THE

The House Party

HE red and blue and yellow flowers in the garden became poisonous in the sunset. A pallid light fell upon them, reflected from the mountainous crimson clouds which hung over the dark hills. Paul meandered along the gravel paths. Here was a fiend's apothecary shop. Macabre potions and baleful doses lurked in every one of these flushed, fragile plants. He let his imaginations and his desires improvise on this theme. He was a cross between an alchemist and one of the Borgias; he could cull the direful liquids from this evil garden, inject them with cunning into the food-stuffs up at the house and annihilate the entire house party. They would twist and writhe to their deaths.

He obtained fleeting glee from this picture and then the pain came hurtling back. He looked up at the house. The Gordons' country home was a white stucco affair made up of three or four great oblong boxes thrown together more or less haphazardly. The roofs were of green tile and the square window openings were trimmed with what purported to be Spanish painted motifs. The house rested on a high hill with formal, terraced gardens on various lower levels, and the Gordons' forest estate sloped away from the gardens.

The white stucco was pink now in the twilight glow, the roofs a brighter green by contrast; the sky graded from the horizon flare of yellow to a deep blue. All these shades met on his retina, as well as the flowers which he concluded were the colors of regretted sins. His pain increased. "I'm very sensitive to color, very," he said to himself. "Colors increase my pleasures and intensify my sorrows." And again those very sorrows drove away his musing. He couldn't avoid it. He was miserable at this house party; wished he'd never come. The rythmic vibrancy of the phonograph up at the house shot annoyingly down at him. "The Roses Brought Me You." Roses-fresh, bright roses in the morning sun; he thought of them with revulsion. Those oppressive flowers in the garden-they were for his mood—the dank,

malevolent things. He sat down on the dewy grass, his back to the house, facing a fringe of cedars.

Karl and Alice would be dancing up there to that tune. They were the only engaged pair at the party. They danced, swam and played tennis incessantly. The other two couples were far less active and a great deal more amorous. He, Paul, was the extra man. Not that it was planned that way. With the exception of Karl and Alice the relationships just happened. The two other girls had naturally picked the two other men. His attentions weren't even solicited. It was all so different from the way he'd foreseen it back at college. Alice, his cousin, had sent him an invitation to her house party. He hadn't been able to understand just why, for he didn't live very near and wasn't intimate with that branch of the family. But he'd imagined his wit and sophistication and poetry as the center of acclaim among the smart young people his wealthy cousin was sure to invite, and he'd eagerly made the journey.

In the first place it was a smaller party than he'd expected, and vacuous as to intellect and the appreciation of nuances in conversation. Someone was always too busy mixing a cocktail or cranking the phonograph to notice the subtleties of his comment. And their own chatter overwhelmed him as did that of the mass of boys he carefully avoided at school. They didn't seem to be sympathetic to his sensitive, perceptive nature. Karl, dark and vigorous and undistinguished was polite and a bit patronizing. Alice, straight and blonde and metallic, was identical in her attitude. The other four were too busy philandering with each other to do more than establish a sort of social inhumanity.

And then there was that horrible swimming, performed three times a day in the outdoor pool. On the first day he'd put on his green bathing suit and arrived at the pool's edge, the last of the party. It was a bright morning; the sunlight glittered on the water which even looked warm. It would have been soothing to float there, gazing up at the sky with the sun baking his face and the quiet of the countryside. But no; the others were shouting and laughing, filling the air with their buoyant tumult. They all regarded him somewhat quizzically, he thought, and when he dived there was a titter of laughter from the girls. As his head emerged

they were very solemn and the boys were covering smiles. He swam back to the edge and by the time he reached it the others were briskly plunging in and sporting with each other. He sat on the tiles, feeling physically thwarted, until the crowd came out. On the succeeding days he made excuses and sat under the sunshade watching the others, and for a day or so hadn't been down to the pool at all. The pleasure of seeing Alice, her lovely slim figure sparsely clad in glistening, wet silk, wasn't enough to atone for the discomfort of sitting stupidly alone on the bank.

On Tuesday afternoon he'd played in a tennis doubles match. It seemed to him that it was a three cornered game; after the first few minutes Karl and Alice played all their shots at his partner and she returned them expertly. His service motions were graceful, but he couldn't seem to control the ball, and when he sacrificed the motions for accuracy the ball went over the net so slowly that the other side had no trouble in returning it swiftly and with effective placing. The girls wore brilliant sweaters and short, billowing skirts. They were lithe and charming as they ran about the court, and Alice was as impeccable when she finished as she was at the beginning. When she asked him a while later if he wished to play golf with them at a nearby country club he said he'd never tried. It was a lie; he'd played a beginner's miserable game for three years, and he didn't wish to engage in any more sports. While they were gone he took one of the roadsters out of the garage and drove around the country. He was solitary and uncomfortable. He wanted his books and paintings, and his piano. But a resolution came out of the ride; the house party could go hang. He'd be independent and superior, perhaps pass some of his time in writing a few satiric verses that had suggested themselves.

Then on Wednesday Alice's older sister, a war widow of about thirty, had come to stay with her parents. His entire outlook on his visit changed immediately. To have his carefully constructed resolutions suddenly upset was disconcerting, but it excited him. From the moment he saw Philippa James he knew he should find her fascinating, and he intuitively realized that she would discover in him the lover of the world's subtle riches, that valuable fountain in his nature of which the others were quite unaware. Phil

ippa was a dark, slender and sombre young woman. She smiled from amusement, but never from hilarity. The other boys on the house party said among themselves that she was charming but they kept to their debutante companions, whose charms were more negotiable. He, on the other hand, fell delighted prey to her matured femininity. He suddenly talked more and at a higher pitch; he addressed all his dinner table comments to her, and her quiet appreciation of his bon mots was balm to his distressed soul. On the night of her arrival he found her reading in the library. He saw the name of De Gourmont on her book.

"Oh! You like him!" he said, as though his happiness depended on the fact.

She gave him her entire attention at once.

"Yes! My husband sent me this from France during the war. I reread it every once in a while."

"Isn't he exquisite? It seems to me no one else has such an appreciation of the various lovelinesses of woman. Perhaps it's because he had something of the woman in him. I'm sure women realize those lovelinesses, even though they can't see them in themselves and they're too jealous to admit them in others. Don't you think so?"

"Perhaps you're right. Yes, I think you are, Paul. What you say about De Gourmont's having something of the woman in him seems to me to be-"

"Oh, I'm sure he has, I think all the greatest novelists and poets have. It's essential-they must be spiritually hermaphroditic."

He knew Philippa was the sort of woman who wouldn't object to the use of a word like that. She didn't.

"I think you're very discerning, Paul. Do you write yourself?" “Oh, yes—I try verse occasionally."

"Tell me about it."

He was looking straight at her. Her features were redeemed from sharpness by just that delicacy which imparts beauty as well as strength. Her dark eyes were frank and intimate; it seemed as though no one had ever looked at him so intimately. The flowing black satin of her dress settled in shining folds about her slender legs. Sitting there she suggested all the delights she might offer a man, delights that lay potential beyond her frail barrier of in

dividuality which just a word or a gesture might break down. Even the remembered voluptuousness of De Gourmont was powerless before Philippa's luscious reality.

"Well," he continued, "I have a theory about poetry. I don't believe in free verse or blank verse, at least for short poems. I think a regular form of verse and rhyme scheme are the most beautiful. But as to poetic subjects I'm more or less of a modernist. I think nature's an effete subject—what can one say? And so is romance and all the rest. What we're interested in now and what we know most about are the minute shades and facets of human relationship-the things that our civilization is the first to discover. I don't mean psychology—that's useless. But you take this man and woman relationship-it's not the simple animal thing that almost everyone from Boccaccio up would have one believe. This one element in life varies with individuals as the tones of all the sunsets in the world have varied. That's it-my work is individual work. It's my particular reaction to things, the most sensitive reaction which calls for the most sensitive expression. For instance, if you wore red tonight instead of black the whole color of my reaction to you as well as the color of your gown would be changed. And it's that very particular color of whatever reaction I'm feeling that I strive to catch in my poetry. I think that's the essential thing, the gift of our age. Don't you, Philippa ?"

Philippa had been listening wraptly, her chin in her hand.

"Why it sounds quite remarkable. Have you any of your poetry here, Paul?"

"I'm sorry, I haven't. But I'll probably do something before I leave."

"I wish you'd let me see it. It's wonderful to think that there's an artistic person in the family. I've always believed that I was the only one who had any leanings that way."

This new feeling of kinship glowed in him. Philippa's soft smile was appreciative, and more than that. He talked for quite a while longer, and then she took him in to dance with her-he was closer then than he had been.

Going to bed that night his mind was full of the story of Don Juan and Julia. He had no trouble in changing Philippa into