Their Only Way
That night, when the last guest had gone, Ketletas, approaching his wife, put an arm about her. With her hair done up with opals and her dress looped with diamonds, in the brilliant room she shone. But undulantly she backed and smiled and said—and civilly enough: “Would you mind not mussing me?”
Ketletas strangled an oath. Still young, good natured, good looking, though not unreasonably so, a man of means and of what is amusingly termed position, before marriage he had been rather run after. So, too, had she. An heiress and a beauty, men in droves had knocked at her heart, or at least at what they thought was her heart, for while necessarily she had one, she was unware of it. Dormant and unaroused, it had never spoken. The men who knocked got for answer an uplift of her delicate chin, the level look of steady eyes and a smile not disdainful but aloof—a smile such as that with which she had just gratified her husband, whom she had accepted, de guerre lasse, because even in these liberal days spinsterhood has its restrictions, yet mainly because, for an heiress and a beauty, marriage is the conventional thing and to be accepted as such.
Conventional she intended the marriage to be. She told him so. It was as though she had told him that truffles were intended merely to be looked at. He did not believe her. He did not believe either that she understood what she was talking about. Even otherwise he felt that he could change her views. But marriage effected no change in this girl who remained fair and frigid as a polar noon.
Apart from that she was a joy in the house and at the dinners and dances that she gave, she became recognised as one of the most charming hostesses in New York, where charming hostesses abound.
It was after one of these dances that she asked Ketletas not to muss her. Ordinarily, and particularly in the drawing room, he might not have attempted to. But it was always the same thing. Before him were truffles, odorant, delicious, yet not to be touched.
Mad as he was about her, the fact had long since envenomed. Now, strangling an oath, he felt that he could kiss her and kill her, but kiss her first. Either proceeding being hazardous, he caught at an unoffending gilt chair and smashed it to bits. It was a pretty if somewhat conventional act.
Helen backed and bubbled.
But Ketletas, his face flushed, threw at her: “One might as well ask alms of a statue as affection from you.”
Helen laughed again. “Some statues have not any.”
“Have not what?”
“Arms you said, didn’t you? There’s the Venus de Milo.”
“Damn the Venus de Milo,” thought Ketletas. But—convinced that there must be some scandal about the lady—he got out: “Anyway, somebody won her.”
“By breaking chairs?” Helen cut in and so tantalisingly that instantly she backed still farther. Again he was approaching her, and with a look in his eyes that even she knew rather well.
But in backing she had reached the wall. There there was a button. She touched it. Ketletas, who heard it ring, stopped short, speculatively.
At that, Helen looked him over, and inhumanly pretty she looked. “Don’t be tiresome,” she lightly admonished. For a second she paused, then added: “You have not seemed quite yourself lately. Why not see somebody? Yes, why not see Cally?”
She turned. A servant had entered. Indicating the wreckage she told the man to remove it.
Ketletas, turning also, walked to the end of the room. The end reached, he turned again. The servant was there, but Helen had gone.
Pursuit was idle. Before he could reach her, she would, he knew, be in her room, her women about her. Moreover the outburst with the chair had already mortified this man who, however primitive, was at least a gentleman.
Yet what could he do? he futilely wondered. The existence that he led was impossible. But at the moment, unable to conjecture any remedy for it, Helen’s mockery occurred to him and he thought of Cally—Cagliostro for short, as grateful patients sometimes called him—a man with whom he had chummed at Harvard, and gloomingly he wished himself back there. But that too being impossible he went on and up to bed, which is always a sane proceeding.
In bed, though he had ridden the whole afternoon and danced the whole evening, sleep delayed, but Cally returned. From him, his thought drifted to Gautier’s “Avatar,” a story in which a man in love with a woman who is not in love with him consults a physician and with such surprising results that ever since they have been manna to needy novelists. But that detail is negligible. Ketletas did not know of it, nor would it have interested if he had known. What preoccupied him was the story of this physician who, being an occultist, knew things that Lothario never imagined. But, for such knowledge, occultism
