Cytherea

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Produced by Michelle Shephard, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

CYTHEREA.

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

_For _ DOROTHY
_Charming in the present and
Secure with the past _

I

It was, probably, Lee Randon realized, the last time he would play golf
that year. He concluded this standing on a shorn hill about which the
country was spread in sere diminishing tones to the grey horizon.
Below, a stream held a cold glimmer in a meadow of brown, frost-killed
grass; and the wind, the bitter flaws where Lee stood, was thinly
scattered with soft crystals of snow. He was alone, no one would play
with him so late in the season, and there had been no boy present to
carry his clubs. Yes, this was the last time he'd try it until spring:
Peyton Morris, who had married Lee's niece and was at least fourteen
years his junior, had been justified in a refusal which, at its
expression, had made Lee cross.

At worse than forty-five, he had told Morris curtly, he was more active
than the young men hardly out of the universities. To this Peyton had
replied that undoubtedly Lee had more energy than he; personally he
felt as old as--as Egypt. Ridiculous, Lee decided, trying to make up
his mind whether he might continue playing or return, beaten by
November, to the clubhouse. In the end, with numb fingers, he picked up
his ball, and walked slowly back over the empty course. The wind, now,
was behind him, and increasingly comfortable he grew reflective:

The comparison of Peyton Morris's age with his, recalling the fact, to
be precise, of his forty-seven years, created a vague questioning
dissatisfaction. Suddenly he saw himself--a comfortable body in a
comfortable existence, a happy existence, he added sharply--
objectively; and the stout figure in knickerbockers, rough stockings, a
yellow buckskin jacket and checked cap pulled over a face which, he
felt, was brightly red, surprised and a little annoyed him. In the
abrupt appearance of this image it seemed that there had been no
transitional years between his slender youth and the present. He had an
absurd momentary impression that an act of malicious magic had in a
second transformed him into a shape decidedly too heavy for grace. His
breathing, where the ground turned upward, was even slightly labored.

It was, Lee thought with all the intensity of an original discovery,
devilish unpleasant to grow old; to die progressively on one's feet, he
elaborated the fact. That was what happened to a man--his liver
thickened, his teeth went, his veins became brittle pipes of lime.
Worse than all that, his potency, the spirit and heat of living, met
without any renewal its inescapable winter. This might, did, occur
while his being was rebellious with vain hope. Today, in spite of the
slight clogging of his breath, his body's loss of flexibility, his
imagination was as vigorous, as curious, as ever ... take that nonsense
about the doll, which, in a recalled classical allusion, he had
privately named Cytherea. Peyton Morris would never have entered into
that!

Lee Randon, on one of his infrequent trips to New York, had seen it in
a confectioner's window on Fifth Avenue, and instantly it had
captivated his attention, brought him to a halt. The doll, beautifully
dressed in the belled skirt of the eighteen-forties, wore plum-colored
silk with a bodice and wide short sleeves of pale yellow and, crossed
on the breast, a strip of black Spanish lace that fell to the hem of
the skirt. It wasn't, of course, the clothes that attracted him--he
only grew conscious of them perhaps a month later--but the wilful
charm, the enigmatic fascination, of the still face. The eyes were long
and half closed under finely arched brows, there was a minute patch at
the right corner of a pale scarlet, smiling mouth; a pointed chin
marked an elusive oval beneath black hair drawn down upon a long slim
neck, hair to which was pinned an odd headdress of old gilt with, at
the back, pendent ornamental strands of gold-glass beads.

Insistently conventional, selectly ordinary, in appearance, the stick
with a pig-skin handle hanging from his left arm, he had studied the
doll with a deepening interest. Never in life, he told himself, had he
seen a woman with such a magnetic and disturbing charm. Fixed in intent
regard he became conscious that, strangely, rather than small the
figure seemed diminished by a distance which yet left every feature
clear. With this he grew satirical at himself; and, moving resolutely
down the Avenue, treated his absorption with ridicule. But the vision
of the face, the smile, the narrowed eyes, persisted in his mind; the
truth was that they troubled him; and within three blocks he had
turned. The second view intensified rather than lessened his feeling,
and he walked quickly into the shop odorous with burned sugar. The doll
was removed from the window--it had come from Paris, he learned--and,
after a single covert glance, he bought it, for, he needlessly informed
the girl wrapping it in an unwieldy light package, his daughter.

To his secret satisfaction, Helena, who was twelve, hadn't been
strongly prepossessed; and the doll--though Lee Randon no longer
thought of it as merely that--left downstairs, had been finally placed
on the white over-mantel of the fireplace by the dining-room door.

There, when he was alone, he very often stopped to gaze at the figure;
and, during such a moment of speculative abstraction, he had, from the
memories of early reading, called her Cytherea. That, Lee remembered
vaguely, was the Cytheranian name of the mysterious goddess of love,
Venus, of the principle, the passion, of life stirring in plants and
men. But in the shape above him it had been strangely modified from an
apparently original purpose, made infinitely difficult if not
impossible of understanding. His Cytherea bore the traces, the results,
of old and lost and polished civilizations; there was about her even a
breath of immemorial China. It mingled with a suggestion of Venice, the
eighteenth century Venice of the princes of Naxos--how curiously she
brought back tags of discarded reading!--and of the rococo Viennese
court. This much he grasped; but the secret of her fascination, of
what, at heart, she represented, what in her had happened to love,
entirely escaped him.

Lee was interested in this, he reassured his normal intelligence,
because really it bore upon him, upon the whole of his married life
with Fanny. He wasn't, merely, the victim of a vagrant obsession, the
tyranny of a threatening fixed idea. No, the question advanced without
answer by Cytherea was not confined to her, it had very decidedly
entered into him, and touched, practically, everyone he knew, everyone,
that was, who had a trace of imagination. Existence had been enormously
upset, in a manner at once incalculable and clear, by the late war.
Why, for example, the present spirit of restlessness should
particularly affect the relation of men and women he couldn't begin to
grasp. Not, he added immediately, again, that it had clouded or shaken
his happiness.

It had only given him the desire, the safe necessity, to comprehend the
powerful emotion that held Fanny and him secure against any accident to
their love. To their love! The repetition, against his contrary
intention, took on the accent of a challenge. However, he proceeded
mentally, it wasn't the unassailable fact that was challenged, but the
indefinable word love. Admiration, affection, passion, were clear in
their meanings--but love! His brow contracted in a frown spreading in a
shadowy doubt over his face when he saw that he had almost reached the
clubhouse; its long steep-pitched bulk lay directly across the path of
dusk, approaching from the east; and a ruddy flicker in the glass doors
on the veranda showed that a fire had been lighted. To his left, down
over the dead sod and beyond a road, he could see the broad low façade
of his house with its terraced lawn and aged stripped maples. There,
too, a window was bright on the first floor: probably Fanny was hearing
the children's lessons.

* * * * *

That cheerful interior he completely visualized: Fanny, in the nicest
possible attire, sitting in the curly-maple rocking-chair, her
slippered feet--she had a premonition of rheumatism--elevated on the
collapsible stool she carried about with her; and Helena and Gregory
hanging on her knees. Gregory, of course, had tomorrow's task easily in
hand, with another star for a day's good conduct in school; but Helena,
shining in the gold and flush of her radiant inattention, would know
nothing. Helena, Lee Randon acknowledged, spelled atrociously. If it
weren't for the clubs and his spiked shoes he'd turn and go home
directly, himself supervise the children's efforts at education. But
Fanny did it much better than he; Helena and Gregory were closer to
her; while they volunteered endless personal and trivial admissions to
her, he had to ask them, detail by detail, what they were doing.

After he had changed his shoes and secured the latticed steel door of
his locker he went up to the main room of the clubhouse, where, on the
long divan before the open fire, he found Peyton Morris lounging with
Anette Sherwin by a low tea table. The hot water, they informed Lee
comfortably, was cold, inviting him by implication to ring for more;
and then they returned to the conversation he had interrupted. Anette
said:

"I asked her from Friday till Monday, over the dance, you see; but she
wired she couldn't be sure. They are going to begin rehearsing at any
minute, and then shoot--it is shoot, isn't it?--the picture. What did
she tell you at the Plaza?"

"The same thing," Peyton replied moodily. "I only saw her for a scrappy
dinner; she couldn't even wait for coffee, but rushed up to a
conference with her director."

They were, Lee knew, talking about Mina Raff, a friend of Anette's
earlier summers by the sea who was beginning to be highly successful in
the more serious moving pictures. He had met her a number of years ago,
in Eastlake, but he retained no clear impression of her; and, admitting
that he hadn't gone to see her in a picture, wondered aloud at her
sudden fame. Peyton Morris glanced at him, frowning; he seemed at the
point of vigorous speech, then said nothing.

"Mina is lovely now, Lee," Anette spoke in his place; "you will realize
that at once. She's like a--a wistful April moon, or corn silk."

"I like black hair," Randon asserted.

"That's amusing, when you think Fanny's is quite brown," Anette
replied. "Whom have you been meeting with black hair? There's none I
can remember in Eastlake."

"There isn't anybody in particular," Lee reassured her; "it is just an
idea of mine." He had a vision of intense black hair swept about an
enigmatic still smile, of an old gilt headdress. "Mina Raff must have
developed if she gets half the pay advertised."

"She'll get twice that when this contract expires," Peyton put in; "and
that will be increased again. No one on the screen can touch her." He
made these declarations in a manner both shadowed and aggressive. Lee
observed that he held a cigarette in one hand and a match in the other
with no effort at conjunction.

"Mina simply tells you everything," Anette continued. "If she comes you
must do your best. It's perfectly marvelous, with so much else, that
she even considers it. I couldn't budge her when she was practically
free."

"How is Claire?" Randon abruptly demanded.

"She's all right," her husband returned; "a little offhand, but no more
than usual. I want her to go to the West Indies and take Ira but she
won't listen. Why anyone who doesn't have to stay through these rotten
winters I can't imagine." A flaming log brought out his handsomely
proportioned face, the clear grey eyes, the light carefully brushed
hair and stubborn chin. Peyton was a striking if slightly sullen
appearing youth--yet he must be on the mark of thirty--and it was
undeniable that he was well thought of generally. At his university,
Princeton, he had belonged to a most select club; his family, his
prospects, even his present--junior partner in a young but successful
firm of bond brokers--were beyond reproach. Yet Lee Randon was aware
that he had never completely liked Peyton.

His exterior was too hard, too obviously certain, to allow any
penetration of the inevitable human and personal irregularities
beneath. It might be possible that he was all of a piece of the
conventional stereotyped proprieties; but Lee couldn't imagine Claire
marrying or holding to a man so empty, or, rather, so dully solid.
Claire he admired without reservation--a girl who had become a wife, a
mother, with no loss of her vivid character. Her attitude toward Ira,
now four years old--wholly different from Fanny's manner with her
children--was lightly humorous; publicly she treated her obligations as
jokes; but actually, Lee knew, she was indefatigable.

This was a type of high spirits, of highly bred courage, to which he
was entirely delivered. Fanny was a perfect mother, a remarkably fine
wife, but she bore an evident sense of her responsibilities. She wasn't
so good-looking as Claire, who at times was almost beautiful; but Fanny
had a very decided kind of attractiveness which Lee Randon wished she
would more bring out. She was a little too serious. He didn't actually
want her to drink and swear in public, that wouldn't become her; but
something of that sort, he felt, might help her. At times, when she had
had more than her customary cocktail and a half, he saw in her a
promise of what he desired.

God knew he wasn't criticizing Fanny, he hastened to reassure even
himself: how could he, in the face of all she had brought him--the
freedom of money and undeviating devotion and their two splendid
children? His house was as absolute in its restrained luxury of taste
as was the unfailing attention to his comfort. It was purely for her
own happiness that he wanted her to be, well--a little gayer. She was
already developing a tendency to sit serenely on the veranda of the
club through the dances, to encourage others rather than take an active
part herself.

Expanding in the glow of the fire and hot strong tea he forgot all
about his uncomfortable premonitions of age. Now it seemed to him that
he had never been younger in the sense of being merely alive; after the
tonic of the cold his nerves were strung like steel, his blood was in a
full tide. Lee was aware of a marked sense of pleasure at the closeness
to him of Anette; settling back, she willingly, voluntarily, leaned her
firm elastic body against him; her legs, as evident in woolen stockings
as his own, were thrust frankly out toward the flames.

"I'll meet her," he heard Peyton say, and realized that they were still
talking about Mina Raff. She wouldn't attract him, Lee Randon, in the
least, he was sure of that ... no wistful April moon. What, then, did
engage him? He was unable to say, he didn't know. It was something
intangible, a charm without definite form; and his thoughts returned to
Cytherea--if he could grasp the secret of her fascination he would be
able to settle a great many disturbing feelings and needs. Yes, what
she mutely expressed was what, beneath his comprehension, he had come
to long for. He had never recognized it as the property of any woman
nor satisfied it in himself.

Here, certainly, his loyalty, his affection for Fanny, weren't damaged;
he was, he thought, beyond assault there. It was only that, together
with his fidelity to his wife, an increasing uneasiness possessed him,
an unabated separate interest in life, in women. He was searching for
something essential, he couldn't discover what; but, dismissing the
problem of how he'd act if he found it, the profound conviction
remained that when his hopeful quest was over then indeed he'd be old,
finished, drained. Lee Randon secretly cherished, jealously guarded,
that restless, vital reaching for the indefinable perfection of his
hidden desire. For a flash it was almost perceptible in Anette, her
head half-buried in the darkness of the divan behind the rise and fall
of her breasts in a close sweater of Jaeger wool.

* * * * *

She stirred, smiled at him absently, and, with Peyton's assistance,
rose. The long room, unlighted except for the fire, was lost in
obscurity; the blackness against the window-panes was absolute.
Outside, however, Lee found a lingering glint of day; the snow had
stopped, but the wind had increased and was blowing over the open
expanse of the course in the high gaunt key of winter. His house,
across the road, showed regular cheerful rectangles of orange
illumination: he always returned to it with a feeling of relief and
pleasant anticipation, but he was very far from sharing Fanny's
passionate attachment to their home. Away--on past trips to the
Michigan iron ore fields and now on shorter journeys to eastern
financial centers--he never thought of it, he was absorbed by business.

But in that he wasn't alone, it was true of the majority of successful
men he knew over forty; they saw their wives, their homes, they thought
of their families, only in the intervals of their tyrannical
occupations. He, in reality, was rather better there than most, for he
occasionally stayed out at Eastlake to play golf; he was locally
interested, active, in the small town of Fanny's birth. Other men--

He made a calculation of how much time a practising lawyer saw his
wife: certainly he was out of the house before nine--Lee knew lawyers
who were in their offices at seven-thirty--and he was hardly back until
after five. Nine hours absent daily through the week; and it was
probable that he was in bed by eleven, up at seven--seven hours' sleep;
of the eight hours left in twenty-four half if not two-thirds of the
Sundays and some part of the others were devoted to a recreation; and
this took no account of the briefcases brought home, the thought and
contributary preoccupations.

More than that, his mind, his hopes and planning, were constantly
directed toward his legal concerns; the wife of such a man filled about
the position of his golf or billiards. Lee Randon had never analyzed
this before, and the result amazed him. With younger men, of course, it
was different; they had more time and interest for their homes, their
wives and children. Everything constantly shifted, changed, perished;
all, that was, but the unintelligible spurring need beyond any
accomplishment.

In him it was almost as though there were--or, perhaps, had been--two
distinct, opposed processes of thought, two different personalities, a
fact still admirably illustrated by his private interest in the doll,
in Cytherea. Much younger he had been fond of music, of opera and then
symphony concerts, and his university years had been devoted to a wide
indiscriminate reading: sitting until morning with college men of
poetic tendencies, he had discussed the intricacies of conduct in the
light of beauty rather than prudence. This followed him shyly into the
world, the offices of the Magnolia Iron Works; where, he had told
himself optimistically, he was but finding a temporary competence.
What, when he should be free to follow his inclination, he'd do, Lee
never particularized; it was in the clouds nebulous and bright, and
accompanied by music. His dream left him imperceptibly, its vagueness
killed partly by the superior reality of pig iron and ore and partly
because he never had anyone with whom to talk it over; he could find no
sympathy to keep it alive.

That it wasn't very robust was evident; and yet, throughout his youth,
it had been his main source of incentive. No one, in the Magnolia
works, knew the difference between the Glucks, Alma and Christopher,
nor read anything but the most current of magazines. At intervals Lee
had found a woman who responded to the inner side of him, and together
they swept into an aesthetic emotional debauch; but they came
inevitably, in the surrounding ugliness of thought and ascribed
motives, to humiliating and ugly ends; and he drifted with increasing
rapidity to his present financial and material sanity.

What remained of the other was hardly more than a rare accelerated
heart-beat at a chord of music like the memory of a lost happiness, or
at the sea shimmering with morning. He never spoke of it now, not even
to Fanny; although it was possible that he might be doing her
understanding an injustice. Fanny, generally, was a woman in whom the
best of sense triumphed; Fanny was practical. It was she who saw that
the furnace pipes were inspected, the chimney flues cleaned before
winter; and who had the tomato frames properly laid away in the stable.
Problems of drainage, of controversies with the neighbors, were
instinctively brought to her, and she met and disposed of them with an
unfailing vigorous good judgment.

A remarkable companion, he told himself; he had been a fortunate man.
She was at once conventional and an individual: Fanny never, for
example, wore the underclothes of colored crepe de chines, the
elaborate trifles, Lee saw in the shop windows, nightgowns of sheer
exposure and candy-like ribbons; hers were always of fine white
cambric, scalloped, perhaps, or with chaste embroidery, but nothing
more. Neither did she use perfumes of any sort, there was no array of
ornamental bottles on her dressing-table, no sachet among her
handkerchiefs, her cambric was not laid in scented flannel. Her
dressing, a little severe, perhaps--she liked tailored suits with crisp
linen waists and blue serge with no more than a touch of color--was
otherwise faultless in choice and order; and, it might be that she was
wholly wise: Fanny was thin and, for a woman, tall, with square erectly
held shoulders. Her face was thin, too, almost bony, and that
magnified, emphasized, the open bright blueness of her eyes; all her
spirit, her integrity and beauty, were gathered in them; her hair was
pale and quite scanty.

Yes, Fanny's eyes were her principal attraction, they were forever
startling, contrasted with the rest, not only remarkable in shade but,
as well, in light; in her quick unreasoning tempers, the only
perceptible flaw of her character, they sparkled with brilliancy. The
tempers, Lee decided, descending the narrow stony road from the club-
house to his gate, were an unavoidable part of her special qualities:
her quick decisiveness, her sharp recognitions of right and her
obdurate condemnation of wrong--these distinctions were never obscured
in Fanny--necessitated a finality of judgment open to anger at any
contrary position. Aside from that she was as secure, as predictable,
as any heavenly orbit; her love for him, beginning before marriage, had
quietly and constantly increased; her usual mood was moulded to his
need; nothing had ever contested the supremacy of his place with her.

Lee swung open the white wicket that broke the middle of his border
hedge and went up the path over the broad lawn; the house, an admirable
copy of locally colonial dwellings, was a yellow stucco, with a porch
on his left and the dining-room at the extreme right. Beyond the porch
was the square of the formal garden, indistinguishable at this season,
and the garage, the driveway, were hidden at the back. He mounted the
broad steps of field stone at the terrace, but, in place of going
directly in under the main portico, turned aside to the porch, past the
dim bare forms of the old maples. Just as he had anticipated, the glass
door showed him Fanny sitting in the maple slatted-back rocking-chair;
Gregory, in blue, was present, but Helena not to be seen.

His wife's hands were lying idly in her lap, and she was gazing into
nothingness with an expression he had never before noticed, there was a
faint troubled doubt on her brow, a questioning expression about her
eyes. As he stood momentarily quiet he saw her hands slowly clasp until
he felt that they were rigid, and her mouth became pinched; her face
seemed actually hard. Gregory spoke to her, with his fat fingers on her
sleeve, but she made no reply, paid no attention to him. Lee could hear
Gregory's demanding voice; and then, gathering herself, Fanny sighed
deeply and smiled at her boy. She was wearing her pearls, her rings
sparkled in glittering prisms; and, as he opened the door, Lee Randon
wondered if he had forgotten an engagement to go out for dinner?

* * * * *

He asked at once if this were so, but found that they were staying at
home. She regarded him still, he realized, a little withdrawn in the
abstraction he had surprised. This, because it was so uncommon,
disturbed him, and he demanded what was worrying her.

"Nothing, really. What made you suppose I was bothered?" Her reply was
instinctive; and then, after a pause, she continued, more insecurely,
"I was only thinking about some things.... Lee," she inquired, "you
love me very much, don't you?"

"Why, of course," he spoke almost impatiently.

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