The Unfinished Symphony

A Story of Revenge, in Which Two Women Want the Same Man in Very Different Fashions

FARADAY KEENE

TONIGHT, sitting here in the box—she supposed it to be a box, this bit of balcony overlooking the dance-floor—beside Jim's wife, she counted the fifteen months since she had seen him. The hideous jazz music from the floor wheezed and blared upward, the dancers bobbed and wriggled. . . . She wondered if when she saw him, he would seem changed.

She drove her nails into the palms of her hands, she was not going to think about Jim. At least she would try not to . . . though God knew how absurd it was to try, with every nerve in her body thrilling with the strain of suspense. The simplest question of all was the one most impossible to ask. "Will your husband be here tonight?" She tried several times to say that, just naturally and simply, and found that it couldn't be done.

Jim would hate the orchestra's jungle noises, too. For three years now it had been sweet to her to know that they loved the same things. Not that he worshipped, as she did, the majestic austerities of music. But the glamorous, the magical things, the things of enchantment. . . . And it had been in an enchanted dusk, when the keys were singing to him under her fingers the melody he had asked for, the haunting song of the Unfinished Symphony, that he had suddenly caught her to him.

Without turning her head, looking straight before her . . . she had never been a woman who could look sideways ... she was conscious of the picture at her side. A woman like a picture. Agatha, Jim's wife. Crisp and stringy . . . thin curly russet hair in a smart little roll, low down. The perfect frock, the pearls, the pinched lips.

Agatha was saying, looking sideways, "You ought not to wear black, dear. It's too trying. You aren't by any chance still in mourning for Dan?"

Dan had been dead four years, and Agatha knew it. Dan's widow said, "No."

"But I daresay it's habit. He liked you in it, didn't he? Poor Dan always liked you to look a hundred. Or at least to look his age."

THERE was really nothing to be said to that. Rachel said nothing. "You were a good wife to Dan, Rachel", went on the voice of her hostess in her ear.

Agatha's guest said steadily, "Dan was a good husband to me."

"He was indeed." Did the ghost of a laugh quiver through the words? "A good provider." And without turning her head, Rachel saw the downward droop of Agatha's that always meant the same thing: a recurrent feast of the eyes, savoring the gorgeousness of the great rope of pearls, so long and shining. The gloating return, automatic after a glance at some other woman's inferior string. At a small string like Rachel's. Good old plodding Dan had left his wife a competence, two dear children, and a single neat row of pearls of the very smallest size; while Jim ... beautiful, careless Jim, with his father's millions ... had pleaded hard, three years ago, for leave to buy her the famous Pruyn necklace, three fabulous gleaming strands, when old Mrs. Pruyn died. Well, she had refused.

She had refused everything. It was precisely her supreme refusal, her heart-breaking triumph over her terrible love for Jim, that had been her undoing. For she had refused his love in black and white, on paper, in what his wife had called a wonderful letter; and Jim . . . beautiful, careless Jim . . . had "lost" it.

Sitting here tonight, with her dry lips, and the ache in her throat, she wondered just what, after that, she could have done differently. She supposed she might have put up a fight, might have defied Agatha. Some women could do that sort of thing. And the letter itself was proof that she had nothing, as the saying goes, to be ashamed of. But to have it spread abroad and talked about, chuckled over—her sacred agony of renunciation—to have it on women's tongues . . . even now, the scalding blush went over her at the thought. Even that, however, she could perhaps have borne; or she thought so. But what she knew she could not bear was her own dread of her children, and of cruel words about "your mother's affair". . .

"T T would make a sordid story", was Agatha's A manner of putting it. And Rachel did not miss the implications in Agatha's use of "make"; well she knew who would see to the making! The story of a little middle-class widow (Agatha called you middle-class if you didn't have a town car ... well, that was a classification like another) who had tried to steal the rich and agreeable and susceptible husband of a certain important lady; who had played the high-minded tantalizing game, and been caught out at it. Played and lost . . . the story would run like that, Rachel knew. When once she had seen her letter in Agatha's hand, she had known better than to put up any fight at all.

"I've decided," Agatha had said, "that you ought to go abroad for a year. And of course not write."

"You mean", said the woman that Jim loved, trying to keep her lips from trembling, "that even knowing it all, even knowing how we feel... how Jim feels .. . you won't divorce?"

Agatha's keen little gray eyes, for once, looked at her straight. "Why should I? I'm satisfied with things as they stand. Because you tell me I've lost my husband's affection . . . lost it to you . . . shall I chuck after it all that I haven't lost? I don't like the position of a divorced woman, I don't see why I should accept it just to please you. The situation's not my fault."

Rachel rose. "Then . . . for everybody's sake ... I'd better go." She could not control the long quivering breath that seemed as if it would take her life with it,but she faced her enemy. Not again would she ask for mercy. "I will take Dan and Monica to Switzerland, and I will stay a year." And she held out her hand for her letter.

Agatha's face twisted in the queerest way. "Oh, I'm keeping this, if you don't mind," she said.

At Grindelwald in the sunny chalet that she found, Rachel had had her children, and her music. She worked passionately at her music. She would work, she would learn, it should be her consolation; all the more that she felt it her single link with her lost lover, with Jim. When her fingers strayed into the throbbing sweetness of the Unfinished Symphony, her love went out to him, across the world, across the silence, on wide ineffable wings of sound. After this year of exile was over, after she went back, they would both be wiser; they would meet calmly; probably on the surface all would be as if their love had never been. But an hour would come when he would hear her play again, perhaps in some crowded room with many faces round them, with all the width of a great crowded room between; and then she would speak to him once again in music, and with all the width of a room between, she would see his eyes ... It would be enough.

At the beginning of the twelfth month, she thought it fair to write to Agatha. She wrote on a postcard: "I am sailing on the twentyseventh." Eight days later she had a cable: "Stay six months longer." Only that. Rachel paced her floor in helpless revolt, in sickening blind rage, for two dreadful nights, after the household slept.. . hot with fury, shaken with sobs ... until exhaustion brought her low. But she unpacked her trunks. She stayed.

Then in the fifteenth month she had an unexpected letter. "You might as well come home now," Agatha wrote. "Not later than the middle of February. We go south a bit earlier than usual this year, and I'd like to see you. Let me know when you land."

RACHEL thought she would have given her soul to defy that letter. But she could not defy it. She had come home. She had come alone, leaving the children happy at Grindelwald with their French and German and their winter sports, under their kind governess. And this was the night of her first day, after fifteen months of absence, in New York. By Agatha's arrangement, here she was in this raucous glittering place, at a "party"; here they sat together, squired by Agatha's stuffy uncle and cousin, who had clearly been given to understand that they were box-furniture merely. Doubtless the occasion represented just an odd notion of Agatha's for burying the hatchet; perhaps, under cover of noise, they would presently exchange some ambiguous word of amity, and part. But under the surface of this queer party, and under the hopes in which the guest of honour (she took herself to be that) dressed her foreboding, was a deep disquiet. The dancers shuffled, the music squawked and whanged . . . Rachel could not help the sick feeling that something was coming nearer to her . . . something dreadful. . . . "Jim's here ... somewhere," said Jim's wife. Rachel felt her heart turn over. She had kept her cruel bond; oh, she had kept it! She had not written, she had not told him he must write. Not one letter had she had from him, not one line. He had obeyed her, she had wept into her pillow because he had obeyed so well. She would not have answered him, but ah! he might have written! It had been so long. . . Now the thought that at any minute she might see him, made her begin to shake.

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"He's usually", said Agatha, "with Pearl Tucker."

"Not . . . ?"

Agatha nodded grimly. "The same. Paint, cocktails, all-night motor-rides. Quite a pace. I thought you might have heard."

Rachel was dumb. Her tormentor's little eyes were fixed on her, side-long, merciless, making sure that the blood followed the lash.

"Here they come. You'll be a surprise to him."

Along the little aisle back of the box, they were coming. Too many cocktails already, both of them. Pearl Tucker, pretty, provocative, halfnaked, and Jim . . . beautiful, careless Jim . . . Rachel saw him go white when his look met hers. Something gleamed that once had seemed imperishable ... it gleamed like a drowned star rising to the surface through dark water. It sank again, or she had dreamed it; she saw his bloodshot eyes. Into silence the music crashed again, it thunvped and banged . . .

"Come along!" shouted Pearl.

They had passed on, their backs were turned; now they were going down the little steep stair, Pearl going first. Jim stumbled, his outstretched hand was laid on a bare shoulder.

And suddenly into Rachel's lap something dropped. It was her letter, her own old letter to Jim. She looked down at it. "I daresay", Agatha was saying, "that you could get him back again, if you tried. But you won't try."

From the direction of the disappearing two on the stair, came Pearl's excited amorous titter, and then, as the turn hid them, a little rapturous screech. "I suppose", said Agatha, with her sidelong look, "that she likes that sort of thing ..."

. . . And of course, somewhere, somewhere in the world, violins were playing Schubert. ...