I
Martin did not see Joyce Lanyon for weeks after his return to New York. Once she invited him to dinner, but he could not come, and he did not hear from her again.
His absorption in osmotic pressure determinations did not content him when he sat in his prim hotel room and was reduced from Dr. Arrowsmith to a man who had no one to talk to. He remembered how they had sat by the lagoon in the tepid twilight; he telephoned asking whether he might come in for tea.
He knew in an unformulated way that Joyce was rich, but after seeing her in gingham, cooking in the kitchen of St. Swithin’s almshouse, he did not grasp her position; and he was uncomfortable when, feeling dusty from the laboratory, he came to her great house and found her the soft-voiced mistress of many servants. Hers was a palace, and palaces, whether they are such very little ones as Joyce’s, with its eighteen rooms, or Buckingham or vast Fontainebleau, are all alike; they are choked with the superfluities of pride, they are so complete that one does not remember small endearing charms, they are indistinguishable in their common feeling of polite and uneasy grandeur, they are therefore altogether tedious.
But amid the pretentious splendor which Roger Lanyon had accumulated, Joyce was not tedious. It is to be suspected that she enjoyed showing Martin what she really was, by producing footmen and too many kinds of sandwiches, and by boasting, “Oh, I never do know what they’re going to give me for tea.”
But she had welcomed him, crying, “You look so much better. I’m frightfully glad. Are you still my brother? I was a good cook at the almshouse, wasn’t I!”
Had he been suave then and witty, she would not have been greatly interested. She knew too many men who were witty and well-bred, ivory smooth and competent to help her spend the four or five million dollars with which she was burdened. But Martin was at once a scholar who made osmotic pressure determinations almost interesting, a taut swift man whom she could fancy running or making love, and a lonely youngster who naively believed that here in her soft security she was still the girl who had sat with him by the lagoon, still the courageous woman who had come to him in a drunken room at Blackwater.
Joyce Lanyon knew how to make men talk. Thanks more to her than to his own articulateness, he made living the Institute, the members, their feuds, and the drama of coursing on the trail of a discovery.
Her easy life here had seemed tasteless after the risks of St. Hubert, and in his contempt for ease and rewards she found exhilaration.
He came now and then to tea, to dinner; he learned the ways of her house, her servants, the more nearly intelligent of her friends. He liked—and possibly he was liked by—some of them. With one friend of hers Martin had a state of undeclared war. This was Latham Ireland, an achingly well-dressed man of fifty, a competent lawyer who was fond of standing in front of fireplaces and being quietly clever. He fascinated Joyce by telling her that she was subtle, then telling her what she was being subtle about.
Martin hated him.
In midsummer Martin was invited for a weekend at Joyce’s vast blossom-hid country house at Greenwich. She was half apologetic for its luxury; he was altogether unhappy.
The strain of considering clothes; of galloping out to buy white trousers when he wanted to watch the test-tubes in the constant-temperature bath, of trying to look easy in the limousine which met him at the station, and of deciding which servants to tip and how much and when, was dismaying to a simple man. He felt rustic when, after he had blurted, “Just a minute till I go up and unpack my suitcase,” she said gently, “Oh, that will have been done for you.”
He discovered that a valet had laid out for him to put on, that first evening, all the small store of underclothes he had brought, and had squeezed out on his brush a ribbon of toothpaste.
He sat on the edge of his bed, groaning, “This is too rich for my blood!”
He hated and feared that valet, who kept stealing his clothes, putting them in places where they could not be found, then popping in menacingly when Martin was sneaking about the enormous room looking for them.
But his chief unhappiness was that there was nothing to do. He had no sport but tennis, at which he was too rusty to play with these chattering unidentified people who filled the house and, apparently with perfect willingness, worked at golf and bridge. He had met but few of the friends of whom they talked. They said, “You know dear old R. G.,” and he said, “Oh, yes,” but he never did know dear old R. G.
Joyce was as busily amiable as when they were alone at tea, and she found for him a weedy flapper whose tennis was worse than his own, but she had twenty guests—forty at Sunday lunch—and he gave up certain agreeable notions of walking with her in fresh lanes and, after excitedly saying this and that, perhaps kissing her. He had one moment with her. As he was going, she ordered, “Come here, Martin,” and led him apart.
“You haven’t really enjoyed it.”
“Why, sure, course I—”
“Of course you haven’t! And you despise us, rather, and perhaps you’re partly right. I do like pretty people and gracious manners and good games, but I suppose they seem piffling after nights in a laboratory.”
“No, I like ’em too. In a way. I like to look at beautiful women—at you! But—Oh, darn it, Joyce, I’m not up to it. I’ve always been poor and horribly busy. I haven’t learned your games.”
“But, Martin, you could, with the intensity you put into everything.”
“Even getting drunk in Blackwater!”
“And I hope in New York, too! Dear Roger, he did have such an innocent, satisfying time getting drunk at class-dinners! But I mean: if you went at it, you could play bridge and golf—and talking—better than any of them. If you only knew how frightfully recent most of the ducal class in America are! And Martin: wouldn’t it be good for you? Wouldn’t you work all the better if you got away from your logarithmic tables now and then? And are you going to admit there’s anything you can’t conquer?”
“No, I—”
“Will you come to dinner on Tuesday week, just us two, and we’ll fight it out?”
“Be glad to.”
For a number of hours, on the train to Terry Wickett’s vacation place in the Vermont hills, Martin was convinced that he loved Joyce Lanyon, and that he was going to attack the art of being amusing as he had attacked physical chemistry. Ardently, and quite humorlessly, as he sat stiffly in a stale Pullman chaircar with his feet up on his suitcase, he pictured himself wearing a club-tie (presumably first acquiring the tie and the club), playing golf in plus-fours, and being entertaining about dear old R. G. and incredibly witty about dear old Latham Ireland’s aged Rolls-Royce.
But these ambitions he forgot as he came to Terry’s proud proprietary shanty, by a lake among oaks and maples, and heard Terry’s real theories of the decomposition of quinine derivatives.
Being perhaps the least sentimental of human beings, Terry had named his place “Birdies’ Rest.” He owned five acres of woodland, two miles from a railroad station. His shanty was a two-room affair of logs, with bunks for beds and oilcloth for table-linen.
“Here’s the layout, Slim,” said Terry. “Some day I’m going to figure out a way of making a lab here pay, by manufacturing sera or something, and I’ll put up a couple more buildings on the flat by the lake, and have one absolutely independent place for science—two hours a day on the commercial end, and say about six for sleeping and a couple for feeding and telling dirty stories. That leaves—two and six and two make ten, if I’m any authority on higher math—that leaves fourteen hours a day for research (except when you got something special on), with no Director and no Society patrons and no Trustees that you’ve got to satisfy by making fool reports. Of course there won’t be any scientific dinners with ladies in candy-box dresses, but I figure we’ll be able to afford plenty of salt pork and corncob pipes, and your bed will be made perfectly—if you make it yourself. Huh? Lez go and have a swim.”
Martin returned to New York with the not very compatible plans of being the best-dressed golfer in Greenwich and of cooking beef-stew with Terry at Birdies’ Rest.
But the first of these was the more novel to him.