The Rose Garden (16 page)

“We're late,” Delia said. “The bell has stopped ringing. We'll hear it all on the way back, Stasia.”

“And Miss Carter on the sofa,” Stasia wailed. “I forgot all the best parts.”

She would never get their attention all the way back again. They'd be crowding around and chattering and interrupting her, getting the story all wrong.

The Servants' Dance

O
n Saturday morning, Charles Runyon awoke in a mood of rapturous gaiety. This day, this evening, this weekend, promised—no, guaranteed—a triumph so complete, both in secret and in public, that it must surely, Charles felt, become one of the succession of platforms that marked his progress through life, each platform raising him higher, the better to survey the world and the men and women in it. My stage and my actors, he said to himself; my arena. Charles was a literary gentleman whose main interest was the theater. He lived alone in a single room in an old and famous hotel in the Murray Hill district. He never entertained, having, as he laughingly explained, no facilities for doing so, but he went out a great deal, and had a reputation, undefined but definite, as a wit and an epigrammatist. His weekends were spent at Herbert's Retreat, thirty miles from New York on the east side of the Hudson, and always at Leona Harkey's, where one bedroom was sacred to him.

Now, lying in his narrow, canopied four-poster there, he stretched his stringy little arms and his long stringy neck, and yawned. Then he got out of bed, pattered over to his writing table,
and snatched up a large notebook, in which, the night before, as every night, he had recorded his impressions of the evening. The notes had been very enjoyable to write. They were copious and would be memorable. Edward Tarnac, Charles's old enemy, the one member of this river community who had ever been able to get under his skin, had returned to the Retreat after five years' absence, and he had returned a ruined man. Ruined at thirty-eight, Charles thought, with a tender side glance for his own unmarred years, which numbered fifty-four.

He pulled open the curtains. Leona's lawn, starting immediately beneath this window, slanted smoothly down to the river's edge, two hundred yards away. It was a lovely view, a sunny day, a glorious prospect, and still only ten o'clock in the morning. Charles rang for his café au lait and sat down in the great chintz-covered armchair that Leona had thoughtfully placed near the window but not so near that Charles, thinking or reading, could be seen from the garden. He still had his notebook in his hand, and he glanced at a passage here and there.

Bridie (Charles liked to refer to her as “that splendid Irishwoman of Leona's”) clumped in with the tray. The glare of pure hatred that was her characteristic expression descended in full force on Charles's silky gray head, but he was indifferent and she was silent, respectfully handing him his orange juice, pouring his coffee and his hot milk (Sye-mull-tane-eusssly, Bridie, she said to herself, the coffee and the milk sye-mull-tane-eusssly), and departing.

Sipping his coffee, he began to read over his notes, but very soon he set both coffee and notes aside and lay back in his chair, to savor—not the sweetness of this present triumph, because, after all, he had that now, but the bitterness of the long grudge he had cherished against Edward Tarnac. The grudge was partly inexplicable to him, and this intensified it. Edward had been well-to-do,
free, charming, happy, handsome, attractive, and athletic, but still, when one came right down to it, how many did not have those qualities? It was the literate, cultured, aloof fellows like himself, the true gentlemen, who were the exception. Indeed, it was curious that Edward had always succeeded so in irritating him, at times beyond endurance.

And then Tarnac had always been so self-confident, so sure that everybody liked him. Why, quite often he had even spoken to Charles as a friend, chatted with him as a friend, completely forgetting the times he had slighted Charles, the gibes, the smart little mockeries that rankled in Charles's mind and glowed there, polished daily until they had the brilliance of jewels. No more, though. This weekend would wipe all that out. Last night was almost enough. Oh, Charles thought, the satisfaction of seeing someone brought down who has been riding high! Well, Tarnac had been thoroughly humiliated, somewhere, somehow, since leaving the Retreat. That much was obvious. The apologetic air of him now, where once he had been so—cocky was the only word for what he had been. He no longer took it for granted that people liked him. Quite the other way around now. Odd, to see him and Lewis Maitland together now. They were bosom friends in the old days, and so much alike that they might have been brothers, with Edward always shining just a little the brighter. Edward had always patronized Lewis—unconsciously, perhaps, but Lewis had felt it. Charles had seen to that. Now the shoe was on the other foot.

Oh, I'm not the only one enjoying this weekend, Charles thought. Whether Lewis knew it or not, he must have been waiting for the opportunity for years. And then to run into Edward on the street like that was sheer good luck. And apparently Edward was delighted to come up for the weekend. Thinking we'd all be glad to see him. The appalling nerve some people have.

I would never have done that, Charles thought, smiling a grim, happy little smile. I would never have come back. As long as he stayed away, we couldn't be sure what had become of him, no matter what reports we heard. But now! It's an object lesson, he thought, and, suddenly anxious for talk, for the delicious rehashing of last night's scene, he bounded to his feet, dashed into his shower, and emerged, clean and shiny, to select from his wardrobe a pair of brown Bermuda shorts, beautifully cut, and a beige wool shirt. He buttoned the cuffs of the shirt, knotted a beige-and-brown silk scarf carefully around his neck, put on a pair of knee-length beige socks and brown sandals, and, opening a door in the side wall of his room, stepped onto an outdoor staircase that curved to bring him, as he hopped lightly from the bottom step onto the grass, in face with the river.

There was Leona, coming out of the kitchen door and talking animatedly to Bridie. Her Bermuda shorts were of red linen, and her navy-blue wool shirt was open at the throat and rolled to her elbows. She paused to strap on her wristwatch, and then, seeing Charles, she smiled brilliantly and hurried to take his arm.

Leona's lawn was as wide as her house, and its green velvet expanse was unbroken except for two statues—one of a white marble woman, which stood far to the right and about a third of the way down, and another, much nearer the river and on the left, of a gray stone clown who raised his sad grin to the heavens. On each side, the lawn was bounded by a high, dense wall of old trees, old hedge, old thicket, all sorts of old greenery—uncared-for now and growing wild but still putting forth fresh leaves and new shoots—that shielded Leona's domain from the view of the neighboring houses, although their white stone walls, glittering in the sunlight like her own, sometimes showed a flash of brightness through a break in the foliage. The house on the right belonged to Lewis
and Dolly Maitland, Leona's closest friends—except, of course, for Charles, who, in addition to being her dearest companion, was her lion, her literary light, and also, although she did not say this, her claim to distinction in the community.

Leona was tall and slim, with a halo of cloudy black hair that swept becomingly around a face crowded with unformed features. Surely, one thought, the nose would grow larger, or the mouth would settle, or a bone would show itself on one cheek, at least. Even the eyes seemed to have been left unfinished. Brown, they should have been a shade lighter or a shade darker. “My mysterious Leona,” Charles called her. “Mysterious, dreaming, romantic Leona.”

Walking arm in arm to the river, they did not speak, Leona because she was always careful to discover Charles's mood before conversation, and Charles because he didn't want to get to the subject closest to his heart before he was comfortably settled in a chair.

From the house, two pairs of eyes watched them. Through the kitchen window, the beady Irish eyes of Bridie followed their movements with malevolent attention, and from the window of the second-floor bedroom he shared with Leona, George Harkey, who had just got out of bed, watched his wife and Charles Runyon with a muffled brown gaze in which curiosity and resentment struggled for supremacy with a very bad hangover.

Charles walked rather stiffly, perhaps because he missed the comforting concealment of a jacket, and from the back his small, shapely figure wagged more than a little. Leona's shorts gave to her slow and sinuous prance a very curious effect, as though with every step she was on the verge of sitting down hard, but she continued fairly upright, flirting her cigarette, until they reached the lawn's edge. There, where the ground fell steeply to the river, Leona's latest improvement was now, after months of talk and effort, ready to be enjoyed. Just below the level of the lawn but well
above water level she had built a wooden deck, six feet wide and running the whole width of the lawn, with a low railing around it. This was not a jetty, for Leona disliked sailing. This was purely a deck. It was painted a very pale blue, and furnished for lounging, with red canvas sling chairs and tables of black wrought iron. It was a delightful spot, private, uncluttered, Leona's realization of the perfect boat, on which she could ride the restless waters of the river while remaining safely anchored not merely to the land but to her own lawn.

“The deck is really charming,” Charles said, lowering himself into a chair, but his tone was perfunctory.

“Wasn't it clever of me to have it built so low, so that it doesn't interfere with the view from the house at all. Even from the upstairs windows you simply can't see it, unless you know it's here.”

She would have gone on, for the house—the frame and expression of her personality—interested her endlessly, but Charles, with a brisk nod, stopped her. He lit a cigarette, threw away the match, snuggled back in his chair, and looked her straight in the eye. “Well, Leona,” he said, “and what do you think of our friend Tarnac now? Quite a revealing evening we had last night, eh?”

They had already discussed the evening at length, and at double length, before they went to bed, but realizing that Charles wanted every detail of it recalled, and herself eager to savor it all again, Leona said, “Oh, Charles, isn't it appalling to see a man so shattered? And in such a short space of time. Why, you know, Charles, I walked into Dolly's living room last night and I simply didn't know him. I actually didn't recognize him. He was standing over by the fireplace with Lewis, and I looked at him, and I looked at Lewis, and I said, ‘Where's Edward?' ”

“I know, darling, we all heard you.”

“And then, of course, I was so overcome when I saw who it was
that I simply lost my head.”

“I'm afraid you were very cruel, Leona.”

“I didn't mean to be cruel. You know I'm never intentionally cruel. Besides, what you said was much, much worse, and you didn't even have my excuse of being flustered. No, you were perfectly cold-blooded. You waited till we were all settled with our drinks, and everything was all smooth and lovely, and then—Oh, Charles, it was perfectly killing. I'll never forget how funny you looked, peering around the room until Dolly was driven to ask you what was wrong, and you said, ‘I'm looking for Edward's pretty girl. Isn't she coming down?' ”

She paused to laugh at the recollection, and Charles neighed softly.

“And then Edward said, ‘What pretty girl?' and you said, ‘Why, surely you're not up here alone, Edward. Why, Edward Tarnac without a pretty girl is only half the picture.' ”

“That stung,” Charles said with satisfaction.

“You know, Charles, I was quite worried for you. If you'd said that to him five years ago he'd have thrown his drink at you.”

“But that was five years ago, wasn't it? And instead of throwing his drink he swallowed it, didn't he? Oh, he's learned what's what, these last few years. He's learned his lesson, all right. And then, of course, your poor George had to put his foot in it.”

“Oh, poor George is such a fool, Charles. Not a glimmer of social sense. Instead of letting it drop then, he had to pipe up, ‘And why shouldn't he come up alone if he wants to?' And naturally that set you off again.”

“Well, really, what could I do? George has such a sagging effect on conversation, don't you think? And of course, being a newcomer, he couldn't be expected to know how things were. Obviously I had to tell him what we all know—that Edward's appearance in solitary, as it were, showed how greatly he had changed.”