The Lady Without a Purpose

And How Diane Pomegranate's One Love Was as Unwise as It Was Fanciful

DAVID CORT

ONE spoke usually of Diane Poincgrana'c as an cn'gnia. She was a good girl, but without dullness. She had made the motions of loving fifty, forty, twentyseven, men, but without promises. 'Throughout that long and brilliant sequence of affaires, though her outward and visible form passed through the usual violent and outrageous antics, she gave to the discerning the impression of disengagement and of terrible boredom. Like the flamingo, she walked through life concerned only with maintaining her head exactly on an exquisitely geometrical plane, while her body followed as it wist, foolishly. In addition, one might have observed that her eyes were as disinterested as her onyx earrings in that which went on about her. In addition to this, her reputation was good, but perhaps that was because she never told the sort of anecdote that is so beautifully dismissed as indiscreet and her Knglish was pure and free from idiom. The world often confuses correctness of grammar with purity of morals, and so, as a purist, Diane Pomegranate was safe from scandal.

ON the other hand, as to her friend Mrs.

Phelps, it is important only to know that it was Mrs. Phelps' pleasure to sec a purpose in everything. Even in Diane. Mrs. Phelps wished that fruitless and pleasant girl to become a wife, a mother, and a credit to womanhood. It is true that she had gone to school with Diane, loved her (as truly as a married woman may love an unmarried woman), and drew from Diane her due of tolerance.

"Dearest Diane," she was accustomed to say, at her most intolerable moments, "1 do despair of you sometimes."

"It doesn't matter. Despair, from my own sex, doesn't flatter me."

"But don't you ever wish for a home, a good man—"

"Sweet Eros!" was all that Diane could reply to this.

"—wish for the kind of certainties that come from the proper, respectable illusions:

I do so wish you were capable of being reasonable about ideals and settling down to a nice marriage."

"Well," Diane might say, "1 have at the moment four brunette lovers, a blond, and a grey. Which would be the easiest to be reasonable about?"

Mrs. Phelps would cluck a rounded "Tchk, tchk", and allow the quiet solicitude in her face to be displaced by outrage, the outrage by sympathy, and the sympathy by tact. "Why don't you come to the country with me this week-end, Diane?"

"Suburban villas and Long Island golf. I should suffocate."

"Not on the North Shore. You may stay in the house, in vour own room, as long as you like. It's a rest you need, Diane."

"I don't want to be rude, dear," said Diane, "but you must excuse me. Besides, sixteen men would commit suicide if l left town this weekend."

It was a conversation often rehearsed. The two women talked by the book on this subject, with rare interspersions ad lib. The cue-line came always from Mrs. Phelps with a homily on the life purposeless of Diane Pomegranate. Through various and set channels it led to an invitation to Mrs. Phelps' country house, of which Diane came to think as an asylum. Her arrival in it would be, she knew, the symbol of an eventually possible, but unthinkable, surrender. The issue of this idle fencing was invariably, too, the same. Mrs. Phelps left for her Long Island privets and green vegetables.

Diane continued in the free exercise of her metropolitan madnesses.

But Mrs. Phelps persisted in seeing a purpose in everything, even in Diane Pomegranate. She sought for more active ways of justifying that other tantalizingly unprofitable existence. Music and painting and business and literary ambitions she discarded at once: such trifling bait would never suffice for Diane. Perhaps, however, she might be able to lure Diane into a philandering that would touch her heart. But of course. Traps were always laid with the victim's favourite delicacy. Forthwith, Mrs. Phelps dusted off in turn each of her most eligible bachelor friends, her husband's friends, his business associates, her friends' brothers, sons, and third cousins, and dangled them in artful temptation before Diane. Diane took them, every one.

As for love, there was even less thought of it now than before. The number and variety of Diane's fire-fondlings and indifferent passions and melancholy inconstancies had been increased tenfold by Mrs. Phelps' unwise concern. Mrs. Phelps had but one stratagem remaining in this great work of finding a purpose in everything, even in Diane Pomegranate.

And so it came about that she and Diane fell into idle conversation about nothing over

tea on an afternoon of the following week.

"And how were the daffodils in the suburbs," asked Diane, "or are they rhododendrons at this season?"

"All our bulbs arc in the cold-cellar," Mrs. Phelps said severely, for she was still a little indignant at the heartless way in which Diane had toyed with her latest offering, a gifted young Harvard boy.

"But was there nothing to relieve Sunday morning church service?"

"Nothing in particular. Or no; now that you speak of it, we did meet a rather interesting young man coming out of church. He was most attractive and his name was Sholcm Vestry. Isn't that oddr I didn't dare ask him about himself—he talked so beautifully and with a very little accent. 1 think it must be a European education. And—oh, yes, he left us quite mysteriously. We live about a halfmile from the beach, you know, and there isn't a house anywhere between us and the Sound. We were awfully puzzled when he said that he had to go and prepare Sunday dinner, and started toward the beach, fie wouldn't dine with us—I was frantic to know where he lived. Of course, he might have been camping. But he wouldn't have come to church and his clothes would never have been so marvellously in press."

"Didn't you find out later?" Diane asked.

"How could 1? I didn't like to ask about him and he wasn't to be seen anywhere on Monday and I can only wait and hope that he'll be in church next Sunday."

"Oh, dear!" said Diane.

A WEEK later the two again had tea to_ZA.gether. After other things had been spoken of, it was natural that Diane should have asked, fliply, about the suburbs.

"Oh, very well," Mrs. Phelps replied.

"And the strange man. Did you discover where he lives and what he does?"

"I didn't learn what he does, but—"

"How frightfully unsatisfactory you arc!" Diane complained.

"—but I did find out where he lives. I'd forgotten that there's an abandoned lighthouse on the cliff behind us. He's taken up quarters there. The grocer told me that. But he wasn't in church, so I haven't seen him."

"Oh, well. I suppose you may be said to have made progress. But remember," Diane said firmly, "to learn everything there is to know about him this next week. I simply won't allow this mystery to cloak him any longer."

And so again, a week later, the two women met. Diane asked straightway, without disguise, for the latest bulletin on the ambiguous Mr. Vestry.

"Oh," said Airs. Phelps, "I've scarcely been able to wait to tell you. He had dinner with us on Sunday and I'm afraid I was terriblv inquisitive. At any rate, I know now that he's not only a graduate of some American college, but of Oxford, and the University of Padua as well. He rowed on the crew at Oxford. And lie's some kind of scholar: it's either beetles or the Ouattrocento in Florence.

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"Have I ever described him to you? lie's tall and strong-looking, but frighteningly restrained. His manners arc absolutely perfect, so that I can't really tell a thing about what he's thinking. When you first see him, you think his face is—well, handsome, of course, but, you know, insensitive, and then when you look again, it seems quite delicate and imaginative. Or perhaps it's the other way around. He told us that he was working on a book about his specialty and takes only Sundays off. I was awfully apologetic about drawing him out about himself, but—"

"You might," said Diane, "have told him that a friend of yours was curious about him."

"Oh, yes, that was the strangest thing of all. I did say that, though quite guardedly, you can be sure, and he wanted to know all about you. He made me describe you for him and I think I noticed a strange sort of interest in his questions. Of course, it was probably just my imagination. He's never seen you and was just being unusually polite, as you arc about him, since you've never seen him either."

"But I am interested in him," Diane insisted, "or what you've made him seem to be. Perhaps you've overdone him. Have you?" she added, with a question in her voice.

"Indeed, why should I? I've told you simply the impression that he's made on me. My husband is a little annoyed, but Mr. Vestry fascinates me. And he seems so completely inexperienced about women."

And so, next week:

"Diane, my dear," exclaimed Mrs. Phelps, "why did you ever let your picture get into the papers? I'm afraid it's started something. Early Sunday morning Sholem came over with the rotogravure section and asked us whether the photograph of you was a fair likeness. 'You're quite certain?' he kept saying, At length he went back to the lighthouse, still waving the paper absently and looking awfully stirred up about something. We didn't see him again all day and he never works on Sunday, so 1 have no idea what he was doing. And on Monday morning, before I left for town, he came to the door and asked me to give you a message from him."

"Oh!" said Diane.

"I confess that I was amazed, but he said: 'Will you ask Miss Pomegranate whether I have her permission to keep her picture?'"

"Yes, yes," Diane said, "tell him that I shall be honoured."

"I'm sure," said Mrs. Phelps, "that it's the most irregular correspondence that I've ever played postman for."

And so, a week later:

"He told me," Mrs. Phelps replied, "that he'd never believed before in the validity of psychic phenomena, but that you, whom he has never seen, are far more real to him than anyone he has ever met—including myself, I suppose, which isn't quite complimentary to me."

"And I," said Diane, "you won't

tell him, of course, but I have begun to think of him during every waking hour. I expect to find him in the drawing-room whenever I come home. I'd know him immediately if ever I met him on the street. Oh, you must invite me out. I must meet Sholem Vestry."

"No," said Mrs. Phelps.

"Why not?" asked Diane.

"I won't have it. 1 won't have you come just to interrupt the work of a man you've never met and whom you've simply idealized. That's that. I'll ask you out in three or four months, when he's finished his book, but not before."

From this judgment, Diane could obtain no appeal. She was satisfied, perforce, with the second-hand intimacy with Sholem Vestry. With every scrap of anecdote about the young man, he became more vivid for her. She came to feel that, waking or sleeping, she was in his presence, far more significantly than if he had been there in the flesh. She could not, she did not wish to, escape from that bodiless and remorseless courtship.

The spirit of Sholem Vestry outdistanced all her other and more tangible suitors. They lost all reality. They were impotent bunglers before him. It seemed to Diane that lie came and went when he chose, that he anticipated all her moods, and was tender even before she knew she wished tenderness and distant even before she was tired of intimacies. He compromised her half a dozen times daily in the hours at which he surprised her.

The bulletins from Mrs. Phelps continued through the weeks. The bond became still stronger. The old affairs seemed shabbier and yet more shabby. Diane preferred a solitude in which she might give audience to Sholem. At the end of two months, she had become a demure, loyal girl, faithful to the man she had not seen.

But the end of the second month brought a decision. She must see Sholem, if only for an hour. She must know whether it were indeed upon a self-delusion that her happiness depended. It was a Saturday and Mrs. Phelps would be at home. She wrote out a telegram in a halfhysteria and sent it off. It read: "You must let me come immediately. I must see Sholem Vestry. You can't keep us apart any longer. Think what it means to me. Please let me come. Please. Diane."

The reply came within the morning: "Impossible for reasons which I have already told you." At what seemed to Diane the brutal finality of that telegram, the code of restraints snapped inside her. She knew then that no one was privileged to deny her the consummation which she had awaited until now with calm. Some time later she telephoned Mrs. Phelps.

"I'm coming at once," she said.

"No," Mrs. Phelps declared desperately.

"I must see him. I'm coming."

"Diane. I beg of you. I command you—"

In consternation Mrs. Phelps heard the click at. the other end of the wire. On consulting the time-table she discovered that Diane would not have had time to catch the next train, that the first possible train would bring her in two hours. She did not know that Diane had telephoned, merely as a formality, from the station.

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An hour later, Mrs. Phelps heard the horn of a taxi. She chanced after an interval of five minutes to look out of the window. In the path leading to the Sound, her husband was standing in conversation with a woman whom she did not at once recognize. He was explaining something which he seemed to find amusing for he was laughing immoderately. The woman was not laughing. The woman was Diane, she realized with a start of dismay. Mrs. Phelps ran out of the house, but only in time to see Diane mounting the rise of ground that ended in the cliffs on the shore. "What did you tell her?" she screamed at her husband. "Why," he said easily, "what should I tell her but that it

was just a joke. A harmless little joke." "Oh, my!" Mrs. Phelps cried and started in pursuit, but Diane was already far ahead. Even now, Mrs. Phelps knew, she would be reaching the shore. By virtue of what she saw or failed to see, she would know that Mr. Phelps had spoken truly, that there was no lighthouse, no Sholem, no romance at all.

Mrs. Phelps, who saw a purpose in everything, even in Diane Pomegranate, stumbled a little in her hurrying. She rounded the last turn and saw before her the drop of rocks, the high, steep line of cliffs broken by that one weary figure. She was in time to see it flung outward into brief space.

A cruel illusion made the body seem to hang for an instant in the air, before it fell, rapidly and more rapidly, and turning slowly, as the earth turns, until a geyser of white water made a flashing and temporary monument to the one unwise love of Diane Pomegranate.