VI
The summer passed. Jacob went about his useless life, sustained by the knowledge that Jenny was coming East in the fall. By fall there would have been many Raffinos, he supposed, and she would find that the thrill of their hands and eyes—and lips—was much the same. They were the equivalent, in a different world, of the affairs at a college house party, the undergraduates of a casual summer. And if it was still true that her feeling for him was less than romantic, then he would take her anyway, letting romance come after marriage as—so he had always heard—it had come to many wives before.
Her letters fascinated and baffled him. Through the ineptitude of expression he caught gleams of emotion—an ever-present gratitude, a longing to talk to him, and a quick, almost frightened reaction toward him, from—he could only imagine—some other man. In August she went on location; there were only post cards from some lost desert in Arizona, then for a while nothing at all. He was glad of the break. He had thought over all the things that might have repelled her—of his portentousness, his jealousy, his manifest misery. This time it would be different. He would keep control of the situation. She would at least admire him again, see in him the incomparably dignified and well adjusted life.
Two nights before her arrival Jacob went to see her latest picture in a huge nightbound vault on Broadway. It was a college story. She walked into it with her hair knotted on the crown of her head—a familiar symbol for dowdiness—inspired the hero to a feat of athletic success and faded out of it, always subsidiary to him, in the shadow of the cheering stands. But there was something new in her performance; for the first time the arresting quality he had noticed in her voice a year before had begun to get over on the screen. Every move she made, every gesture, was poignant and important. Others in the audience saw it too. He fancied he could tell this by some change in the quality of their breathing, by a reflection of her clear, precise expression in their casual and indifferent faces. Reviewers, too, were aware of it, though most of them were incapable of any precise definition of a personality.
But his first real consciousness of her public existence came from the attitude of her fellow passengers disembarking from the train. Busy as they were with friends or baggage, they found time to stare at her, to call their friends’ attention, to repeat her name.
She was radiant. A communicative joy flowed from her and around her, as though her perfumer had managed to imprison ecstasy in a bottle. Once again there was a mystical transfusion, and blood began to course again through the hard veins of New York—there was the pleasure of Jacob’s chauffeur when she remembered him, the respectful frisking of the bell boys at the Plaza, the nervous collapse of the head waiter at the restaurant where they dined. As for Jacob, he had control of himself now. He was gentle, considerate and polite, as it was natural for him to be—but as, in this case, he had found it necessary to plan. His manner promised and outlined an ability to take care of her, a will to be leaned on.
After dinner, their corner of the restaurant cleared gradually of the theater crowd and the sense of being alone settled over them. Their faces became grave, their voices very quiet.
“It’s been five months since I saw you.” He looked down at his hands thoughtfully. “Nothing has changed with me, Jenny. I love you with all my heart. I love your face and your faults and your mind and everything about you. The one thing I want in this world is to make you happy.”
“I know,” she whispered. “Gosh, I know!”
“Whether there’s still only affection in your feeling toward me, I don’t know. If you’ll marry me, I think you’ll find that the other things will come, will be there before you know it—and what you called a thrill will seem a joke to you, because life isn’t for boys and girls, Jenny, but for men and women.”
“Jacob,” she whispered, “you don’t have to tell me. I know.”
He raised his eyes for the first time. “What do you mean—you know?”
“I get what you mean. Oh, this is terrible! Jacob, listen! I want to tell you. Listen, dear, don’t say anything. Don’t look at me. Listen, Jacob, I fell in love with a man.”
“What?” he asked blankly.
“I fell in love with somebody. That’s what I mean about understanding about a silly thrill.”
“You mean you’re in love with me?”
“No.”
The appalling monosyllable floated between them, danced and vibrated over the table: “No—no—no—no—no!”
“Oh, this is awful!” she cried. “I fell in love with a man I met on location this summer. I didn’t mean to—I tried not to, but first thing I knew there I was in love and all the wishing in the world couldn’t help it. I wrote you and asked you to come, but I didn’t send the letter, and there I was, crazy about this man and not daring to speak to him, and bawling myself to sleep every night.”
“An actor?” he heard himself saying in a dead voice. “Raffino?”
“Oh, no, no, no! Wait a minute, let me tell you. It went on for three weeks and I honestly wanted to kill myself, Jake. Life wasn’t worth while unless I could have him. And one night we got in a car by accident alone and he just caught me and made me tell him I loved him. He knew—he couldn’t help knowing.”
“It just—swept over you,” said Jacob steadily. “I see.”
“Oh, I knew you’d understand, Jake! You understand everything. You’re the best person in the world, Jake, and don’t I know it?”
“You’re going to marry him?”
Slowly she nodded her head. “I said I’d have to come East first and see you.” As her fear lessened, the extent of his grief became more apparent to her and her eyes filled with tears. “It only comes once, Jake, like that. That’s what kept in my mind all those weeks I didn’t hardly speak to him—if you lose it once, it’ll never come like that again and then what do you want to live for? He was directing the picture—he was the same about me.”
“I see.”
As once before, her eyes held his like hands. “Oh, Ja‑a‑ake!” In that sudden croon of compassion, all-comprehending and deep as a song, the first force of the shock passed off. Jacob’s teeth came together again and he struggled to conceal his misery. Mustering his features into an expression of irony, he called for the check. It seemed an hour later they were in a taxi going toward the Plaza Hotel.
She clung to him. “Oh, Jake, say it’s all right! Say you understand! Darling Jake, my best friend, my only friend, say you understand!”
“Of course I do, Jenny.” His hand patted her back automatically.
“Oh‑h‑h, Jake, you feel just awful, don’t you?”
“I’ll survive.”
“Oh‑h‑h, Jake!”
They reached the hotel. Before they got out Jenny glanced at her face in her vanity mirror and turned up the collar of her fur cape. In the lobby, Jacob ran into several people and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” in a strained, unconvincing voice. The elevator waited. Jenny, her face distraught and tearful, stepped in and held out her hand toward him with the fist clenched helplessly.
“Jake,” she said once more.
“Good night, Jenny.”
She turned her face to the wire wall of the cage. The gate clanged.
“Hold on!” he almost said. “Do you realize what you’re doing, starting that car like that?”
He turned and went out the door blindly. “I’ve lost her,” he whispered to himself, awed and frightened. “I’ve lost her!”
He walked over Fifty-ninth Street to Columbus Circle and then down Broadway. There were no cigarettes in his pocket—he had left them at the restaurant—so he went into a tobacco store. There was some confusion about the change and someone in the store laughed.
When he came out he stood for a moment puzzled. Then the heavy tide of realization swept over him and beyond him, leaving him stunned and exhausted. It swept back upon him and over him again. As one rereads a tragic story with the defiant hope that it will end differently, so he went back to the morning, to the beginning, to the previous year. But the tide came thundering back with the certainty that she was cut off from him forever in a high room at the Plaza Hotel.
He walked down Broadway. In great block letters over the porte-cochère of the Capitol Theater five words glittered out into the night: “Carl Barbour and Jenny Prince.”
The name startled him, as if a passerby had spoken it. He stopped and stared. Other eyes rose to that sign, people hurried by him and turned in.
Jenny Prince.
Now that she no longer belonged to him, the name assumed a significance entirely its own.
It hung there, cool and impervious, in the night, a challenge, a defiance.
Jenny Prince.
“Come and rest upon my loveliness,” it said. “Fulfill your secret dreams in wedding me for an hour.”
Jenny Prince.
It was untrue—she was back at the Plaza Hotel, in love with somebody. But the name, with its bright insistence, rode high upon the night.
“I love my dear public. They are all so sweet to me.”
The wave appeared far off, sent up whitecaps, rolled toward him with the might of pain, washed over him. “Never any more. Never any more.” The wave beat upon him, drove him down, pounding with hammers of agony on his ears. Proud and impervious, the name on high challenged the night.
Jenny Prince.
She was there! All of her, the best of her—the effort, the power, the triumph, the beauty.
Jacob moved forward with a group and bought a ticket at the window.
Confused, he stared around the great lobby. Then he saw an entrance and walking in, found himself a place in the fast-throbbing darkness.