“Thought you never would cut in,” Bess said to Lew. “You’d be foolish not to. I’m the best dancer of us three, and I’m much the smartest one. Jean is the jazzy one, the most chic, but I think it’s passй to be jazzy and play the traps and neck every second boy. Amanda is the beauty, of course. But I’m going to be the Cinderella, Mr. Lowrie. They’ll be the two wicked sisters, and gradually you’ll find I’m the most attractive and get all hot and bothered about me.”
There was an interval of intervals before Lew could maneuver Amanda to his chosen segment of the porch. She was all radiant and shimmering. More than content to be with him, she tried to relax with the creak of the settee. Then instinct told her that something was about to happen.
Lew, remembering a remark of Jean’s—“He asked me to marry him, and he hadn’t even kissed me”—could yet think of no graceful way to assault Amanda; nevertheless he was determined to tell her tonight that he was in love with her.
“This’ll seem sudden,” he ventured, “but you might as well know. Please put me down on the list of those who’d like to have a chance.”
She was not surprised, but being deep in herself at the moment, she was rather startled. Giving up the idea of relaxing, she sat upright.
“Mr. Lowrie—can I call you by your first name?—can I tell you something? No, I won’t—yes, I will, because I like you now. I didn’t like you at first. How’s that for frankness?”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
“No. Listen. You met Mr. Horton—the man from New York—the tall man with the rather old-looking hair?”
“Yes.” Lew felt a pang of premonition in his stomach.
“I’m engaged to him. You’re the first to know—except mother suspects. Whee! Now I told you because you saved my life, so you do sort of own me—I wouldn’t be here to be engaged, except for you.” Then she was honestly surprised at his expression. “Heavens, don’t look like that!” She regarded him, pained. “Don’t tell me you’ve been secretly in love with me all these months. Why didn’t I know? And now it’s too late.”
Lew tried a laugh.
“I hardly know you,” he confessed. “I haven’t had time to fall in love with you.”
“Maybe I work quick. Anyhow, if you did, you’ll have to forget it and be my friend.” Finding his hand, she squeezed it. “A big night for this little girl, Mr. Lew; the chance of a lifetime. I’ve been afraid for two days that his bureau drawer would stick or the hot water would give out and he’d leave for civilization.”
They were silent for a moment; then he asked:
“You very much in love with him?”
“Of course I am. I mean, I don’t know. You tell me. I’ve been in love with so many people; how can I answer that? Anyhow, I’ll get away from this old barn.”
“This house? You want to get away from here? Why, this is a lovely old house.”
She was astonished now, and then suddenly explosive:
“This old tomb! That’s the chief reason I’m marrying George Horton. Haven’t I stood it for twenty years? Haven’t I begged mother and father on my knees to move into town? This—shack—where everybody can hear what everybody else says three rooms off, and father won’t allow a radio, and not even a phone till last summer. I’m afraid even to ask a girl down from school—probably she’d go crazy listening to the shutters on a stormy night.”
“It’s a darn nice old house,” he said automatically.
“Nice and quaint,” she agreed. “Glad you like it. People who don’t have to live here generally do, but you ought to see us alone in it—if there’s a family quarrel you have to stay with it for hours. It all comes down to father wanting to live fifty miles from anywhere, so we’re condemned to rot. I’d rather live in a three-room apartment in town!” Shocked by her own vehemence, she broke off. “Anyhow,” she insisted, “it may seem nice to you, but it’s a nuisance to us.”
A man pulled the vines apart and peered at them, claimed her and pulled her to her feet; when she was gone, Lew went over the railing with a handhold and walked into the garden; he walked far enough away so that the lights and music from the house were blurred into one entity like a stage effect, like an approaching port viewed from a deck at night.
“I only saw her four times,” he said to himself. “Four times isn’t much. Eeney-meeney-miney-moe—what could I expect in four times? I shouldn’t feel anything at all.” But he was engulfed by fear. What had he just begun to know that now he might never know? What had happened in these moments in the garden this afternoon, what was the excitement that had blacked out in the instant of its birth? The scarcely emergent young image of Amanda—he did not want to carry it with him forever. Gradually he realized a truth behind his grief: He had come too late for her; unknown to him, she had been slipping away through the years. With the odds against him, he had managed to found himself on solid rock, and then, looking around for the girl, discovered that she had just gone. “Sorry, just gone out; just left; just gone.” Too late in every way—even for the house. Thinking over her tirade, Lew saw that he had come too late for the house; it was the house of a childhood from which the three girls were breaking away, the house of an older generation, sufficient unto them. To a younger generation it was pervaded with an aura of completion and fulfillment beyond their own power to add to. It was just old.
Nevertheless, he recalled the emptiness of many grander mansions built in more spectacular fashions—empty to him, at any rate, since he had first seen the Gunther place three months before. Something humanly valuable would vanish with the break-up of this family. The house itself, designed for reading long Victorian novels around an open fire of the evening, didn’t even belong to an architectural period worthy of restoration.
Lew circled an outer drive and stood quiet in the shadow of a rosebush as a pair of figures strolled down from the house; by their voices he recognized Jean and Allen Parks.
“Me, I’m going to New York,” Jean said, “whether they let me or not… No, not now, you nut. I’m not in that mood.”
“Then what mood are you in?”
“Not in any mood. I’m only envious of Amanda because she’s hooked this M’sieur, and now she’ll go to Long Island and live in a house instead of a mouse trap. Oh, Jake, this business of being simple and swell—”
They passed out of hearing. It was between dances, and Lew saw the colors of frocks and the quick white of shirt fronts in the window-panes as the guests flowed onto the porch. He looked up at the second floor as a light went on there—he had a conception of the second floor as walled with crowded photographs; there must be bags full of old materials, and trunks with costumes and dress-making forms, and old dolls’ houses, and an overflow, everywhere along the vacant walls, of books for all generations—many childhoods side by side drifting into every corner.
Another couple came down the walk from the house, and feeling that inadvertently he had taken up too strategic a position, Lew moved away; but not before he had identified the pair as Amanda and her man from New York.
“What would you think if I told you I had another proposal tonight?”
“…be surprised at all.”
“A very worthy young man. Saved my life… Why weren’t you there on that occasion, Bubbles? You’d have done it on a grand scale, I’m sure.”
Standing square in front of the house, Lew looked at it more searchingly. He felt a kinship with it—not precisely that, for the house’s usefulness was almost over and his was just beginning; rather, the sense of superior unity that the thoughtful young feel for the old, sense of the grandparent. More than only a house. He would like to be that much used up himself before being thrown out on the ash heap at the end. And then, because he wanted to do some courteous service to it while he could, if only to dance with the garrulous little sister, he pulled a brash pocket comb through his hair and went inside.
II
The man with the smiling scar approached Lew once more.
“This is probably,” he announced, “the biggest party ever given in New York.”
“I even heard you the first time you told me,” agreed Lew cheerfully.
“But, on the other hand,” qualified the man, “I thought the same thing at a party two years ago, in 1927. Probably they’ll go on getting bigger and bigger. You play polo, don’t you?”
“Only in the back yard,” Lewis assured him. “I said I’d like to play. I’m a serious business man.”
“Somebody told me you were the polo star.” The man was somewhat disappointed. “I’m a writer myself. A humani—a humanitarian. I’ve been trying to help out a girl over there in that room where the champagne is. She’s a lady. And yet, by golly, she’s the only one in the room that can’t take care of herself.”
“Never
