East of Eden

Title: East of Eden

Author: Isa Glenn

Release date: April 3, 2025 [eBook #75781]

Language: English

Original publication: Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1932

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75781

Credits: Carla Foust, Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

EVA LITCHFIELD

was banished from Eden by either beauty or genius, whichever one chose to consider the irrelevant factor of her character. If she herself had known what she wanted most, she would have liked to write her novels in a tranquil, mental world where there was no room for lovers.

She was capable of going through matrimony without experiencing with her body the slightest nervous reaction. Her soul might be bruised and her mind astonished, but no physical impression would have been made on her. She was like a crystal. A blow might leave her unscratched while the next blow might strike on the line of cleavage and shatter her.

Eva’s marriage to Nicholas Van Suydam of the Dutch Van Suydams who inherited Manhattan and upheld the ancient family traditions with stolid charm, was doomed to unhappiness.

Miss Glenn creates the strangely living and attractive personality of a lovely, untouchable woman and a genius, against the background of contemporary literary New York, a New York brilliantly sketched with wit and a light touch of satire. In subject East of Eden is a vivid contrast to Miss Glenn’s Transport and A Short History of Julia.

EAST OF EDEN

BOOKS BY Isa Glenn

EAST OF EDEN A SHORT HISTORY OF JULIA TRANSPORT SOUTHERN CHARM LITTLE PITCHERS HEAT

EAST OF EDEN

Isa Glenn

Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc. Garden City, N. Y. 1932

PRINTED AT THE Country Life Press, GARDEN CITY, N. Y., U. S. A.

COPYRIGHT, 1932 BY ISA GLENN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED FIRST EDITION

Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

GENESIS iii. 23-24.

PART ONE

[2]

I

I realized that I was sorry to be back in New York. Molly Underhill had telephoned: “Oh, darling, I’m so remorseful that we didn’t meet your ship! Eva Litchfield and I were going to be waiting for you with cheers because you’re home at last, and then Eva couldn’t get away. She’s in the last throes of a book, you know—or maybe you don’t know; you’ve become an expatriate, haven’t you?” Gasping, lisping, gushingly affectionate because she was speaking to me instead of talking about me, she eventually came to the point and invited me to dine with her at our old haunt, one of those establishments run by an Italian whose name it would be a shame to give. There was much to hear, she assured me; things had been popping, as they could pop only in New York. “But I’ll tell all, in the taxi,” she promised. “Only, the drive will be short, and the tale is long.”

In New York, the tale is always long, but one gets it in fragments delivered between the necessary snatches of[4] sleep and the attenuated diet of the New Yorker determined to be slim. Molly explained that she was at liberty to introduce me, in a way of speaking, to the city that had so radically changed, so phenomenally grown, during my protracted stay abroad: she had finished the proofs of a volume of her poems and, she added, as usual when she had sojourned in the empyrean, she felt the need of a strongly human contact. I informed her that on my own part I had come back to write a book about the ways and mistakes of Americans in France; one had to get out of a place in order to write a novel about it. When conversing with Molly Underhill, the trick was to watch her face; her expression might not harmonize with her words. I was at a disadvantage when she drawled: “And then, my lamb, you purpose leaving New York in order to write a book about us? Oh, you’ll get stories out of us! You can’t conceive of the racket instituted by our crowd; and Eva

Litchfield is our pacemaker. I suspect it’s because of an underlying discontent with her failure in the marriage line.”

Molly forced information only upon reluctant listeners. It was as if I harboured no curiosity that I asked: “Why do you call it a failure?”

“The look in her mother-in-law’s eye,” chuckled Molly; and hung up. She had a lip-licking chuckle. It prepared me to combat whatever position she had taken in regard to Eva Litchfield. I did not go so far as to decide to range myself squarely on Eva’s side, it being problematical if a fight were raging around her or if she herself had precipitated some squabble among her friends. This point time,[5] and no human reasoning, would clear up. In our crowd, one always disputed, but the gage of battle, promptly trampled underfoot, was soon overlooked, the war cry settled on when all was over.

The frantic American spirit of crowding into a day all that should be spread over a week caught me up and swept me out to be lost in a sea of controversial gossip. I found my time arranged for; I was to rush from one engagement to another without the necessary pauses in which to piece together my impressions of things told me. I was to lunch with Charles Glidden the novelist, in a “quiet little place where we can talk about Eva Litchfield’s married life.” I was to go to Sutton Place for cocktails with Florence Quincy the short-story writer, who would invite only a few people “so that we can talk about poor Eva’s fiasco.” In regard to Eva Litchfield, conditions in New York had not changed. From all sides would come allusions to her, stray information about her, acrimonious or friendly discussion of her. If she failed to set the pace in the sense alluded to by Molly Underhill, she set it in the way of arousing unflagging talk. She had, always, so set it. She was one of the women—lucky or unlucky, as one might consider them—who are discussed. I wished immensely to

hear the latest arguments for and against her. I burned with curiosity, composed of friendship and of that prying interest of the novelist, to know the details of her marriage, which had taken place shortly after my departure for a stay of two years in France. Not having returned to New York for the purpose of finding out, today I realised that this was what I must find out. It became a[6] piece of news that New York withheld only to drop on my head when I should be off my guard. The tales I was to hear would be partisan tales; the truth was the brick held in reserve. For, odious as I felt myself in wanting to know, I still feared to hear the truth. That I was promptly to hear everything else was left in no doubt; underlying the various invitations there was the projected weaving into a whole piece of those vicarious hints, those veiled prognostications, those omens of the future as read from the signposts of the immediate past, that our friends had left behind their occasional European travels. Authors do not write chatty letters to each other: they save their

lucubrations for the printed work; and what they had dropped in the course of the necessarily hurried talk of casual encounters as we drifted anchorless had not exposed what might be the trouble between Eva Litchfield and Nicholas Van Suydam.

I said to myself: “Dinah Avery, my good woman, you had best furbish your own ideas—your recollections—before swimming out to sea. For swim out to sea you must, and will, before the day is over.” From the thirtieth-floor windows of my small apartment I looked at the sky-line whose fame was flashing around the world and was physically shocked: had corresponding changes taken place in my friends? With that sky-line assaulting my nerves it required no wide digression to speculate about Eva’s husband: he was one of the rising young architects of the city, and that the steel ribs of one or more monsters had been plucked from the side of this Adam was probable. I recalled him as a handsome man who lacked hardness of[7] fibre. How could he bring about a drastic change in Eva? Life failed to scratch the surface of her absorption in her work. Her experiences were of the soul and not of the body. She was capable of going through matrimony without experiencing with her body the slightest nervous reaction. Her soul might be bruised and her mind astounded,

but no physical impression would have been made on her; she would still show to the world, and even to those friends in her confidence, a face almost nun-like in its essential purity. No man could hurt Eva for all time, I reflected comfortably: and at once I recalled the comment made on her by the caricaturist, Justo Zermonte. Zermonte had said without apology what many men had suspected but hesitated to acknowledge: Eva was a crystal, and a blow might leave her unscratched while the next blow might strike on the line of cleavage and shatter her.

As usual when she was being discussed, Spencer Mapes the essayist had been eager; he had an insect-like persistence in stinging; but he might have been as impersonally curious as Zermonte when he asked: “Where would that blow have to strike—the shattering blow, I mean?”

According to a trick of his, Zermonte was sketching on the back of a menu card and did not lift his eyes. He shrugged. Those human beings whose lines of cleavage had been struck the shattering blow were more vulnerable to caricature, and therefore more interesting to him, than the unbroken Eva Litchfield; he could not understand the writer’s desire to peel off the skins of the onion, for only the dreadful core was in his line. But Spencer Mapes of the literary mind continued to speculate; he seemed to buzz,[8] when he so discussed his friends. “If the crystal were to be heated?” he suggested. Zermonte regretted that, not being a lapidary, he did not know. “I was wrong, of course,” Mapes kept at it. “A crystal can’t be heated.”

Eva had sat looking at them while they so arranged her under a microscope. She smiled with a faint amusement that could have been genuine but that was merely her lovely indifferent agreement on a point which failed to interest her; she had but a slight sense of humour. Humour would have marred the delicacy of her feeling for beauty. She tolerated no realism. Characteristically she suggested: “Why not have said a diamond? The diamond is eternal.” Nicholas Van Suydam, indeed, could not hurt her. She did not care whether her happiness were eternal if only her work would be.

But Molly had said, “The look in her mother-in-law’s eye.” I felt as if I were at the motion pictures, as if I were managing the picture; for I cranked the projecting machine a little further and saw, clearly and accurately, Nicholas Van Suydam’s mother as I had seen here in fact.

His publishers had given a tea to our favourite Englishman. The entresol of the Savoy Plaza roared with our lifted voices, and smelled of dying flowers, and occasionally someone paused long enough absent-mindedly to eat a sandwich. Eva Litchfield had taken possession of Nicholas Van Suydam and, as I recall, was in a less crowded room talking with him. She had not captured him against his will; never had I seen a young man so fatuously lifted above himself by a woman’s notice. Eva was a delicate thistledown blowing across his path, dazzling him, luring[9] him. While I stayed, they did not again mingle with the crowd. And Spencer Mapes lingered near the door through which they had disappeared, leaning against the white woodwork with his own handsome head thrown back—not brooding but waiting.

The Englishman stood decently to receive those invited to meet him and no one wasted a minute on him. In a mild aside to those of us within hearing, he said that it was very New York. He stood watching the people who did not so much as glance at him because already they knew how he looked. They were in perpetual motion. They drew together and fell apart; and so quickly did they shift from group to group that one got the impression of their never quite closing their lips: what they had started to say in one group was continued in the next group in which they found themselves. It is impossible to accost a scuttling mouse: they dashed past the guest of honour with terrifying speed. The noise of the conclave surged down the stairs; and such was the volume of this concatenation that the elderly lady who now, with the most beautiful suddenness, appeared at the head of the stairs must have had to push against it as against material opposition. But this opposition which was not consciously directed against her had had, evidently, the effect of stiffening some as yet unrevealed

resolution. Also, she might have been upheld by many taffeta petticoats. She was alone but gave the impression of being attended. And such was the security of her evident faith in her impregnable position that, too shrewd not to perceive that the crowd ignored her, she waved aside any discomfort arising from this by her own[10] sweeping condemnation of all that she saw. Her cold grey eyes travelled from face to face, appraising with a complete and icy detachment—no interest whatever in who it might be the orbit of whose flight she chanced to observe.

Beyond a few curious glances, the milling crowd paid no attention to her. From his far doorway, Spencer Mapes, however, stared with absorption. James Pomeroy, adjusting his pince-nez, his fingers using on its narrow black ribbon the tenderness of touch that he would use on a rare old book, came up to say to the Englishman, “I saw her—on her way here, although it didn’t occur to me that she could conceivably be on the way here—driving uptown in a horse-drawn carriage!” But, at one time or another, most people had seen her maroon brougham with a red-faced coachman in a puce livery expertly handling a pair of bays. She might be said to be the last of the old buildings now in process of demolition. In a backwash formed by the elderly lady’s antagonistic near presence, the small cluster of us stood staring. Novelists stare because they never know when they will use a person as a character in a story. They stare without blinking, making no excuse to the object of their fixed regard; they are working a photographic memory. And here was a middle-aged woman who

declined to appear younger than she was. It was a find. We examined her in unabashed glee.

On her own part, she looked at us and refused to see us. About her there was something of the lone knight girded for the combat. Her purpose was so definite that by it she was set aside from the people who aimlessly charged past; she waited for an opponent upon whom the eyes of[11] her mind were already fixed. I think that we might have talked about her at the top of our lungs and she would not have stirred a muscle of her face, so bent was she on an exact aim. She was a force which had surged in on us. We felt her presence. But I got the impression that in spite of the opposition of her ignoring quiescence she watched us. She feared something; and that she refused to acknowledge the existence of this apprehension did not minimize it. On some one issue she had staked a thing so big that she quailed at the failure she had not yet in her soul acknowledged to be possible. Her hands, in too-small white gloves, clasped each other so tightly that the kid stretched, and drew, and bulged. But her face was composed—old ivory in its hard finish. Her decorous feet, in high

buttoned boots, rested side by side, and it was evidently with an effort of her muscles that she kept them so properly on the floor; for she was by now seated on one of those dreadful hotel sofas that are slippery and are too high. About her there was something charming, and something forbidding, and through all, and arising from the cause of all, this emanation of terror. I got the idea that she forbade us to approach her because of this terror. But what that would touch her could we bring down on her?

Molly Underhill suggested: “She does look like a scared rat.” She looked like nothing of the sort; her fear was not fear of the fight but of what might cause the fight.

James Pomeroy said that he took his hat off to her. “I never before saw such iron self-control. Do you notice that she doesn’t tap her foot on the floor, as all women under stress do? For you’ll admit that she’s under stress?”

[12]The Englishman undertook to explain her: he also was analysing her for future use. “I have an old aunt,” he began. “That generation of nice old ladies had no use for their own sex. You notice that her attention is riveted on Spencer Mapes? Oh—unobtrusively, delicately; but with such passion of feeling!”

“Spence wouldn’t see her even if she were younger. We all know—although we deny it, and can’t after all explain the ramifications of it—that he has eyes for no one besides Eva Litchfield. I’m not sure it’s love——” speculated Florence Quincy, who did not care. This was an old question with us; none of us cared; but, not necessarily with viciousness but with the greatest persistence, we dissected Spencer Mapes’ intentions towards Eva.

The Englishman murmured that he intended making a virtue of his necessity to know more of her. He approached the elderly lady and enquired if there were something he could do for her. He was a huge man with a kind pink-and-white face and a gasping voice. Her own voice, when she replied, was dry as bone-dust, but she stated, graciously enough, that she recognized him by his pictures. Severely she added that she had thought the reception was given to him. And her somewhat acrid amusement, when he replied that so he had been given to understand, proved that her fear was not of the guests now hovering near.

She said: “I came to get my son.” There was finality about her announcement. In the same tone she might have said “I came to snatch my son from hell fire.”

“Your son, then, is a writer?” the Englishman ventured.

[13]Her figure tightened: it was impossible for her to draw herself up; so far as one could see, she had drawn herself up at birth and never let go. “We have no artists in our family,” she gave him back. She remarked that she was Mrs. Schuyler Van Suydam, and added more kindly: “My son is by way of being an architect. Possibly, in England also, you permit your sons to play before they settle down?” She had disposed of the question of how she came to be there and was done with him. She swept the room with her disapproval, and turned her chilling regard back to the Englishman and disapproved of him. In spite of the alleged paucity of such stuff in her family, she was a great pantomime artist. She sat on her sofa—squarely in the middle as if to defy an author to sit beside her. But I saw that her throat was convulsed. Her eyes were bleak with more than her aversion to her surroundings.

The Englishman indulged in his soundless laughter. Throughout an attack of this mirth, he might be without emotion of any sort, so expressionless would be his face; it might be a physical instead of a mental spasm. He swallowed every second word of his reply, and on the resulting incoherence took himself off. He again mentioned his old aunt to us. He became so amused at the recollection that he gasped himself out of telling more. The old aunt remained in our memory as one who could well have been what is called a character. One had, always, to supplement what the Englishman recounted.