VI.
SUSY found Strefford, after his first burst of nonsense, unusually kindand responsive. The interest he showed in her future and Nick's seemedto proceed not so much from his habitual spirit of scientific curiosityas from simple friendliness. He was privileged to see Nick's firstchapter, of which he formed so favourable an impression that he spokesternly to Susy on the importance of respecting her husband's workinghours; and he even carried his general benevolence to the lengthof showing a fatherly interest in Clarissa Vanderlyn. He was alwayscharming to children, but fitfully and warily, with an eye on hisindependence, and on the possibility of being suddenly bored by them;Susy had never seen him abandon these precautions so completely as hedid with Clarissa.
"Poor little devil! Who looks after her when you and Nick are offtogether? Do you mean to tell me Ellie sacked the governess and wentaway without having anyone to take her place?"
"I think she expected me to do it," said Susy with a touch of asperity.There were moments when her duty to Clarissa weighed on her somewhatheavily; whenever she went off alone with Nick she was pursued by thevision of a little figure waving wistful farewells from the balcony.
"Ah, that's like Ellie: you might have known she'd get an equivalentwhen she lent you all this. But I don't believe she thought you'd be soconscientious about it."
Susy considered. "I don't suppose she did; and perhaps I shouldn't havebeen, a year ago. But you see"--she hesitated--"Nick's so awfully good:it's made me look; at a lot of things differently...."
"Oh, hang Nick's goodness! It's happiness that's done it, my dear.You're just one of the people with whom it happens to agree."
Susy, leaning back, scrutinized between her lashes his crooked ironicface.
"What is it that's agreeing with you, Streffy? I've never seen you sohuman. You must be getting an outrageous price for the villa."
Strefford laughed and clapped his hand on his breast-pocket. "I shouldbe an ass not to: I've got a wire here saying they must have it foranother month at any price."
"What luck! I'm so glad. Who are they, by the way?"
He drew himself up out of the long chair in which he was disjointedlylounging, and looked down at her with a smile. "Another couple oflove-sick idiots like you and Nick.... I say, before I spend it alllet's go out and buy something ripping for Clarissa."
The days passed so quickly and radiantly that, but for her concernfor Clarissa, Susy would hardly have been conscious of her hostess'sprotracted absence. Mrs. Vanderlyn had said: "Four weeks at the latest,"and the four weeks were over, and she had neither arrived nor writtento explain her non-appearance. She had, in fact, given no sign of lifesince her departure, save in the shape of a post-card which hadreached Clarissa the day after the Lansings' arrival, and in which Mrs.Vanderlyn instructed her child to be awfully good, and not to forgetto feed the mongoose. Susy noticed that this missive had been posted inMilan.
She communicated her apprehensions to Strefford. "I don't trustthat green-eyed nurse. She's forever with the younger gondolier; andClarissa's so awfully sharp. I don't see why Ellie hasn't come: she wasdue last Monday."
Her companion laughed, and something in the sound of his laugh suggestedthat he probably knew as much of Ellie's movements as she did, if notmore. The sense of disgust which the subject always roused in her madeher look away quickly from his tolerant smile. She would have giventhe world, at that moment, to have been free to tell Nick what she hadlearned on the night of their arrival, and then to have gone away withhim, no matter where. But there was Clarissa--!
To fortify herself against the temptation, she resolutely fixed herthoughts on her husband. Of Nick's beatitude there could be no doubt.He adored her, he revelled in Venice, he rejoiced in his work; andconcerning the quality of that work her judgment was as confident asher heart. She still doubted if he would ever earn a living by whathe wrote, but she no longer doubted that he would write somethingremarkable. The mere fact that he was engaged on a philosophic romance,and not a mere novel, seemed the proof of an intrinsic superiority. Andif she had mistrusted her impartiality Strefford's approval would havereassured her. Among their friends Strefford passed as an authority onsuch matters: in summing him up his eulogists always added: "And youknow he writes." As a matter of fact, the paying public had remainedcold to his few published pages; but he lived among the kind of peoplewho confuse taste with talent, and are impressed by the most artlessattempts at literary expression; and though he affected to disdain theirjudgment, and his own efforts, Susy knew he was not sorry to have itsaid of him: "Oh, if only Streffy had chosen--!"
Strefford's approval of the philosophic romance convinced her that ithad been worth while staying in Venice for Nick's sake; and ifonly Ellie would come back, and carry off Clarissa to St. Moritz orDeauville, the disagreeable episode on which their happiness was basedwould vanish like a cloud, and leave them to complete enjoyment.
Ellie did not come; but the Mortimer Hickses did, and Nick Lansing wasassailed by the scruples his wife had foreseen. Strefford, coming backone evening from the Lido, reported having recognized the huge outlineof the Ibis among the pleasure craft of the outer harbour; and the verynext evening, as the guests of Palazzo Vanderlyn were sipping their icesat Florian's, the Hickses loomed up across the Piazza.
Susy pleaded in vain with her husband in defence of his privacy."Remember you're here to write, dearest; it's your duty not to let anyone interfere with that. Why shouldn't we tell them we're just leaving!"
"Because it's no use: we're sure to be always meeting them. And besides,I'll be hanged if I'm going to shirk the Hickses. I spent five wholemonths on the Ibis, and if they bored me occasionally, India didn't."
"We'll make them take us to Aquileia anyhow," said Streffordphilosophically; and the next moment the Hickses were bearing down onthe defenceless trio.
They presented a formidable front, not only because of their merephysical bulk--Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were equally and majesticallythree-dimensional--but because they never moved abroad without theescort of two private secretaries (one for the foreign languages), Mr.Hicks's doctor, a maiden lady known as Eldoradder Tooker, who was Mrs.Hicks's cousin and stenographer, and finally their daughter, CoralHicks.
Coral Hicks, when Susy had last encountered the party, had been afat spectacled school-girl, always lagging behind her parents, with areluctant poodle in her wake. Now the poodle had gone, and his mistressled the procession. The fat school-girl had changed into a young ladyof compact if not graceful outline; a long-handled eyeglass had replacedthe spectacles, and through it, instead of a sullen glare, Miss CoralHicks projected on the world a glance at once confident and critical.She looked so strong and so assured that Susy, taking her measure ina flash, saw that her position at the head of the procession was notfortuitous, and murmured inwardly: "Thank goodness she's not prettytoo!"
If she was not pretty, she was well-dressed; and if she wasovereducated, she seemed capable, as Strefford had suggested, ofcarrying off even this crowning disadvantage. At any rate, she was abovedisguising it; and before the whole party had been seated five minutesin front of a fresh supply of ices (with Eldorada and the secretariesat a table slightly in the background) she had taken up with Nick thequestion of exploration in Mesopotamia.
"Queer child, Coral," he said to Susy that night as they smoked a lastcigarette on their balcony. "She told me this afternoon that she'dremembered lots of things she heard me say in India. I thought at thetime that she cared only for caramels and picture-puzzles, but it seemsshe was listening to everything, and reading all the books she could layher hands on; and she got so bitten with Oriental archaeology that shetook a course last year at Bryn Mawr. She means to go to Bagdad nextspring, and back by the Persian plateau and Turkestan."
Susy laughed luxuriously: she was sitting with her hand in Nick's, whilethe late moon--theirs again--rounded its orange-coloured glory above thebelfry of San Giorgio.
"Poor Coral! How dreary--" Susy murmured
"Dreary?
Why? A trip like that is about as well worth doing as anythingI know."
"Oh, I meant: dreary to do it without you or me," she laughed, getting uplazily to go indoors. A broad band of moonlight, dividing her room ontotwo shadowy halves, lay on the painted Venetian bed with its folded-backsheet, its old damask coverlet and lace-edged pillows. She felt thewarmth of Nick's enfolding arm and lifted her face to his.
The Hickses retained the most tender memory of Nick's sojourn on theIbis, and Susy, moved by their artless pleasure in meeting him again,was glad he had not followed her advice and tried to elude them. She hadalways admired Strefford's ruthless talent for using and discarding thehuman material in his path, but now she began to hope that Nick wouldnot remember her suggestion that he should mete out that measure to theHickses. Even if it had been less pleasant to have a big yacht at theirdoor during the long golden days and the nights of silver fire, theHickses' admiration for Nick would have made Susy suffer them gladly.She even began to be aware of a growing liking for them, a likinginspired by the very characteristics that would once have provoked herdisapproval. Susy had had plenty of training in liking common peoplewith big purses; in such cases her stock of allowances and extenuationswas inexhaustible. But they had to be successful common people; and thetrouble was that the Hickses, judged by her standards, were failures.It was not only that they were ridiculous; so, heaven knew, were manyof their rivals. But the Hickses were both ridiculous and unsuccessful.They had consistently resisted the efforts of the experienced adviserswho had first descried them on the horizon and tried to help themupward. They were always taking up the wrong people, giving the wrongkind of party, and spending millions on things that nobody who matteredcared about. They all believed passionately in "movements" and "causes"and "ideals," and were always attended by the exponents of their latestbeliefs, always asking you to hear lectures by haggard women in peplums,and having their portraits painted by wild people who never turned outto be the fashion.
All this would formerly have increased Susy's contempt; now she foundherself liking the Hickses most for their failings. She was touched bytheir simple good faith, their isolation in the midst of all theirqueer apostles and parasites, their way of drifting about an alienand indifferent world in a compactly clinging group of which EldoradaTooker, the doctor and the two secretaries formed the outer fringe, andby their view of themselves as a kind of collective re-incarnation ofsome past state of princely culture, symbolised for Mrs. Hicks in whatshe called "the court of the Renaissance." Eldorada, of course, wastheir chief prophetess; but even the intensely "bright" and modern youngsecretaries, Mr. Beck and Mr. Buttles, showed a touching tendency toshare her view, and spoke of Mr. Hicks as "promoting art," in the spiritof Pandolfino celebrating the munificence of the Medicis.
"I'm getting really fond of the Hickses; I believe I should be nice tothem even if they were staying at Danieli's," Susy said to Strefford.
"And even if you owned the yacht?" he answered; and for once his banterstruck her as beside the point.
The Ibis carried them, during the endless June days, far and wide alongthe enchanted shores; they roamed among the Euganeans, they saw Aquileiaand Pomposa and Ravenna. Their hosts would gladly have taken themfarther, across the Adriatic and on into the golden network of theAegean; but Susy resisted this infraction of Nick's rules, and hehimself preferred to stick to his task. Only now he wrote in the earlymornings, so that on most days they could set out before noon and steamback late to the low fringe of lights on the lagoon. His work continuedto progress, and as page was added to page Susy obscurely but surelyperceived that each one corresponded with a hidden secretion of energy,the gradual forming within him of something that might eventually alterboth their lives. In what sense she could not conjecture: she merelyfelt that the fact of his having chosen a job and stuck to it, if onlythrough a few rosy summer weeks, had already given him a new way ofsaying "Yes" and "No."