Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  “No,” Jessica said, “don’t. Let’s not talk about anything constructive. I’m tired of being constructive.”

  The land around them also seemed tired of being constructive. The frost was seeping out from it, leaving it moist and weary. The further they went, the further they were away from anything that was constructive.

  “I’m tired of sitting around and being nice, too,” Jessica said. “I wonder how nice anyone is, really.”

  “Everyone has to pretend,” Charles said.

  “That’s the trouble,” Jessica said, “and so you never know what anyone is really like.”

  He never could remember how Malcolm Bryant’s name came up but it must have been Jessica who spoke of him first because he never would have. She was saying that Malcolm Bryant was always dropping in and giving travel talks about central African beads and life in beehive huts. She never could keep her mind on what he was saying, and she always felt as though she were sitting in a lecture hall.

  “But he’s pretty interesting sometimes,” Charles said. “He’s been around a lot.”

  “Everybody acts as though I ought to like him,” Jessica said. “Charley, did you really think I liked him?”

  It was the most beautiful question that anyone had ever asked him. They were crossing a culvert, over a piece of swampy land, and there was a row of old willows on either side of the road.

  “Did you really?” she asked again, and then before he could answer she slowed down the car and asked him what that singing noise was.

  “It’s the peepers,” he said, “the frogs”; and the high notes of the singing frogs rose all around them.

  “Sam used to take me out to catch them,” he said, “hut they were pretty hard to catch.”

  If you came near where they were they always stopped their singing, but if you stood still long enough you could see them, sometimes. They blew their throats up like balloons. You had to wait a long while, absolutely still, before they began to sing again.

  “Sam could make the best willow whistles,” he said.

  This was just the time for whistles, now that the sap was running in the willows and the twigs were growing yellow. You could always tell by looking at the willows when spring was coming.

  “Can you make a whistle?” she asked—but he was not good at making whistles. He never had been good at doing things with his hands. He never could carve boats or do any of those things in the American Boy’s Handy Book.

  Once long ago, she said, one spring in Clyde, she had gone out picking wildflowers in a place called the High Woods. She always remembered them coming through the dead leaves and she had always wanted to go again but somehow there had never been a chance.

  “Do you suppose there are any flowers yet?” she asked him.

  It was just the time of year when you thought of such things, whether you cared for flowers or not. He told her that the grape hyacinths were out by the front door at Spruce Street and this meant that there might be hepaticas in the woods—not liverwort, he hated the name “liverwort.” It had been a cold, late spring, but still there might be hepaticas on a southeast slope. They would be pushing up through the leaves. He liked hepaticas, he said, better than any other flower, because they were the earliest.

  The road was winding up into the hills again. They were not far from Walton Spring and he was thinking that it sounded innocent and artificial, talking so much about frogs and telling her that he liked hepaticas.

  “I don’t know why it always sounds flat when you talk about flowers,” he said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” she said. “It sounds all right to me,” and she slowed down the car again. “Do you suppose there are any in those woods?”

  She had stopped the car and she pointed to the woods on a hill above a pasture, and when he said there might be, that he didn’t know, she said they might walk up and see. There were bars in a gap in the stone wall and he pulled the bars down carefully so that she could step over them. They walked quickly up the rocky, grassy slope and he held up a strand of barbed-wire fence so that she could crawl under. There was a stand of oak and hickory on top of the hill and when their feet rustled through the dead, sodden leaves there was a musty smell, half of winter and half of spring, but there was not a single hepatica.

  The buds on the branches above them were as tight as though it were still winter, because oaks were suspicious trees, never coming out until they were sure it was spring. There was not a sign of life in those woods, not even a trace of green, except for some rock ferns growing in a crevice of a granite ledge. Nevertheless, they kept on walking. If she started to climb a hill, she said, she always liked to get to the top and they might as well get there. The hill was higher than it looked and when they reached the crest and turned around they could see a wide expanse of country below them through the bare branches of the trees. They could see the curve of the river and the third bridge in the hazy distance and further off to the left the roofs of Clyde, a long narrow town on its bank. Afterwards whenever he saw journeyman paintings, he always thought of himself and Jessica standing on that hill, looking at the toylike town.

  They were both a little out of breath, both looking into the distance down the hill, and they both must have turned toward each other at the same moment. He stared straight at her and she had a grave, startled look and her brown eyes were opened very wide.

  “Oh,” she said, in a dry, matter-of-fact sort of voice, and then the next moment they were in each other’s arms.

  “Oh,” she said again, and he kissed her and they clung to each other, their eyes closed, not speaking. When she turned her head away and let it rest a second on his shoulder he dropped his arms, but suddenly she pulled him close to her again and they stood side by side, looking into the half-defined distance.

  “Well,” she said, “there’s Clyde.” It was just as though nothing had happened.

  “Yes,” he answered, “there it is.”

  “I didn’t know we could see so much from here.” She was not looking at him.

  “It’s because the leaves aren’t out,” he told her.

  The sun had broken through the clouds again, the slanting sun of late afternoon. It was just as though nothing had happened when Jessica and he walked down the hill, as though they had never stood locked in each other’s arms and had never kissed, except that she put her arm through his while they were still in the woods.

  “It’s always harder walking downhill,” she said, but she drew her arm away when they were out in the open pasture.

  “I always like juniper in a pasture,” she said. “Listen. You can hear the frogs,” and they stood for a moment listening, with their shadows long on the brown turf. They walked across the pasture without speaking. It was almost as though it had never happened, but not quite.

  When they were in the car, she pulled a gold compact from her pocket, opened it, stared at herself intently in its little mirror, put a dab of powder on her nose, and snapped the compact shut. Then she pulled down her hat.

  “I wish my hair didn’t always blow,” she said.

  “I like it when it blows,” he told her. It was almost as though it had never happened, but he never would have said such a thing before they walked up the hill.

  “Do you?” she said. “Well, I’m glad somebody does.”

  The truth was that so much had happened that it was better not to talk about it. It was better to sit quietly as they were driving home, conscious only that they were near each other.

  “Charley,” she asked finally, “have you ever been abroad?”

  Once he had thought of working his way abroad on a cattle ship, while he was in college. Some of the boys in his fraternity had talked of it, but he had never done anything more than talk. It was different with her. She had been to England and France with her father last summer and before that she had been with some of the girls from school on a tour arranged by one of the teachers, one of those queer school girl tours when you walked in a small procession throug
h the cathedrals and the galleries. They had gone to Rome and to Florence.

  “I brought back Pliny’s doves,” she said. “Everyone seems to buy Pliny’s doves.”

  As soon as you got home it all seemed a long way off in the distance. It was hard to believe that you’d ever been to Florence. It was like coming home after a dance that year her father had made her come out in Boston. She used to come down from Vassar in her coming-out year and stay at her Aunt Rachel’s on Marlborough Street. She was always doing things, she told him, that she did not want to do particularly.

  “I wish,” she said, “we didn’t always have to do things. Charley, tell me what you have to do.”

  He told her that he would have to go to Wright-Sherwin on Monday morning. He began to tell her about the office and about Mr. Howell, but when he started he had a desperate feeling of everything closing around him because they were back in Clyde again and Clyde was as orderly as the houses on Johnson Street, everything in its place and a place for everything.

  “I might as well get out here,” he said, when they came near the courthouse.

  “Well, all right,” she said, “I suppose it’s better.”

  Everything was in its place and there was a place for everything.

  “Thanks ever so much,” Charles said when the car stopped. “I had a wonderful time.”

  “So did I,” she said, and then she smiled. “I loved every minute of it.”

  “Did you?” Charles asked.

  “Yes,” she answered, “every minute of it. If it’s a good day, let’s do it again next Saturday.”

  “Why, that would be fine,” he said.

  She waved her hand to him when he took off his hat, and when the Dodge rounded the curve on Johnson Street he wondered what she would tell them at home of how she had spent the afternoon.

  12

  In the Spring a Livelier Iris …

  —ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

  Charles could occasionally see himself through the perspective of elapsed time. His mind still worked in much the same way as that of the Charles Gray who must have existed that spring in Clyde. He still had a desire to accept what was around him and to develop according to established rules. Not even in those days, he realized, did he wish to change the rules, although he could see their unfairness. He had never been a revolutionary, he had never possessed the reformer’s urge, but still that spring he could perceive in himself undercurrents of discontent. He was acutely conscious of his own deficiencies and of his inexperience, but it was a healthy sort of discontent and at least he knew what he lacked and what he wanted. He wanted, of course, to be more like Jessica Lovell. He studied, that spring, as well as one could in the Clyde library, the Italian primitives and Del Sarto and Da Vinci. He read the autobiography of Cellini. He learned the difference between Gothic and baroque architecture and he read Hare’s Walks in Rome and Florence. It was probably Jessica Lovell who stopped him from being a small-town boy, Jessica Lovell and possibly Malcolm Bryant. He never attempted to conceal his cultural deficiencies from Malcolm Bryant. In fact he must have felt instinctively that Malcolm presented intellectual opportunity.

  “Listen,” Malcolm said, one evening in May, “why are you always picking my brains about Europe? You wouldn’t like it if you got there. You want to learn to cultivate contentment, Charley. It’s a wonderful thing, contentment. Look at me.”

  “Why are you contented?” Charles asked.

  “I’ll tell you,” Malcolm said. “If you want a frank answer, I think I’m doing better with Jessica. I used to have the idea that she didn’t like to have me around, but now all of a sudden she really does.”

  There was a maddeningly inartistic lack of reticence in Malcolm’s discussion of Jessica. He could not understand, Malcolm often said, what there was about her that attracted him in such a blind, irrational manner. Sometimes he could see very clearly that he was on the verge of making a fool of himself. It was a problem, he admitted, of his own emotional instability aggravated by the forces of biological selection. Did the things he seemed to see in Jessica exist in fact or were they manufactured out of his own imagination? Love was a biological disease, Malcolm said, and once you contracted it you could never be sure of facts. This was hard for anyone who believed in the empirical approach.

  He liked to think, quite frankly, that he was a trained, scientific observer—and quite frankly he was a very good one. His training showed him what was wrong with the Lovells—wealth and tribal ritual had a limiting effect that ended in atrophy. He had never previously been in a position to observe such ritual, aside from the South Sea taboos, and the Lovells were what he termed kapu ali’i, meaning that ritual removed them completely from reality. They lived in a world of antiquities and were actuated by ancestor worship and cultism of the dead. He could see this with painful clarity, only to forget it whenever he saw Jessica. It was emotion triumphing over reason. And what would he do with Jessica Lovell if he ever got her? It would have been amusing to tell Malcolm Bryant that he need not bother to worry, but of course Charles never did and actually he could agree in principle with many of the things that Malcolm Bryant said.

  Charles, too, could see that the Lovells were shut off from most of the rest of Clyde by their own elaborations, but this was not strange because Clyde had made them what they were. Furthermore, he could see that though Jessica Lovell was touchable she was still unattainable, because they had different positions in the plan of Clyde. Though their clandestine meetings that spring had occurred in fact, they still held elements of the unreal and consequently their moments together were the more vivid. He also knew that this situation was bound to change eventually and that the reticences between them would have to break.

  This happened on a warm day in May when the trees were all a soft green. They had driven along the Spring Road again to the same pasture and they had left the car and had walked up the same hill. They had spoken much as they had before as they walked across the pasture, shyly and uncertainly as though neither of them could be sure of what would happen when they reached the woods.

  “It’s been such a late spring, hasn’t it?” Jessica said. “I was afraid it was going to rain today.”

  “So was I,” Charles said.

  “But if it had, we could have driven in the rain.”

  “Yes,” he said, “of course we could have driven in the rain.”

  That meaningless conversation carried them across the pasture and into the woods.

  “I like that coat of yours,” she said. “It’s old but it looks nice.” It was the old tweed coat, he remembered, that he had worn at the firemen’s muster. “You always look so nice, so self-possessed.”

  “So do you,” he said. “You always do.”

  It did not seem possible that the same thing might happen again that had now happened several times before. It did not seem possible that he had ever touched her, because she was unattainable.

  “I’m getting pretty good at walking up this hill,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “but it’s good exercise”—and then the same thing happened, the same impossible thing.

  “Darling,” she whispered, when he held her in his arms, “darling,” and then he told her that he loved her. He could not have said it if she had not spoken first.

  “Yes,” she said, “I know.”

  It was still too immense to talk about intelligently, but suddenly it was fact, now that they had put it into words.

  “Oh, Charley,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I don’t mind right now.”

  “I always wondered what would happen if we said it,” she said. “Do you still love me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Darling,” she said, “everybody’s going to find out.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I suppose they will.”

  “I wish they’d let us alone.” She stopped and rested her head on his shoulder. “Charley,” she asked him, “are
you happy?”

  Yes, he had never been so happy.

  “It’s so different,” she said, “from the first time.”

  “It’s because we said it.”

  “Well, let’s not think about anything else.”

  “What else?” he asked.

  “Oh, everything. What we’re going to do next. All those silly things.”

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” he said, but all sorts of things that should not have mattered were already gathering around them when they walked back down the hill.

  “I don’t think Father will mind so much,” she said, “if he gets to know it gradually and not all at once.”

  “You mean your father won’t like it,” he said. “I don’t suppose he will.”

  “I wish he could just see more of you without its disturbing him. You’re not cross, are you, Charley?”

  “No,” Charles said, “I’m not cross.”

  “Charley, don’t look so unhappy.” She took his arm and pressed it tight against her. “If we had only met each other somewhere else. Do you see what I mean?”

  She was saying, of course, that everything would have been all right if he had only lived on Johnson Street. She was saying, without saying it, that everything would have been all right if the Grays had been better off or even if he had not been a Clyde boy, and it made him angry. It might have been better if his name had been Marchby, but at the same time he was Judge Gray’s grandson. He was thinking that if Jessica had been Priscilla Meader or one of the Latham girls everything would have been all right.

  “Oh, Charley,” she was saying. “Charley, please.”

  He had forgotten until she spoke that she was still close beside him.

  “Oh, Charley, I don’t care what anyone’s going to say.”

  “If you think I’m as bad as all that,” he began, “why did you ever have anything to do with me?”

  “Oh, Charley,” she said, and they stood there in the pasture and she began to cry. It made him feel hopeless and desperate but there was nothing he could do about it. “I only said I didn’t care.”