Manslaughter/Chapter 5

HEN Lydia came back from the Emmonses late Monday afternoon she brought Bobby Dorset with her. Miss Bennett, who was arranging Morson's vases of flowers according to her more fastidious ideas, heard them come in, as noisy and high-spirited, she thought, as a couple of puppies. Lydia was so busy giving orders to have Bobby's room got ready and to have Eleanor telephoned to come over to dinner in case they wanted to play bridge, and sending the car for her, because Eleanor was so near-sighted she couldn't drive herself, and always let her chauffeur go home, and he had no telephone—so incompetent of Eleanor—that Miss Bennett had no chance to exchange a word with her. Besides, the poor lady was taken up with the horror of the approaching bridge game. She liked a mild rubber now and then, but not with Lydia, who scolded her after each hand, remembering every play.

Lydia, who was almost without physical or moral timidity, was always fighting against a subconscious horror, a repulsion rather than a fear, that life was just a futile, gigantic, patternless confusion, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, which is the horror of all materialists. When she walked into her bedroom and found her things laid out just as usual, and a new maid—a Frenchwoman, brown and middle-aged and competent—waiting for her, just as Evans had waited, one of her moods of deep depression engulfed her, just as those who fear death are sometimes brought to a realization of its approach by some everyday symbol. Lydia did not fear death, but sometimes she hated life. She never asked if it were her own relation to life that was unsatisfactory.

When she came downstairs in a tea gown of orange and brown chiffon no one but Bobby noticed that her high spirits had all evaporated.

At table, before Morson and the footman, no one mentioned the subject of the robbery, but when they were back in the drawing-room Miss Bennett introduced it by asking: "Did the new woman hook you up right? Will she do, dear?"

Lydia shrugged her shoulders, not stopping to think that Miss Bennett had spent one whole day in intelligence offices and a morning on the telephone in her effort to replace Evans.

The older woman was silenced by the shrug—not hurt, but disappointed—and in the silence Bobby said: "Oh, what happened about Evans? They took her away?"

Lydia answered, with a contemptuous raising of her chin, "She confessed—she always was a goose."

"That didn't prove it," returned Miss Bennett with spirit. "It was the wisest thing to do. The district attorney—my dear girls, if I were your age, and that man"

"Look out!" said Lydia. "He's a great friend of Eleanor's."

"Of Eleanor?" exclaimed Miss Bennett. She was not and never had been a vain woman, but she was always astonished at men caring for a type of femininity different from her own. She liked Eleanor, but she thought her dry and unattractive, and she didn't see what a brilliant, handsome creature like O'Bannon could see in her. "Is he, really?"

"Yes, he is," said Eleanor coolly. Experience had taught her an excellent manner in this situation.

"I wish you had waited, Lydia," Miss Bennett went on. "It was very impressive the way he managed Evans, almost like a hypnotic influence. She told him everything. She seemed to give herself over into his hands. It was almost like a miracle. A moment before she had been so hostile—a miracle taking place right there in Lydia's bedroom."

Lydia, who had been bending over reorganizing the fire, suddenly straightened up with the poker in her hand and said quickly, "Where? Taking place where?"

"In your room, dear. Evans was shut up there."

"That man in my room!" said Lydia, and her whole face seemed to blaze with anger.

"It never occurred to me that you would object, my dear. He said he"

"It should have occurred to you. I hate the idea—that drunken attorney in my bedroom. It's not decent!"

"Lydia!" said Miss Bennett.

Eleanor spoke in a voice as cold as steel.

"What do you mean by calling Mr. O'Bannon a drunken attorney?"

"He drinks—Bobby says so."

"I did not say so!"

"Why, Bobby, you did!"

"I said he used to drink when he was in college."

"Oh, well, a reformed drunkard," said Lydia, shrugging her shoulders. "I can't imagine your doing such a thing, Benny, except that you always do anything that anyone asks you to do."

Her tone was more insulting than her words, and Miss Bennett did the most sensible thing she could think of—she got up and left the room. Lydia stood on the hearthrug, tapping her foot, breathing quickly, her jaw set.

"I think Bennett's losing her mind," she said.

"I think you are," said Eleanor. "What possible difference does it make?"

"You say that because you're crazy about this man. Perhaps if I were in love with him I'd lose all my sense of delicacy too; but as it is"

Eleanor got up.

"I think I'll take my lack of delicacy home," she said. "Tell Morson to send for the motor, will you, Bobby? Good night Lydia. I've had a perfectly horrid evening."

"Good night," said Lydia with a fierce little beck of her head.

Bobby saw Eleanor to the car, and sat with her some time in the hall while it was being brought round.

"No one could blame you for being furious; but you're not angry at her, are you, Eleanor?" he said.

"Of course I'm angry!" answered Eleanor. "She's too impossible, Bobby. You can't keep on with people who let you in for this sort of thing. I could have had a perfectly pleasant evening at home—and to come out for a row like this!"

"She doesn't do it often."

"Often! No, there wouldn't be any question then."

"She's been perfectly charming at the Emmonses'—gay and friendly, and everyone crazy about her. And by the way, Eleanor, I didn't say O'Bannon was a drunkard."

"Of course you didn't," said Eleanor.

"But he used to go on the most smashing sprees in college, and I told her about one of those and made her promise not to tell."

"A lot that would influence Lydia."

The car was at the door now, and as he put her into it he asked, "Oh, don't you feel so sorry for her sometimes that you could almost weep over her?"

"I certainly do not!" said Eleanor.

Turning from the front door, Bobby ran upstairs and knocked at Miss Bennett's door. He found her sunk in an enormous chair, looking very pathetic and more like an unhappy child than a middle-aged woman.

"It isn't bearable," she said. "Life under these conditions is too disagreeable. I don't complain of her never noticing all the little sacrifices one makes—all the trouble one takes for her sake. But when she's absolutely rude—just vulgarly, grossly rude as she was this evening"

"Miss Bennett," said Bobby seriously, "when things go wrong with women they cry, and when things go wrong with men they swear. Lydia takes a little from both sexes. These outbursts are her equivalent for feminine tears or masculine profanity."

Miss Bennett looked up at him with her starlike eyes shining with emotion.

"But someone must teach her that she can't behave like that. I can't do it. I can only teach by being kind—endlessly kind—and she can't learn from that. So the best thing for both of us is for me to leave her and let someone else try."

Bobby sat down and took her thin aristocratic hand in both of his.

"No one can teach her, dear Benny," he said. "But life can—and will. That's my particular nightmare—that people like Lydia get broken by life—and it's always such a smash. That's why I'm content to stand by without, as most of my friends think, due regard for my own self-respect. That's why I do hope you'll contrive to. That's why she seems to me the most pathetic person I know. She almost makes me cry."

"Pathetic!" said Miss Bennett with something approaching a snort.

"Yes, like a child playing with a dynamite fuse. Even to-night she seemed to me pathetic. She can't afford to alienate the few people who really care for her—you and Eleanor and—well, of course, she won't alienate me, whatever she does."

"But she takes advantage of our affection," said Miss Bennett.

Bobby stood up.

"You bet she does!" he said. "She'll have something bitter waiting for me now when I go down, something she'll have forgotten by to-morrow and I'll remember as long as I live."

He smiled perfectly gayly and left the room. He found Lydia strolling about the drawing-room, softly whistling to herself.

"Well," she said, "my party seems to have broken up early."

"Broken's the word," answered Bobby.

"Isn't Eleanor absurd?" said Lydia. "She loves so to be superior—'Order my carriage'—like the virtuous duchess in a melodrama."

"She doesn't seem absurd to me," said Bobby.

"Oh, you've been tiptoeing about binding up everybody's wounds, I suppose," she answered. "Did you tell them that you knew I didn't mean a word I said? Ah, yes, I see you did. Well, I did mean every single word, and more. Upon my word, I wish you'd mind your own business, Bobby."

"I will," said Bobby, and got up and left the room.

He went out and walked quickly up and down the flat stones under the grape arbor. The moon was not up, and the stars twinkled fiercely in the crisp cool air. He thought of other women—lovelier and kinder than Lydia. What kept him in this bondage to her? All the time he was asking the question he was aware of her image in her orange tea gown against the dark woodwork of the room, and suddenly, before he knew it—certainly before he had made any resolve to return—he was back in the doorway, saying,

"Would you like to play a game of piquet?"

She nodded, and they sat down at the card table. Bobby's faint resentment had gone in ten minutes, but it was longer before Lydia, laying down her cards, said, as if they had just been talking about her misdeeds instead of merely thinking about them, "But Benny is awfully obstinate, isn't she? I mean the way she goes on doing things the way she thinks I ought to like them instead of finding out the way I do like."

"She's very sweet—Benny is."

"And that's just what makes everyone think me so terrible—the contrast. She's sweet, but she wants her own way just the same. Whereas I"

"You don't want your own way, Lydia?"

They nearly fought it out all over again. This time it was Lydia who stopped the discussion with a sudden change of manner.

"The truth is, Bobby," she said with an unexpected gentleness, "that I feel dreadfully about Evans. You don't know how fond you get of a person who's about you all the time like that."

"Horrid that they'll rob you, isn't it?"

"Yes." Lydia stared thoughtfully before her. "I think what I mind most is that she wouldn't tell me—kept denying it, as if I were her enemy—and then in the first second she confessed to the district attorney."

"Oh, well, that's his profession."

She seemed to think profoundly, and her next sentence surprised him.

"Do you think there's anything really between him and Eleanor? I couldn't bear to have Eleanor marry a man like that."

Bobby, trying to be tactful, answered that he was sure Eleanor wouldn't, but as often happens to consciously tactful people, he failed to please.

"Oh," said Lydia, "you mean that you think he's crazy about her?"

"Mercy, no!" said Bobby. "I shouldn't think Eleanor was his type at all, except perhaps as a friend. It's the chorus-girl type that really stirs him."

"Oh, is it?" said Lydia, and took up the cards again.

They played two hours, and the game calmed her but could not save her from the blackness of her mood. It came upon her, as it always did if it were coming, a few minutes after she had got into bed, turned out her light and had begun to discover that sleep was not close at hand. Life seemed to her all effort without purpose. She felt like a martyr at the stake; only she had no vision to bear her company. She felt her loneliness to be not the result of anything she said or did, but inevitable. There seemed to be nothing in the universe but chaos and herself.

She turned on her light again and read until almost morning. Nights like this were not unusual with Lydia.