her friends: Strefford,
Fred Gillow, a giggling fool of a young Breckenridge,
of their New York group, who had arrived that day,
and Prince Nerone Altineri, Ursula’s Prince,
who, in Ursula’s absence at a tiresome cure,
had, quite simply and naturally, preferred to join
her husband at Venice. Susy looked from one to
the other of them, as if with newly-opened eyes, and
wondered what life would be like with no faces but
such as theirs to furnish it....
Ah, Nick had become perpendicular!...
After all, most people went through life making a
given set of gestures, like dance-steps learned in
advance. If your dancing manual told you at a
given time to be perpendicular, you had to be, automatically and
that was Nick!
“But what on earth, Susy,”
Gillow’s puzzled voice suddenly came to her
as from immeasurable distances, “Are you going
to do in this beastly stifling hole for the rest of
the summer?”
“Ask Nick, my dear fellow,”
Strefford answered for her; and: “By the
way, where is Nick if one may ask?”
young Breckenridge interposed, glancing up to take
belated note of his host’s absence.
“Dining out,” said Susy
glibly. “People turned up: blighting
bores that I wouldn’t have dared to inflict
on you.” How easily the old familiar fibbing
came to her!
“The kind to whom you say, ‘Now
mind you look me up’; and then spend the rest
of your life dodging-like our good Hickses,”
Strefford amplified.
The Hickses but, of course,
Nick was with the Hickses! It went through Susy
like a knife, and the dinner she had so lightly fibbed
became a hateful truth. She said to herself feverishly:
“I’ll call him up there after dinner and
then he will feel silly” but only
to remember that the Hickses, in their mediaeval setting,
had of course sternly denied themselves a telephone.
The fact of Nick’s temporary
inaccessibility since she was now convinced
that he was really at the Hickses’ turned
her distress to a mocking irritation. Ah, that
was where he carried his principles, his standards,
or whatever he called the new set of rules he had suddenly
begun to apply to the old game! It was stupid
of her not to have guessed it at once.
“Oh, the Hickses Nick
adores them, you know. He’s going to marry
Coral next,” she laughed out, flashing the joke
around the table with all her practiced flippancy.
“Lord!” grasped Gillow,
inarticulate: while the Prince displayed the
unsurprised smile which Susy accused him of practicing
every morning with his Mueller exercises.
Suddenly Susy felt Strefford’s eyes upon her.
“What’s the matter with
me? Too much rouge?” she asked, passing
her arm in his as they left the table.
“No: too little. Look
at yourself,” he answered in a low tone.
“Oh, in these cadaverous old
looking-glasses-everybody looks fished up from the
canal!”
She jerked away from him to spin down
the long floor of the sala, hands on hips, whistling
a rag-time tune. The Prince and young Breckenridge
caught her up, and she spun back with the latter, while
Gillow-it was believed to be his sole accomplishment-snapped
his fingers in simulation of bones, and shuffled after
the couple on stamping feet.
Susy sank down on a sofa near the
window, fanning herself with a floating scarf, and
the men foraged for cigarettes, and rang for the gondoliers,
who came in with trays of cooling drinks.
“Well, what next this
ain’t all, is it?” Gillow presently queried,
from the divan where he lolled half-asleep with dripping
brow. Fred Gillow, like Nature, abhorred a void,
and it was inconceivable to him that every hour of
man’s rational existence should not furnish a
motive for getting up and going somewhere else.
Young Breckenridge, who took the same view, and the
Prince, who earnestly desired to, reminded the company
that somebody they knew was giving a dance that night
at the Lido.
Strefford vetoed the Lido, on the
ground that he’d just come back from there,
and proposed that they should go out on foot for a
change.
“Why not? What fun!”
Susy was up in an instant. “Let’s
pay somebody a surprise visit I don’t
know who! Streffy, Prince, can’t you think
of somebody who’d be particularly annoyed by
our arrival?”
“Oh, the list’s too long.
Let’s start, and choose our victim on the way,”
Strefford suggested.
Susy ran to her room for a light cloak,
and without changing her high-heeled satin slippers
went out with the four men. There was no moon thank
heaven there was no moon! but the stars
hung over them as close as fruit, and secret fragrances
dropped on them from garden-walls. Susy’s
heart tightened with memories of Como.
They wandered on, laughing and dawdling,
and yielding to the drifting whims of aimless people.
Presently someone proposed taking a nearer look at
the façade of San Giorgio Maggiore, and they hailed
a gondola and were rowed out through the bobbing lanterns
and twanging guitar-strings. When they landed
again, Gillow, always acutely bored by scenery, and
particularly resentful of midnight aesthetics, suggested
a night club near at hand, which was said to be jolly.
The Prince warmly supported this proposal; but on
Susy’s curt refusal they started their rambling
again, circuitously threading the vague dark lanes
and making for the Piazza and Florian’s ices.
Suddenly, at a calle-corner, unfamiliar and
yet somehow known to her, Susy paused to stare about
her with a laugh.
“But the Hickses surely
that’s their palace? And the windows all
lit up! They must be giving a party! Oh,
do let’s go up and surprise them!” The
idea struck her as one of the drollest that she had
ever originated, and she wondered that her companions
should respond so languidly.
“I can’t see anything
very thrilling in surprising the Hickses,” Gillow
protested, defrauded of possible excitements; and Strefford
added: “It would surprise me more than
them if I went.”
But Susy insisted feverishly:
“You don’t know. It may be awfully
exciting! I have an idea that Coral’s announcing
her engagement her engagement to Nick!
Come, give me a hand, Streff and you the
other, Fred-” she began to hum the first bars
of Donna Anna’s entrance in Don Giovanni.
“Pity I haven’t got a black cloak and a
mask....”
“Oh, your face will do,”
said Strefford, laying his hand on her arm.
She drew back, flushing crimson.
Breckenridge and the Prince had sprung on ahead, and
Gillow, lumbering after them, was already halfway up
the stairs.
“My face? My face?
What’s the matter with my face? Do you know
any reason why I shouldn’t go to the Hickses
to-night?” Susy broke out in sudden wrath.
“None whatever; except that
if you do it will bore me to death,” Strefford
returned, with serenity.
“Oh, in that case !”
“No; come on. I hear those
fools banging on the door already.” He caught
her by the hand, and they started up the stairway.
But on the first landing she paused, twisted her hand
out of his, and without a word, without a conscious
thought, dashed down the long flight, across the great
resounding vestibule and out into the darkness of the
calle.
Strefford caught up with her, and
they stood a moment silent in the night.
“Susy what the devil’s the
matter?”
“The matter? Can’t
you see? That I’m tired, that I’ve
got a splitting headache that you bore
me to death, one and all of you!” She turned
and laid a deprecating hand on his arm. “Streffy,
old dear, don’t mind me: but for God’s
sake find a gondola and send me home.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.”
It was never any concern of Streff’s
if people wanted to do things he did not understand,
and she knew that she could count on his obedience.
They walked on in silence to the next canal, and he
picked up a passing gondola and put her in it.
“Now go and amuse yourself,”
she called after him, as the boat shot under the nearest
bridge. Anything, anything, to be alone, away
from the folly and futility that would be all she
had left if Nick were to drop out of her life....
“But perhaps he has dropped
already dropped for good,” she thought
as she set her foot on the Vanderlyn threshold.
The short summer night was already
growing transparent: a new born breeze stirred
the soiled surface of the water and sent it lapping
freshly against the old palace doorways. Nearly
two o’clock! Nick had no doubt come back
long ago. Susy hurried up the stairs, reassured
by the mere thought of his nearness. She knew
that when their eyes and their lips met it would be
impossible for anything to keep them apart.
The gondolier dozing on the landing
roused himself to receive her, and to proffer two
envelopes. The upper one was a telegram for Strefford:
she threw it down again and paused under the lantern
hanging from the painted vault, the other envelope
in her hand. The address it bore was in Nick’s
writing. “When did the signore leave this
for me? Has he gone out again?”
Gone out again? But the signore
had not come in since dinner: of that the gondolier
was positive, as he had been on duty all the evening.
A boy had brought the letter an unknown
boy: he had left it without waiting. It
must have been about half an hour after the signora
had herself gone out with her guests.
Susy, hardly hearing him, fled on
to her own room, and there, beside the very lamp which,
two months before, had illuminated Ellie Vanderlyn’s
fatal letter, she opened Nick’s.
“Don’t think me hard on
you, dear; but I’ve got to work this thing out
by myself. The sooner the better-don’t you
agree? So I’m taking the express to Milan
presently. You’ll get a proper letter in
a day or two. I wish I could think, now, of something
to say that would show you I’m not a brute but
I can’t. N. L.”
There was not much of the night left
in which to sleep, even had a semblance of sleep been
achievable. The letter fell from Susy’s
hands, and she crept out onto the balcony and cowered
there, her forehead pressed against the balustrade,
the dawn wind stirring in her thin laces. Through
her closed eyelids and the tightly-clenched fingers
pressed against them, she felt the penetration of the
growing light, the relentless advance of another day a
day without purpose and without meaning a
day without Nick. At length she dropped her hands,
and staring from dry lids saw a rim of fire above
the roofs across the Grand Canal. She sprang
up, ran back into her room, and dragging the heavy
curtains shut across the windows, stumbled over in
the darkness to the lounge and fell among its pillows-face
downward groping, delving for a deeper
night....
She started up, stiff and aching,
to see a golden wedge of sun on the floor at her feet.
She had slept, then was it possible? it
must be eight or nine o’clock already!
She had slept slept like a drunkard with
that letter on the table at her elbow! Ah, now
she remembered she had dreamed that the
letter was a dream! But there, inexorably, it
lay; and she picked it up, and slowly, painfully re-read
it. Then she tore it into shreds hunted for a
match, and kneeling before the empty hearth, as though
she were accomplishing some funeral rite, she burnt
every shred of it to ashes. Nick would thank her
for that some day!
After a bath and a hurried toilet
she began to be aware of feeling younger and more
hopeful. After all, Nick had merely said that
he was going away for “a day or two.”
And the letter was not cruel: there were tender
things in it, showing through the curt words.
She smiled at herself a little stiffly in the glass,
put a dash of red on her colourless lips, and rang
for the maid.
“Coffee, Giovanna, please; and
will you tell Mr. Strefford that I should like to
see him presently.”
If Nick really kept to his intention
of staying away for a few days she must trump up some
explanation of his absence; but her mind refused to
work, and the only thing she could think of was to
take Strefford into her confidence. She knew
that he could be trusted in a real difficulty; his
impish malice transformed itself into a resourceful
ingenuity when his friends required it.
The maid stood looking at her with
a puzzled gaze, and Susy somewhat sharply repeated
her order. “But don’t wake him on
purpose,” she added, foreseeing the probable
effect on Strefford’s temper.
“But, signora, the gentleman is already
out.”
“Already out?” Strefford,
who could hardly be routed from his bed before luncheon-time!
“Is it so late?” Susy cried, incredulous.
“After nine. And the gentleman
took the eight o’clock train for England.
Gervaso said he had received a telegram. He left
word that he would write to the signora.”
The door closed upon the maid, and
Susy continued to gaze at her painted image in the
glass, as if she had been trying to outstare an importunate
stranger. There was no one left for her to take
counsel of, then no one but poor Fred Gillow!
She made a grimace at the idea.
But what on earth could have summoned
Strefford back to England?