Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

by Nigel Dennis

  He had these thoughts while she was telling him about her husband’s career, and how it had meant moving repeatedly from one country to another. It seemed to him that she talked about absent Mr. Streeter rather too much, as if the thought of his sturdy, adamant character was as helpful to her poise as Divver’s inadequacies were to his own. But she managed at the same time to convey to Morgan that so much strength of character in a man could make a woman feel rather sad and regretful sometimes. “We lived in one hotel in Prague,” she said, “for three whole years, and that time I almost let myself forget that it wasn’t a steady home, and I mustn’t try to fix it up like one—but that’s just what I did do; and when Larry came in one day and said that his job was done and we were going to move on to Cairo, I made a terrible scene that made me terribly ashamed of myself afterwards.”

  “I think you had every reason to make a scene,” said Morgan stoutly.

  “No, I didn’t; I’d known all along; I knew what being married to an old rover like Larry meant, from the very beginning.”

  “I think you’re being much too hard on yourself.”

  He thought of how beautiful it would be to sacrifice his career to a woman’s happiness, to mop up her floods of tears with blotting-paper pulped from his potential greatness.

  He noticed that she knew the name of their waiter and spoke to him familiarly with many warm smiles, and that the waiter knew who she was and treated her with great respect. He also noticed that she was nervous and rather scatterbrained, and kept breaking off to look at the other tables and keep an eye on who came in and who went out. He thought this meant that she was a woman who had many acquaintances and admirers, and each time she turned her head toward the other diners and he saw her profile and the nervous twitch of a preparatory smile, he lost some of his confidence. When the headwaiter came to their table, Mrs. Streeter introduced Morgan to him, saying: “Ambrose, this is Mr. James Morgan, a young man from my country who has never been to Europe before”—and the two of them instantly raised their eyebrows and smiled with such astonished good humour that Morgan felt like a small Mohican peering at the brothers Goncourt out of the cleft in a wigwam. And so, when she went on to name the innumerable capitals, streets, and hotels which were known to her—and, like most Americans, she had an almost guide-book memory in such matters—he forgot the sympathy he had felt for her as a restless, homeless, wife and began to think of her as too dashing and glamorous for a boy of his age. He might have guessed, from her indiscreet use of dates, that her husband was much older than she was; instead he became more conscious of how much older than himself she was. Nothing’s going to happen, he told himself despondently. I’m a child and she’s an old woman.

  Fortunately, the more silent and unsure he became, the more friendly and reassuring she seemed to be. Over coffee, he made a rather boyishly-glum remark about his ignorance, and she at once turned her affectionate smile on him, looked at him in a way that was positively bold, and actually stretched out her hand and patted him.

  “I shall really enjoy seeing the fireworks with you,” she said. “You have so much natural enthusiasm.”

  He rose from the table awkwardly; his stomach was not used to having two full dinners and qualms about impotence suddenly stuffed into it. But he followed her out of the dining-room with calmness and pride, and when they reached the lobby, which was now crowded with immaculate, romantic, half-tipsy American school-teachers and Baltic barons, the ghost he saw in his old chair was that of a small, excitable being from whom he felt separated by years of sophistication. He thought that he should make some suggestion to Mrs. Streeter as to how they might pass the time until the fireworks started; but she walked with perfect ease toward the private elevator, and he felt a sudden thrill of excitement at obediently following her trim and handsome figure—a sensation of happy submissiveness that he had never know before.

  They rose, side by side, in the golden cage.

  *

  At the drawing-room entrance of the Archduke Suite, Mrs. Streeter gave an unexpected giggle. “Well, here’s our home,” she said to Morgan, opening the enormous black door. “Larry says it’s like living in a private opera house.” She giggled again, as though she found the comparison flattering to her social station.

  Morgan could see why she should be pleased; his first glimpse of the drawing-room told him that its peculiarities were signs of special prestige. The better rooms at the Hotel Poland, such as his and Divver’s, carried neat signs informing tourists about the payment of bills, and warning Americans that the local current was not adapted to foreign electric irons and razors—“our own barbers and laundry exist precisely to help you in these respects, at moderate charges.” The furnishings of these better rooms included chromium plating and enamelling, rimless mirrors, handphones, beige carpets with geometrical patterns, and twin beds, all put straight easily enough with a dust-rag and vacuum cleaner.

  But the best rooms, the suites in the Distinguished Travellers’ Annex, achieved to their special distinction by staying dowdy; they needed the steady attentions of scrubwomen, veteran French chambermaids and very old, shaky waiters named “boys.” The distinguished people who attained to the suites—bishops, directors of American corporations, princes and prima donnas in good voice and throne, heiresses trying their third or fourth prince, older authors—had in years of travel learnt to understand that there is a point beyond which hospitable admiration cannot go without expressing itself as discomfort—that living immortals can receive the ultimate homage of the vital only by being treated as already dead. Thus the important residents recognized the compliment of a bathtub so incorporated into a waxed mahogany case as to have the inflexible reserve of a coffin; of massive wardrobes, deep as hell, which opened with long brass keys and whose farthest row of hooks was out of sight; of corridors so dark that the names of some of the suites could not be read unless a lighter, or common match, were struck. To summon waiters, the distinguished travellers tugged red, tasselled bell-ropes; their secretaries made trans-Atlantic calls with ponderous armed-and-legged black telephones; the ice for their highballs was brought to them, after a long journey over winding trails, in silver-plated urns with twisted handles of embossed timber. The special elevator by which they were inspired to their eminence or depressed into public life was moved in an intimate way by gentle tuggings at a rubber rope, as in milking a tall cow; the passengers viewed the brick and mortar of the passing floors through gilded fretwork, and sniffed the scent that drifted from a concealed font of verbena.

  In the drawing-rooms of the suites, immense red curtains moved on wooden rings as large as quoits, and had been thrashed and fondled by “boys” and “girls” until the velvet nap was in a condition of deep reflection. The Turkish carpets felt like inches of pressed feathers; the tin wall-vases, crusted with silver cherries, strawberries, and peaches, were not only polished outside until each fruit had its own glorious life, but were also made to shine inside, where the silver was quite worn off.

  Morgan had never seen so much plush and velvet, such broad lamp-shades with long silk fringes and embroidered scenes of medieval life, such expanses of murky dimness on a huge carpet, such distant, invisible corners to so lofty a ceiling. He had never doubted the extent of his mother’s wealth, but this big room was so out of the ordinary as to seem far more luxurious than his mother’s house, just as a treasure-chest sounds incomparably richer than any bank-balance. When he hitched his black trousers and set himself down gingerly in an oak chair, the broad seat spread away a full foot on either side of his behind; he had to stretch his trembling elbows in order to rest them on the padded arms. On the carved table beside him, next to an impossible cigar-lighter that resembled an old-fashioned turbine, was a fat, impressive book called Cyanide Separation in Rote Containers. On another, distant table he could see a man’s photograph in a broad silver frame, but although he peered curiously, the man’s features were lost in the half-light. He rather gaped at Mrs. Streeter, who walked the f
loor with the bosun’s swing of a woman in her own home, although the breadth and height of the room reduced her to a tiny figure. She went to the big French windows that looked out on to the square, and raised her small white arm to a big cord, at which the enormous damson curtains smoothly drew together, turning the room into a huge enclosure. “We can open them later, when the fireworks start,” she said. He nodded, and his heart began to thump.

  She tripped along for another thirty paces, to a cabinet from which she took a bottle of liqueur and glasses. When he took his glass from her, he kept his eyes away from her face, to compose himself; but as soon as she had sat down in a chair that was a cool twelve feet away from him, he at once began staring at her face and wondering how he could bring her closer. The dimness of the room, the impossibility of distinguishing half-light from shadow, and either from the deeper colours of the furniture, excited but worried him: she appeared entirely used to an atmosphere that was devoid of all the sharpness and clarity of a well-to-do American home. He was also confused by her double appearance: her clothes and her self-importance made her a mature woman, but her smallness relative to the things around her, as well as her frequent smiles—which had something furtive, hopeful, and a little pleading in them—made her something of a nervous child. He was sure that the occasion demanded some sensible, masculine, grown-up topics besides Divver and the Danzig question, neither of which he really knew much about or cared to introduce. Worse, he saw by her face that Mrs. Streeter had exhausted her resources in drawing the curtains and felt no better off than he did. Sunk half out of sight in a deep chair, she was going through an absurd, monotonous patter—raising her eyebrows and affecting to sniff the liqueur, sipping at it overhastily like a bird; and feigning ease in the most commonplace ways, by trilling little bits of tunes, looking over the furniture with extreme vacancy, and waggling one foot at the ankle with unnerving persistence. On the occasions when their eyes met, each managed promptly to display the dull exposure of teeth that suggests a jolly time—after which, she returned to her humming and waggling, and he to his search for some powerful masculine phrase. “Did you say you both came from Pennsylvania?” he asked her at last, with the intensity of a scientist checking a point of higher mathematics.

  “Larry does,” she replied, and he saw his own stupid earnestness exactly reflected in her face.

  But suddenly her eyes lit up and she jumped out of her chair with immense satisfaction. “I simply must show you …” she said, and disappeared into one of the dark corners of the room, where he heard her rustling through some papers. She quickly returned, beaming with relief, with a two-page letter typewritten on very stiff white paper. “I don’t see why it should interest you, really …”

  “Oh, I’m sure it will,” he cried, seizing the life-belt from her eagerly.

  “Dear Sir,” said the letter:

  “We are in receipt of your I.M.O. to the value of five dollars, and as a result of preliminary but careful research among our records can definitely inform you that your lineage is traceable to Seigneur Jehar de la Rue, a Norman who accompanied William the Conqueror to England, as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, and afterward became cupbearer to his successor, William II (“The Red”). Thereafter, the surname became anglicized, as was oft the custom, and reappears in its new form in the roll of the Battle of Agincourt (1495), wherein is distinctively mentioned a Thomas Stritter Esquire, of Aylward, Gloucestershire. A junior branch of the Stritters, or Streeters, assumed residence in Pennsylvania and Ohio in the early part of the 19th century, and it is from this branch that you undoubtedly may claim descent.

  “The arms of the Stritter or Streeter family are: Ermine, on a bend or, three martlets sable; the crest, a martlet’s head erased, ermine; the legend: Si Deus, Quis Contra? (If God be with me, who shall be against me?).

  “If you will kindly remit the additional twenty-five dollars, we shall be happy to despatch to you your complete lineage, inscribed on parchment, with the shield, crest, and motto depicted in scrupulously exact blazonry. We will also enclose, wholly free of charge, our special booklet history of the Norman Period, by the noted English historian, J. A. R. Craddock, M.A.

  “May we add that should you so desire we shall be happy to engrave your arms in copper (accompanied by your full name, in script) so that you may press therefrom the bookplates necessary for your library. We are also expert in the enamelling of crests on cigarette boxes, automatic lighters, wine glasses, etc. We also supply libraries.

  “In replying, we should be grateful if you would furnish us, for reasons of complete accuracy, with the full names of your father and grandfather.

  “We remain, dear Sir,

  Respectfully yours,

  Seigneur and Guggenheim,

  —— Fifth Avenue,

  New York, N.Y.

  “Why, how exceedingly interesting!” said Morgan.

  “I think it is.”

  “Did it come as a great surprise?”

  “Oh, Larry had always suspected something like it in his background. But he never gave any thought to finding out; practical men of his type don’t bother with their pedigrees. He sent the five dollars just as a big joke. ‘Just you wait and see,’ he said, ‘they’ll have me descended from William the Conqueror.’ And you see, he was right. Personally, I think it’s a very nice thing to know. Why shouldn’t a man have a pedigree? Or am I talking like a European?”

  “Not a bit,” he said warmly.

  “I’ve lived on this side for twelve years …”

  “No one would know it.”

  He was pleased, relaxed and happy. She poured them both out another liqueur, and he began to pace, holding the glass easily in his hand, delving into his fertile mind for another question that would be as successful as the last. He spoke the first one that came into his mind—how it happened to pop up he couldn’t imagine. He spoke it easily, chattily:

  “Where do your children sleep?”

  Mrs. Streeter gave a violent start. In a second, her whole face, which her husband’s ancestry had so charged with animation, became red, hard and angry, and she looked at him like a fierce little animal. He wanted to run for his life.

  “I never said I had any children,” she said, slowly, with horrifying coolness.

  “No, of course you didn’t,” he said.

  “Then why did you ask?”

  “I don’t really now; I guess it must have been something that came up in our conversation.”

  “What? Did I say anything about children?”

  “Something you said …”

  “When? At dinner?”

  “I suppose it must have been at dinner …” He wanted to cut and bruise himself, his lying made him feel so despicable.

  “Well, I wish you’d tell me what.”

  He wrung his hands and said nothing. The sooner I get out of here the better, he thought, spitting angrily on his silly hopes of glory and romance. His vanity was agonizingly depleted; he longed to save, in solitude, what was left of it.

  At that moment he glimpsed her face and saw that already the anger had gone and that she was now looking merely tired and disgusted, as if she felt, as he did, that their flying start had ended in a ditch and should be put out of mind along with all silly things. He was now certain, too, that she knew all about him, what he had wanted from her, how little genuine interest there had been in his polite attention to her and to the things she had told him about herself. He felt that no matter how romantic and glittering they had been in a bright, noisy dining-room, surrounded by people, they were now two drab, uncomfortable strangers, without one thing in common. Impelled by the same spontaneousness with which he had hurt her, he now crossed over to her chair on shaking legs, and said to her out of the small remains of his courage: “I am very sorry I was rude to you. I swear I didn’t mean it. I was lying about what you said at dinner. I shall go now, because I know you don’t want me to stay.”

  She looked up at him with surprise. He was standing perfectl
y erect with all a penitent youth’s resolution and intense gravity, prepared to pay for his crime by being exiled to Devil’s Island as the epitome of human selfishness—exhibiting, in short, the incomparable, heart-warming, masculine charm of total loss of proportion and intellect.

  Mrs. Streeter instantly rose from her chair, put her arms round his neck and kissed him vigorously on the lips.

  His body remained as stiff as a board, he blushed all over. Her arms trembled as she withdrew them; she sat back again in her chair, shaking, and blushing too, frowning and smiling at once. “Excuse me,” she said, starting to laugh in an ashamed but very friendly way. “It was so sweet of you to apologize; I just couldn’t resist thanking you.”

  It was so far beyond his understanding, and he was so shaken by the way in which new hopes and feelings poured into him again, that he could only think of trying to keep his lips set in just the position in which she had left them and not to lose from his flesh the least sensation of her mouth and arms.

  “And I was the one who spoke out of turn, not you at all,” she said. “How could you know? That just happened to be something I was specially sensitive to, today particularly, and only to do with me and Larry. I won’t try and explain, and burden you.”