He put the paper under his arm and gave his trousers a little pull so as not to spoil the crease in them and sat down beside Louella. There was a gentle swinging motion, hardly perceptible, but intoxicating. Louella, with her little brown shoes, was pushing the hammock softly back and forth.
“It’s nicer,” she said, “than the rocking chairs, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “it doesn’t throw you backwards.”
Louella laughed.
“We were pretty busy today,” Jeffrey said. “Have you seen the paper?”
Louella said she hadn’t seen it, because it hadn’t come yet, and Jeffrey took his own copy from beneath his arm and pointed to the right-hand column.
“The man who usually does it didn’t come back from lunch,” he said. “I wrote that.”
She leaned closer toward him to see. Her shoulder touched his and then she drew away.
“Why Jeffrey Wilson,” Louella said, “you didn’t write all of that.”
He felt a surge of disappointment. If he had written all the column she might have leaned longer against his shoulder.
“No,” he said, “just that much.”
“Oh,” Louella said, “why, Jeffrey Wilson!”
“You can keep it,” he said, “don’t bother to read it now. It isn’t anything, really.” And then he wanted to change the subject. There was a piece of knitting between them on the hammock.
“What’s that?” he asked. “Something you’re making?” And then he thought it might have been something which Louella would not want to speak about, something that girls wore.
“Why,” Louella said, “it’s a washcloth. I knit them for Father and Mother, and I’ll give this one to you.”
Jeffrey swallowed, and for an instant he sat mute.
“But maybe your father needs it,” he said.
“Oh, no,” Louella said, “Father has lots and lots. Not that I don’t think you’re clean—” Louella giggled and Jeffrey laughed too. He had never lived through such a day as that. He had written a war lead in the paper, and Louella was going to give him a washcloth if he stopped to see her tomorrow—a durable article which he could keep always, which he could keep until he died.
19
And All the Heart Desires
In the afternoon the evening war communiqués would come over the A.P., and Mr. Jenks would get out his maps and Mr. Eldridge and Mr. Nichols would come in from the editorial rooms out front and all of them would chat agreeably and perhaps intelligently about the war. They had all read the critiques of Mr. Frank Simonds and other military experts and they had read the London Times and the Paris Matin and the Spectator and the London Evening Post and the Chronicle. They were also familiar with more permanent works on the art of war, so that their conversation was sprinkled with such expressions as “camouflage” and “aerial observation” and “no man’s land” and “creeping barrages” and “box barrages” and “primary and secondary objectives.” It was like being in a conference of generals when those elderly men were talking, dispassionately removed from actuality, striving to put order into a confusion that was a very long way off. They talked of the submarine blockade and of attacks without warning on our merchant shipping. The German soldiers were sheep being driven to slaughter, but at the same time they possessed barbarous vindictiveness. They cut the hands off little Belgian children and they had crucified British prisoners. It was Mr. Eldridge’s opinion that they were inhuman swine. There was even a story that they had rendering plants in which they manufactured soap out of their own dead. There were lots of rumors which you could not set down in print. At such times Mr. Nichols wished fervently that we had a man in the White House and not a Presbyterian college professor. Even that smile of Woodrow Wilson’s was anathema to Mr. Nichols. There was such a thing, Mr. Wilson had said, as being too proud to fight, which simply meant, according to Mr. Nichols, that we were afraid to fight. We were a soft nation of yellow-bellied cowards, particularly those people in the Middle West. They did not know, by God they didn’t, that there was such a thing as national honor. They did not care if we were insulted and it was no wonder the Germans laughed at us in Berlin. After sinking the Lusitania, they knew we wouldn’t fight. There had only been a cringing sort of note penned by William Jennings Bryan. We would go on playing the part of poltroons and cowards, making money out of war contracts until we had someone else besides a college professor in the White House. It was a good thing that election was coming, for there might be a few men left in the country who were not glad that Woodrow Wilson had kept us out of war. He wished that Theodore Roosevelt were in there; that man might interfere with business, but he was not afraid to fight. Mr. Nichols wished to heaven that he were ten or twenty years younger. He wished that he were Jeffrey Wilson’s age and he would not be wearing out the seat of his pants in any office.
Those conversations never reached any conclusion. Nevertheless it began to be plain, and Jeffrey felt it vaguely, that those nations known as “the Allies,” on the other side of an ocean which Jeffrey had never crossed, were not going to defeat the Germans by themselves. There was a dread which lay behind nearly everyone’s thoughts and words—a mass emotion—and perhaps this was all that ever caused a war—a mass contagious thought shared by all the people, which the poets, the writers and the artists of the generation would never bring to full expression.
Later Jeffrey realized that he had been witnessing the phenomenon of a people drifting into war, and that it had been a collective impulse beyond the power of any group to stop. The formation of his own convictions was as imperceptible as the rotation of a planet. You were told on impeccable authority that the world made a complete revolution in space each day, which meant that half the time you must have been walking upside down, like a fly upon the ceiling; but there was nothing you could do about it—everyone else was walking upside down.
None of it impressed him much—the autumn election, the campaign speeches, the German note on unrestricted submarine warfare—none of these had anything to do with what had happened between him and Louella Barnes; and that itself, when he thought of it later, was something like the war, for it had the same inescapable quality.
Once that winter he had actually held Louella’s hand. They had been sitting alone in the little parlor and Louella had made a plate of fudge. Jeffrey had been careful not to eat more than two pieces of it, but when he had told her that it was very good fudge, she must have thought that he was going to reach up to the little table and take a third piece because she laughed, and placed her hand over his to restrain him.
“Don’t be such a greedy pig,” Louella said, “and eat up all my fudge.”
On thinking it over later, he knew that Louella must have regretted that playful gesture, because, without intending to in the least, he had taken advantage of it. She had put her hand over the back of his and somehow the next moment he was holding it and then all time seemed to stop. He could not even remember whether she had tried to draw her hand away. It lay there for a moment, and he believed that it was better to pass it over without mentioning it specifically.
“It’s pretty late,” he said, “I guess I’d better be going.”
“You always think it’s getting late,” Louella said. “You’re not mad, are you?”
“Why,” he asked her, “why should I be mad?”
“Because you said you had to be going home.”
He smiled at her, blankly, but he knew that she had forgiven him, and that they would say no more about it.
“Silly,” Louella said, “open your mouth and shut your eyes, and I’ll give you something to make you wise.” It was infinitely sweet of her, but he knew that he must be more careful after that. It would not do to frighten a girl like Louella by trying to hold her hand.
Toward the end of March, when Jeffrey had stopped by on his way from the train, Louella asked him if he wouldn’t come back after supper—that is if he didn’t have something better to do. Her father and mother
were going to a whist party at the Thompsons and she was going to be alone. It had pleased him very much, because lately he had been afraid that he was taking up too much of Louella’s time. It must have meant that Mr. and Mrs. Barnes did not think that he was paying Louella too much attention.
There was a soggy blanket of snow over everything and it was raining.
“My,” Louella said, when she opened the front door, “you haven’t got a muffler on—you’ll get your death of cold.” And then when he was taking his overshoes off she told him to hurry and come in by the fire, and she asked him to help her pull the sofa near the fire so that she could see that he got thawed out. Louella said she was awfully glad that he had come because she knew it was silly, but it was spooky just sitting in the house all alone and hearing the rain on the windows. The rain sounded just like ghosts trying to get in, and she asked Jeffrey to sit still and not say anything. Jeffrey said it always was lonely in a house alone, and Louella said but now it was company—two made company and three made a crowd, but the ghosts knocking on the window didn’t make a crowd, because she knew that Jeffrey would see that they didn’t get in.
There was nothing in Louella’s appearance to show that she was afraid of ghosts or spooks. She had on a new yellow silk dress that was very tight around her arms and shoulders, but the skirt was all yellow pleats and ruffles and the color went beautifully with her hair. When she asked Jeffrey what he was staring at, he said that he was looking at her dress and Louella said it was just a dress she had made from a pattern.
“I was just trying it on,” she said, “and then I heard you coming. Mother doesn’t like it,” Louella said, “she thinks it’s a little—too tight in front.”
Jeffrey looked carefully at the fire.
“Down on the paper,” Jeffrey said, “they think we’re going to get into the war.”
“Oh,” Louella said, “men always talk about war.”
She said she hated the Germans, but she did not want to think of Jeffrey going to the war.
“But I suppose you’ll be dying to go,” Louella said.
Jeffrey had not thought of it at all until she mentioned it, and then she asked him if he was sure he had not caught cold. They must have talked for some time, for all at once when he looked at the clock on the mantel, in front of the beveled mirror, it was half-past nine.
“Maybe I ought to go home,” Jeffrey said, “it’s getting sort of late.”
“That’s what you always say,” Louella said. “I don’t know why I like to have you here when you always say that.”
“Well, I just meant—” Jeffrey began—“I just thought maybe you were tired.”
“You mean you don’t like being alone with me,” Louella said.
And then her voice broke.
“You don’t like me,” Louella said, “I always knew you didn’t.”
Jeffrey could see himself, years afterwards, seated on that sofa with the golden oak of the Barnes mantelpiece in front of him. He could see himself edging furtively toward Louella Barnes. He could see himself extending his arm, gingerly, and putting it across her shoulders. He could remember Louella’s sobbing, and the exact crinkling sound of that yellow dress. Whenever anyone said afterwards that Americans were bad lovers—and there was a time when serious thinkers were inclined to find that the answer for everything that was wrong in America—its brashness, its lack of good food, its inferior literary output and the frigidity of its women—whenever this assertion was advanced, Jeffrey would wince internally, and live that scene again. When he did, he would try to discover what had been wrong with it. He would wonder, with a lack of gallantry which he confined only to his thoughts, what might have happened if Louella had been more experienced. Often when he read passages on the beauty of young love, Jeffrey wondered if it did not rather possess a certain tragedy and a lack of fulfillment which the writer had conveniently forgotten. At any rate, that dated picture of Louella and himself on the sofa would tangle itself irrationally with all sorts of thoughts and moods.
“Louella,” he said. “Louella, I—”
He always thought of it when he read love scenes, particularly the parts about kissing. He thought of it when he read about the couples kissing each other carefully, lingeringly, or thoughtfully, or hungrily. He thought of it when he read that their lips met or that her lips found his. Whatever he and Louella did, it did not fall into that category. He had visualized that moment for so long that when it happened it was all a hasty blank. Somehow, doubtless because Americans were not great lovers, the fire tongs and poker fell upon the hearth when he kissed Louella Barnes, but he was not conscious of the sound. He was only conscious that Louella’s dress was pressed against his coat. Her eyes were tight shut, and he saw that there were little freckles on her cheeks, and there was an aura of the same violet talcum powder that Alf had loaned him. He did not know whether she pushed him from her gently, as those love passages had it, or whether it was he who released her reluctantly. He only knew that they were sitting side by side on the sofa and that Louella’s face was flushed.
“Oh, Jeffrey,” she said, “oh, Jeffrey.”
His first impression was that it was irrevocable. He could see his past moving from him, and he had never realized how comfortable his past had been. He was bewildered because reality could never have equaled the embroidery of his imagination. The clock on the mantel ticked more loudly. The rug in front of the hearth was scuffed and turned in little folds and Jeffrey found himself bending down and straightening it.
“Jeffrey,” Louella said, “do you think we ought to tell Father and Mother?”
“Why, I don’t know,” he answered, “why?”
“But we’re engaged, aren’t we?” Louella asked.
The inescapable fact of it gripped Jeffrey.
“Yes,” he said, “I guess so.”
“Well, aren’t you glad?” Louella asked.
“Why, yes,” Jeffrey said, “yes, Louella.”
“Then you might act glad,” Louella said.
Her voice had a sharpness that was unfamiliar to him, but he felt the justice of it. The least he could do was to act glad.
“I’m just getting used to it,” he said. “I never thought—”
Louella’s laugh interrupted him. He could see that she must have wanted it to happen.
“Maybe it would be nicer to have it a secret,” Louella said, “just for a little while. Do you think it would be nicer?”
“Maybe it would, for a while,” Jeffrey said.
“Oh, Jeffrey,” Louella said. “I can’t believe it, can you?”
He was already believing that perhaps it had not happened, even though he knew it had.
“Oh, dear,” Louella said, “here come Mother and Father now.”
He could hear their footsteps on the porch. He could hear Mr. Barnes stamping on the mat and then the front door closed.
“Why,” Mrs. Barnes said, “hello, you two.”
“Hello,” Mr. Barnes said, “Jeffrey’s been calling, has he?”
“Yes, sir,” Jeffrey said, “is it still raining outside?”
“It’s raining cats and dogs,” Mr. Barnes said. “How cozy you two look in front of the fire.”
“I guess I ought to be going now,” Jeffrey said.
“Well, it’s so nice you came over,” Mrs. Barnes said. “Harold, will you come out here for a minute?”
“Why,” Mr. Barnes said, “what’s the matter now?”
“Harold,” Mrs. Barnes said, “there’s something I want to show you in the kitchen.”
Back in the kitchen he could hear Mr. Barnes’s voice.
“Don’t keep telling me,” he said, “I am leaving them alone.”
But Jeffrey pretended not to hear it. He was pulling on his overshoes. He and Louella were alone in the front hall. Louella was helping him into his coat and telling him to button it tight around his neck. She was saying that she would see him tomorrow, and of course he would see her tomorrow, and he was won
dering if Mr. and Mrs. Barnes could hear them.
“Well,” Jeffrey said, “good night, Louella, I had a very nice time.”
But he knew that something else was required of him. He bent down quickly and kissed Louella’s cheek.
“Good night,” Louella whispered, “dear.”
He hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Barnes did not hear them. There was no doubt that they were engaged.
Jeffrey found himself walking very quickly and in the confusion of his thoughts he did not mind the rain. He wanted to feel that he was absolutely happy, but instead he had a feeling that was almost like relief that he was not there any longer. He had known that he would love Louella Barnes always. Yet, now that he had discovered that Louella Barnes loved him, instead of experiencing the acme of happiness, he wanted to get away. He told himself that he must be going mad, that decency and obligation and every proper instinct made any sort of escape impossible. He told himself it would be better the next time he saw her. He told himself that it was all because he was so surprised. He never realized, as he was walking away in the rain, that he was leaving Louella Barnes already, and with her leaving everything he had ever known.
20
Old Kaspar, and the Sun Was Low
One morning in the summer of 1935, when Jeffrey was not obliged to go to New York, and when there was nothing to do at all, he was reading the paper under a tree in front of the house in Connecticut. Madge had bought the place two years before with her own money, and Jeffrey had not approved particularly. He had told her that everyone was buying farms in Connecticut, especially in the neighborhood of Westport, and that now the whole country was being filled with all sorts of people who wanted to get away from the city. They were just like all the people that they were trying to get away from, except that in the country they had allowed their personalities to expand. Jeffrey had told her that she was only buying the place because her friend Beckie had bought one. It had not helped, either, when he had heard Madge saying to someone across the table, when they were out at dinner, that she had bought it so that they could have some place to live, come the Revolution.
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