with Coral in the Scalzi.
Mr. Buttles, instead of speaking, had tentatively approached his table. “May I take this seat for a moment, Mr. Lansing? Thank you. No, I am not here as an advance guard—though I believe the Ibis is due some time tomorrow.” He cleared his throat, wiped his eyeglasses on a silk handkerchief, replaced them on his nose, and went on solemnly: “Perhaps, to clear up any possible misunderstanding, I ought to say that I am no longer in the employ of Mr. Hicks.”
Lansing glanced at him sympathetically. It was clear that he suffered horribly in imparting this information, though his compact face did not lend itself to any dramatic display of emotion.
“Really,” Nick smiled, and then ventured: “I hope it’s not owing to conscientious objections to Tiepolo?”
Mr. Buttles’s blush became a smouldering agony. “Ah, Miss Hicks mentioned to you… told you…? No, Mr. Lansing. I am principled against the effete art of Tiepolo, and of all his contemporaries, I confess; but if Miss Hicks chooses to surrender herself momentarily to the unwholesome spell of the Italian decadence it is not for me to protest or to criticize. Her intellectual and aesthetic range so far exceeds my humble capacity that it would be ridiculous, unbecoming….”
He broke off, and once more wiped a faint moisture from his eyeglasses. It was evident that he was suffering from a distress which he longed and yet dreaded to communicate. But Nick made no farther effort to bridge the gulf of his own preoccupations; and Mr. Buttles, after an expectant pause, went on: “If you see me here to-day it is only because, after a somewhat abrupt departure, I find myself unable to take leave of our friends without a last look at the Ibis—the scene of so many stimulating hours. But I must beg you,” he added earnestly, “should you see Miss Hicks—or any other member of the party—to make no allusion to my presence in Genoa. I wish,” said Mr. Buttles with simplicity, “to preserve the strictest incognito.”
Lansing glanced at him kindly. “Oh, but—isn’t that a little unfriendly?”
“No other course is possible, Mr. Lansing,” said the ex-secretary, “and I commit myself to your discretion. The truth is, if I am here it is not to look once more at the Ibis, but at Miss Hicks: once only. You will understand me, and appreciate what I am suffering.”
He bowed again, and trotted away on his small, tightly-booted feet; pausing on the threshold to say: “From the first it was hopeless,” before he disappeared through the glass doors.
A gleam of commiseration flashed through Nick’s mind: there was something quaintly poignant in the sight of the brisk and efficient Mr. Buttles reduced to a limp image of unrequited passion. And what a painful surprise to the Hickses to be thus suddenly deprived of the secretary who possessed “the foreign languages”! Mr. Beck kept the accounts and settled with the hotel-keepers; but it was Mr. Buttles’s loftier task to entertain in their own tongues the unknown geniuses who flocked about the Hickses, and Nick could imagine how disconcerting his departure must be on the eve of their Grecian cruise which Mrs. Hicks would certainly call an Odyssey.
The next moment the vision of Coral’s hopeless suitor had faded, and Nick was once more spinning around on the wheel of his own woes. The night before, when he had sent his note to Susy, from a little restaurant close to Palazzo Vanderlyn that they often patronized, he had done so with the firm intention of going away for a day or two in order to collect his wits and think over the situation. But after his letter had been entrusted to the landlord’s little son, who was a particular friend of Susy’s, Nick had decided to await the lad’s return. The messenger had not been bidden to ask for an answer; but Nick, knowing the friendly and inquisitive Italian mind, was almost sure that the boy, in the hope of catching a glimpse of Susy, would linger about while the letter was carried up. And he pictured the maid knocking at his wife’s darkened room, and Susy dashing some powder on her tear-stained face before she turned on the light—poor foolish child!
The boy had returned rather sooner than Nick expected, and he had brought no answer, but merely the statement that the signora was out: that everybody was out.
“Everybody?”
“The signora and the four gentlemen who were dining at the palace. They all went out together on foot soon after dinner. There was no one to whom I could give the note but the gondolier on the landing, for the signora had said she would be very late, and had sent the maid to bed; and the maid had, of course, gone out immediately with her innamorato.”
“Ah—” said Nick, slipping his reward into the boy’s hand, and walking out of the restaurant.
Susy had gone out—gone out with their usual band, as she did every night in these sultry summer weeks, gone out after her talk with Nick, as if nothing had happened, as if his whole world and hers had not crashed in ruins at their feet. Ah, poor Susy! After all, she had merely obeyed the instinct of self preservation, the old hard habit of keeping up, going ahead and hiding her troubles; unless indeed the habit had already engendered indifference, and it had become as easy for her as for most of her friends to pass from drama to dancing, from sorrow to the cinema. What of soul was left, he wondered—?
His train did not start till midnight, and after leaving the restaurant Nick tramped the sultry by-ways till his tired legs brought him to a standstill under the vine-covered pergola of a gondolier’s wine-shop at a landing close to the Piazzetta. There he could absorb cooling drinks until it was time to go to the station.
It was after eleven, and he was beginning to look about for a boat, when a black prow pushed up to the steps, and with much chaff and laughter a party of young people in evening dress jumped out. Nick, from under the darkness of the vine, saw that there was only one lady among them, and it did not need the lamp above the landing to reveal her identity. Susy, bareheaded and laughing, a light scarf slipping from her bare shoulders, a cigarette between her fingers, took Strefford’s arm and turned in the direction of Florian’s, with Gillow, the Prince and young Breckenridge in her wake….
Nick had relived this rapid scene hundreds of times during his hours in the train and his aimless trampings through the streets of Genoa. In that squirrel-wheel of a world of his and Susy’s you had to keep going or drop out —and Susy, it was evident, had chosen to keep going. Under the lamp-flare on the landing he had had a good look at her face, and had seen that the mask of paint and powder was carefully enough adjusted to hide any ravages the scene between them might have left. He even fancied that she had dropped a little atropine into her eyes….
There was no time to spare if he meant to catch the midnight train, and no gondola in sight but that which his wife had just left. He sprang into it, and bade the gondolier carry him to the station. The cushions, as he leaned back, gave out a breath of her scent; and in the glare of electric light at the station he saw at his feet a rose which had fallen from her dress. He ground his heel into it as he got out.
There it was, then; that was the last picture he was to have of her. For he knew now that he was not going back; at least not to take up their life together. He supposed he should have to see her once, to talk things over, settle something for their future. He had been sincere in saying that he bore her no ill-will; only he could never go back into that slough again. If he did, he knew he would inevitably be drawn under, slipping downward from concession to concession….
