But Mr. Lovell could do nothing.
“We can start early,” Charles said to Jessica. “If it’s all right, I’ll call at half past six.”
“I’ll wear something warm, Father, and remember what we decided.” Jessica’s voice was sharper. For a second there was another blank silence.
“Well, well.” Mr. Lovell sounded as though a valuable piece of bric-a-brac had been broken. It was all right. It did not matter, at least not before company. “I feel quite out of touch with things. Quite a lot must have been going on since we’ve been away.”
“Not so much,” Charles answered. “Everything’s about the same.”
The differences were only superficial. Everything between them was basically the same except that everything was better than it had been. When Jessica Lovell sat beside him on the front seat of the Cadillac, wrapped in her new polo coat from London, the lights on Johnson Street did not matter. It was a starlit October night and the headlights cut sharply into the coolness in front of them. There was that old smell of burning leaves and toward the end of Johnson Street there were wisps of autumn mist.
“There’s no month as beautiful as October,” Jessica said.
“It’s the best month there is.”
They spoke as though they were strangers because they were still on Johnson Street.
“Let’s drive around the training field first,” she said.
They were silent as they drove around it, but they both must have known they would stop awhile when they were back on the main road, where the houses ended.
Beyond the Royall farm on the main road there was nothing but the black of wind-swept fields and she moved closer to him as he brought the car to a stop. It was like the hill again, that spring. They were clinging to each other and they did not speak for a long while.
“Darling,” she said, “aren’t you going to say anything?”
“I don’t need to say anything,” he told her.
“I know. Darling, I’ve missed you so.” That was when she said she had been afraid last night, just for a moment when she first saw him in the hall, that he did not love her any more.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said.
“No, I know there isn’t,” she said, “not any more, but we mustn’t ever let ourselves get away from each other again. If you see me getting away, you’ll tell me, won’t you? And I’ll tell you.” She was thinking of the way things had been, before she had gone abroad, and now there was not the same sort of gap between them.
“I suppose we’d better go on,” she said. “I wish we didn’t always have to be going somewhere or saying good-by.”
When he started the car again she was still close beside him with her head on his shoulder and with her arm through his as he held the wheel. There was so much to say that it was hard to know where to start. She had missed him every minute, she was saying. She had never been so wretched or unhappy as when they had sailed away and he had been on her mind every minute, or almost every minute. It was no fun seeing all those places alone if you were in love. She had never known how much she loved him. All those places had a sterile sort of blackness which she could not describe.
“It was awfully hard on Father, but he was awfully sweet,” she said. “He kept trying so hard not to notice when I couldn’t keep my mind on anything.”
He did not answer her directly. They were in the car and they were going away from Clyde and he wished that they were going away for good right now, alone together, but he did not tell her that. There were all sorts of other things he wanted to tell her about what he had been doing and what he had been thinking. He had to tell her all about Rush & Company and about why he liked what he was doing there.
“If you want to get on there, you have to see things in a special way,” he said, “and I’m trying to find the way.”
If she could understand what he was trying to do, everything else he had to explain would be much easier. He had to tell about John Gray and it seemed very necessary that she should see his father as he did, what was wrong and what was right with him. He had never told anyone so much about his father and he had never spoken so many of his thoughts.
“Of course, I don’t know much about him myself,” he began. “We don’t speak the same language, or at least we use different dictionaries. The same words don’t mean the same thing.”
Then he told her about the system and the ass and the bundle of hay and how his father was going to beat the system. The only trouble was that he did not seem to know when he had beaten it enough. People like him never knew. It was like walking outdoors into the sunlight being able to say those things to someone without being too careful how you said them.
“He thinks I’m the ass following the bundle of hay,” he said, and then he laughed. “He doesn’t care much about work. Sometimes I think everybody works but Father.”
Of course his father was making a lot of money, money on paper, and he kept trying to persuade his father to get some of it off of paper, but sometimes when he was with his father he felt as though he were the tail of a kite, he said. Had she ever flown a kite? He and Sam used to fly them. If you did not put enough tail on to balance it, then the kite would begin darting from side to side and finally it would come crashing.
“Of course, when you’re the tail of a kite,” he said, “you’ve got to follow it. That’s why we’re in this car. We’re both tied to the kite.”
“It’s nice, being tied to something.”
She had always been tied to something, she said, and she supposed a girl always was, but all of this was new.
Yes, all of it was new and it would always stay so in memory. The car, he supposed, if he were to see it now would look antiquated and clumsy, and the dress she wore that night would be ludicrous if he could see it now, but the Cadillac, her dress, and everything they said always would be new and they always would be young, in memory, riding through an October night.
He was the tail of the kite and he was gambling as hard as his father, he told her. He had no right to criticize.
“You see,” he said, “someone’s got to beat the system. You’re my system,” and she laughed and her arm tightened through his.
“Darling,” she said, “you don’t have to beat me, and besides, I’m not much to beat.”
He knew then that he would ask Jessica Lovell to marry him. The idea of its being possible was like the Cadillac. It was there, but it might not be there permanently. It might, and yet it might not, be illusion. It was just as his father had said—it was surprising how quickly you got used to things—even to impermanence.
The Shore Club, in spite of its name, was two or three miles inland from the water. It was old, for a country club. Its wooden verandas were pockmarked by the hobnails of more than a generation of golfing shoes. Its walls were decorated with mementos of great bygone events and with comical English prints of riders being tossed by their mounts into ponds and hedges. Antiquated drivers and tennis rackets, all suitably labeled, were hung upon the walls, together with whips, a few hunting horns, and the puckered, sad masks of foxes, for there were still a few foxes on the Shore, carefully watched by the owners of the estates on which they took refuge. The tables were decorated by large silver cups and bowls won by club teams and of such a cumbersome size, perhaps, that no one wanted to take them home and so left them where they properly belonged, at the Shore Club. All these objects gave the whole place an atmosphere of violent out-of-door activity, so it did not seem right to be there unless one had reached a state of suitable physical exhaustion.
The members must have been resting at home that evening because the club, when Charles and Jessica arrived there, was empty, and their footsteps echoed in a reproachful sort of silence. A fire was burning in the main room and the chimney must have still been cold for the room was drafty and smoky. They stood there for a moment uncertainly and then Jessica began to giggle.
“I guess nobody’s here,” she said. “It’s like something in
The Green Fairy Book or The Purple Fairy Book, isn’t it?” The log snapped sullenly in the fireplace.
“What do I do now?” he asked her.
“Why, you ring the bell for Clarkson.”
“Who’s Clarkson?”
“I don’t know,” Jessica said, “except he’s always been here.”
Clarkson was the club steward and Charles supposed he should have known it, but then Jessica was used to the Shore Club and he had only been there once before.
“Where’s the bell?” he asked.
“I’ll ring it,” Jessica said. “That’s the way you can tell a college girl. They always ring bells when they’re with a man.”
Clarkson was a thin, elderly man, who of course knew Jessica and who accepted Charles when he explained who he was. It even seemed to Charles that Clarkson looked at him approvingly, as though Clarkson understood that he was on the team at E. P. Rush & Company. It was strange how quickly everything was changing. If they wanted, Clarkson said, he could set a table for them in front of the fire, and if they wanted something before dinner there was something in Mr. Gray’s locker. He was sorry it was so lonely tonight, but then perhaps they did not mind. They could have a Martini cocktail, if they wanted.
“Oh,” Charles said, “I didn’t know my father had a locker.”
Though he did not need the drink—he seldom did in those days—it was just as well to have one, but even without the cocktail, even with the smoking fireplace and the cold air about their ankles, the room would have been warm and friendly simply because Jessica and he were alone in it.
“I never knew what this place was good for until now,” she said. “I wish we could do this all the time.”
Then she told him it was the first time she had not been afraid of the Shore Club. She had been there for golf lessons and she had been there for dances but she had always felt uneasy because she did not live on the Shore.
“I know what the trouble was,” she said. “I never had anyone who belonged to me—and you don’t mind it at all. I never thought of your being able to get on everywhere. What are you laughing at?”
“Malcolm Bryant once said I had mobility,” he told her. “I do feel awfully mobile. I guess Father and I both have it.”
“You were mobile at the firemen’s muster,” she said. “Do you remember?”
There was so much to remember that belonged only to them. Did he remember, she asked at dinner, that Saturday morning at the Dock Street Bank? Did she remember the frogs and the swamp, he was asking, and she asked if he remembered the hepaticas. They had never found a single hepatica.
“We’ll find some next spring,” he told her.
“It was like playing hide-and-seek, wasn’t it?” she said—“always pretending to hide what we thought about each other and yet not wanting to hide it, and now we don’t have to hide anything any more.”
It was not exactly so, because no one would ever tell anyone else everything, but there was the illusion that there was no concealment. When you were in love, all the cards seemed to lie face upwards on the table.
After dinner, they walked out to the parking place where they had left the car. It was the only car there and they did not drive away for a long while.
“I never thought I’d be in just this place under just these circumstances,” she said.
“It’s probably happened before,” he told her, “but then I wouldn’t know.”
“Darling,” she said, “I’m so happy. I’m not sorry about any of it, except one thing, just one thing.”
“What one thing?”
He was not thinking attentively of what she was saying, because they had said so many other things, the things perhaps one always said when one was in a parked car when one was in love.
“It’s Father,” she said. “Poor Father. You like him, don’t you, darling?”
There were still things it was better to conceal. She had raised her head from his shoulder. She was looking at him, trying to see his face through the dark.
“I’m afraid he doesn’t like me much,” he said, “but I don’t blame him. Why should he?”
“He does.” It hurt him because she was no longer happy and he wished that Mr. Lovell had not come into it. “He likes you as much as he can anyone who likes me, don’t you see?”
“Yes,” he said, “I guess I see.”
“It’s my problem anyway,” she said. “You don’t have to mind as long as you understand the way he feels. It’s just waiting until he gets used to it.” She was always saying to wait until he got used to it. “I wish I weren’t torn in two pieces whenever I see you both together … Darling?”
“Yes,” he said.
“He really does like you. At least, he tries to like you. He always says nice things about you, or at least he tries to. I’ve got to love you both at once. That’s all I mean.”
It was a time when nothing was a problem. When one talked of cold facts at such a time, they were like the roseate clouds of a summer sunrise, drifting like gilded islands across one’s thoughts. If they were so large that they temporarily obscured the sun, you knew that the sun would burn through them. There had to be a happy ending, or you could not be in love.
He put his foot on the starter of the Cadillac and at the same time he switched on the lights. The sound of the motor was strong and reassuring. He did not speak as he backed the car and started it down the drive because he still had to give the gears his full attention. The car moved deliberately and slowly until it was in second, and then it was in high and the crunching of the gravel beneath the wheels was louder than the sound of the motor.
“Jessica,” he said, “will you marry me? I wish you would.”
“Why, Charley,” she said, and there was a catch in her voice. “What made you think of that just now?”
Johnson Street and Spruce Street and all of Clyde seemed to be around him as he had proposed to Jessica Lovell.
“Why, I’ve been thinking about it all the time,” he said.
“Well, so have I,” and there was that catch in her voice again. “Oh, Charley, of course I will.”
He felt the blood rush to his cheeks. He could never have described everything he felt but relief must have been a part of it, deep relief that the waiting was over. It had been bound to happen and it was over and now they could go on from there, anywhere they wanted, he and Jessica Lovell.
“But we can’t get married right away.”
“No,” he said, “not right away.”
“We wouldn’t have anything to live on, would we? That’s what Father keeps saying.”
“No,” he said, “not now, but we will have by spring.”
At least he had offered her everything once. He told her that he was only making thirty dollars a week at Rush & Company but he would get a raise on the first of the year. He might be getting fifty dollars a week by spring. Besides, there was the five thousand dollars his aunt had left him, and now it was twenty thousand. He would not be afraid to marry her now, if she were not afraid, but he hoped to have fifty thousand by spring and if he did he would stop. The income from fifty thousand dollars, safely invested at five per cent, would be twenty-five hundred dollars, and if he were making fifty dollars a week that would be five thousand dollars a year. The prospect had a desperate quality, but with Jessica there listening he could believe in it implicitly.
“And Father will give me an allowance,” she said.
“He doesn’t have to,” Charles told her. “I can take care of you, Jessica.”
He could take care of her, now that his thoughts were moving on. He knew that he was doing well in Rush & Company. He might be a partner some day. He could see life stretching out before him like the dark road beneath the headlights.
“Of course, it won’t be much to start with,” he said, “and we don’t have to live in Clyde.” He must have known even then that they should get away from Clyde. Everything he was saying would be truer if they were somewhere else.
“Of
course we have to live in Clyde,” she said. “All our families are there.”
They were already talking as though everything were settled.
“Charley,” she said, “you like children, don’t you? We’ll have the nicest children, two boys and two girls. No, three girls”; and then she laughed. “And we can buy one of those little houses by the river, and we can do it over … Why, we’re talking as if it had already happened.”
When she said it, the house of cards fell down and for a moment he could see every fallacy of its flimsy structure.
“Well,” he said, “it’s got to happen. Jessica, please go on and keep believing.”
“Of course I’ll keep believing, but, darling,” and there was a doubtful sound in her voice, “we’d better not tell anyone—and certainly not Father yet. He might stop me from believing.”
By the time Charles had left the Cadillac in Rowell’s Garage, the lights were out in the house on Spruce Street except in the front hall and in his father’s room at the head of the stairs. The door to the upstairs room was half open and he could see his father sitting in front of his table adding a column of figures beneath the light of his old student lamp which had recently been wired for electricity. The sofa had been reupholstered in green velvet and there were glazed chintz curtains around the windows and a new green carpet, but no one had touched the books. Though the room was swept now and freshly painted, it was still like his father’s mind, full of odds and ends for which he had never found a place.
“Oh, there you are, Charley,” his father said. “You didn’t smash the car, did you?”
“No, sir,” Charles said, “nothing happened to the car.”
“How was Clarkson—and the Shore Club? Did you see Clarkson?”
“Yes, sir,” Charles said.
“You know, I rather like Clarkson. I’d like to have someone like him looking out for me. I’m tired of carrying my own clothes down to Dock Street to be pressed.”
John Gray leaned back in his chair and pushed away his papers and opened the mahogany humidor which he had recently purchased.
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