“Possibly,” said Orr. “Well,” he added, reverting to the episode that had brought him there, “I am sorry for all this. I know you are. I will write to Sylvia and tell her so.”
“Please do.”
Annandale stood up and accompanied him to the door. When he turned life seemed blank as the blanks of the night.
VII
Sweet-and-Twenty
What Sylvia replied to Orr’s communication, whether indeed she replied at all, Annandale was not informed. He himself wrote to her. The letter was long; it was also abject. But he got no answer. He wrote again. The result was the same.
Then both at her and at himself he rebelled. He had supped on humiliations. He had no appetite for more. With some bravery, yet without bravado, he tore a leaf from his life and on it wrote Finis. The epitaph was figurative, but he thought it final. He thought that he could dictate to Fate. It is a mistake that many make.
Presently it surprised him to find how laborious is the task of putting people out of your life. If you have cared for them they will come back. In the pages of a book, in the pauses of speech, suddenly you behold them. In sleep they will not let you be. When you awake, there they are. However detestable their behavior may have been, in dream they visit and caress you. It takes time and vigilance; it takes more, it takes other faces to disperse them.
In spite of the Finis, Sylvia Waldron declined to be dismissed. She haunted Annandale. To memories of her he could not always show the door. Sometimes they were masked. Occasionally they reproached him. Again they seemed to say that did he but find out how, all might yet be well between them. But usually they came and stood gazing at him in love and grief eternal.
Then he would start. But what could he do? Besides, there was the Finis.
June meanwhile had come and gone. Summer with a frenzy quasi-maniacal had battened on the town. It is said that the hottest place in the world is a port on the Persian Gulf. But it is wrong to believe everything we hear. When New York decides to be hot, the temperature of the Persian port must be agreeable by comparison.
One fetid noon Annandale fled. When he stopped it was at Narragansett.
Before August comes and with it the mob, Narragansett is charming. There is a mile of empty hotels, a stretch of sand fine as face powder, a heaving, heavenly desert of blue and an atmosphere charged with ozone and desire.
In August the hotels are packed. The stretch of sand is a stage. Every day a ballet is given there. The coryphées are the prettiest girls in the world—girls from Baltimore, girls from Philadelphia, girls from everywhere, girls with the Occident in their eyes and lips that say “Drink me.”
At high noon, from the greenroom of the bathhouses, Sweet-and-twenty floats down, clasps the sea to the hum of harps, breasts the waves to the laugh of brass and reemerges to the sound of trumpets.
After the dip, other diversions. Primarily flirtations on the lawns; later, polo at the Country Club; at night, dancing in the ballrooms, more flirtations on the galleries of the Casino, supper on the terrace below.
The terrace resembles, or, more exactly, on this particular summer did resemble, a roof garden on the ground floor. From a kiosk a band of Hungarians distributed selections of popular rot, sometimes their own delirious czardas. There, circled by variegated lights, fanned by the violins, girls and men sat beneath the high, wide, flowerful umbrellas of Japan.
Sometimes some of them, wearying of that, wandered into silences and shadows and lingered there, occupied with the crops, with strikes and other subjects of national interest which young people always discuss when holding hands in the dark.
To Newport, which squats disdainfully over the way, this is all too free and easy. To Annandale, it was distressing. Everywhere there was love, yet none for him. He had come to the Pier, as Narragansett is locally termed, because of Newport’s propinquity. If Sylvia so much as signaled he could join her at once.
As yet no signaling was apparent. In its place was an influx of a reflection of fashion. The influx made Annandale swear. He hated to be seen stalking moodily about. He hated still more to have the rupture of his engagement discussed. The ballet on the beach irritated him. He told himself that he had come to the wrong shop. One day he thought of joining friends in Canada. The next he thought of joining friends who had gone abroad. The day after he thought that still he might be signaled.
In these uncertainties he loitered, annoyed but sober. Since the visit from Orr he had not touched a drop. Then, it so fell about that one evening he looked in at a dance at the Casino. Madness was in the air. The savors of the sea, the tonic of the dip, the stare of the harvest moon, go to the head, stir the heart, excite the pulse in a manner really Boccaccian.
Madness is contagious. It seemed particularly catching that night. The hall was filled, the gallery flushed. On a stage, at the end of the ballroom, musicians were tossing out in trailing rhythm the sorcery of “Il Bacio,” the invitation of the Cent Vierges, the muffled riot of El Capitan.
To these incentives couples turned. Beneath the gallery where Annandale stood there was a vision of white arms, bare necks, slender waists circled by the blackness of men’s sleeves. Three hundred girls and men were waltzing together, interchanging partners, clasping hands, gazing into each other’s eyes.
Behind Annandale a group had gathered. They were talking, yet of what he did not heed. But, presently, into the conversation filtered the freshness of another voice.
“I quite believe, you know,” the voice was saying, “that a
