Wheels within Wheels

by Alec Waugh

  The moment Roy had left the apartment she rang up Renter’s. Was Mr. Lester in? Yes, Mr. Lester was in. Could he come round and see Miss Summers? Yes, certainly he would come round and see Miss Summers.

  “This is about the last piece of work that I shall ever do for Renter’s,” he was telling her twenty minutes later.

  “Why?”

  “I told you. I’m going west.”

  “They fired you?”

  “No. They fired the other man. He’s married and got a kid. Things would go badly for him. I was through, anyway. I said he could keep my job. I’d take the road. But any way, what is it you want to buy?”

  “I don’t want to buy. I want to sell.”

  “That’s what everyone’s wanting to do just now.”

  “I’m leaving this place.”

  “Most people are leaving their places.”

  He spoke with a friendly, open-hearted smile. It clearly didn’t matter to him which way the wind blew. He was young, and strong. His shoulders were broad enough to carry most loads.

  “What have you got to sell?”

  She showed him. He glanced over the cases.

  “Two hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “They cost ten times that.”

  “A good many things are going to-day for a tenth of what they cost.”

  “That’s really the best you’re offering?”

  “When I get back to the store they’ll be grumbling because I gave so much.”

  “Very well, then.”

  “There’ll be a cheque along to-night.”

  “O.K.”

  She looked at him, half wistfully, wishing he would stay; remembering the first day he had come to sell her the diamond bracelet; how she had wished she could take him places and give him things; but had realized that he was not that kind: that when he was with a girl he did the spending: that they were of different worlds, that he wasn’t to be had that way; on his terms, not on hers; and how she had been sad about it, in just the same way that she was sad now because he was going out of her life.

  It would be fun to go west with him, but he wouldn’t want her. He’d want a practical kind of woman, who would look after him; run his house; bear him children and face hardships with a smile. She wasn’t that sort. So he’d have to go. It was a pity, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it. It wasn’t enough for two people to like each other, to like the look of one another. You had to fit in in other ways. There wasn’t any use in his hanging around. So she held out her hand and, “Good luck,” she said. “I’ll think of you.”

  The door of the apartment swung.

  It was lonely when he went. She’d have to be packing soon. The apartment was taken by the week, the furniture paid for by the month. They’d both go back to where they’d come from. There’d be herself with two-fifty dollars, and two wardrobe trunks. She was on her own again; just as she had been a year ago; and just as she had done a year ago when she was feeling lonely, she dialed a Bowery number.

  Could she speak to Mr. Bergheim? It was Miss Summers speaking. A moment later. “Yes, it’s me, Cary,” she was saying. “Yes, I know it’s a long time, Joe. I’ve been busy this way and that. You’ve heard? Really! Well, look here. I was wondering, couldn’t I come along one evening? Saturday? That’ll be swell. There’ll be some of the boys there? Swell. It’ll be grand to see you.”

  With a smile Bergheim replaced the receiver of his telephone. So she’d come back on Saturday. There’d be the boys there, and other girls. There’d be rye, there’d be the radio, and a ten-dollar bill in her bag when she said good night. And this was the girl that Roy Bauer had spent his thousands on. She had ridden on the crest of the wave; the waves were falling. There were too many like her. Cuties, like the smart cars, had been turned out by the thousand to be bought on the instalment plan: it was fine riding about in a smart car with a smart girl at your side. But the wind changed. You couldn’t meet your instalments; the car went back to stock; the girl rang up her former friends.

  Caroline was a luxury; people dispensed with luxuries in hard times. They flung overboard everything that wasn’t real. And Caroline was never real to Roy. His mother was real to him. The chain store; that was real, since it provided a real need in the public life. But all this buying of shares: the smart car: the smart apartment: the night clubs and the girls that went with it; that wasn’t real. More than half of it was done to impress himself; and the other half to impress his mother. Like a child, bringing its drawings to a mother to be praised.

  Roy’d never grown up. He was adolescent, like his country. He’d lost his head like an adolescent when things were going well. He’d bought and bought, regardless of intrinsic value. Now he would sell and sell, regardless of intrinsic value, driving commodities below their value as before he had driven them up above their value. Now he’d go back to his mother and be comforted; and soon he’d feel important again, and the big little fellow altogether. But he wasn’t grown up yet. He wasn’t man enough to understand a woman: to be real to a woman. He’d never been real to Caroline. She’d never been real with him; for all his gifts and adoration.

  She’d feel far more real on Saturday with the boys at his apartment. The Jews were an adult people. They understood women. They venerated what was important in woman: wifehood, motherhood, the family. But orgies they did not think important. They enjoyed them, as one would a game, they thought them no more important than a game. Which was why they made it clean and real and wholesome: so that a girl felt happy with them. Girls wouldn’t come if there wasn’t a ten-dollar bill in their bags afterwards. The boys wouldn’t expect them to. Jews were practical and understood exchange; but the girls wouldn’t come for fifty dollars if they didn’t enjoy themselves.

  • • • • •

  “A cable for you, Mr. Bergheim.”

  It was from New Orleans: from young Shirley. He was not going to take up any share in the oil well. So the syndicate would have to go into liquidation. For a moment he toyed with the idea of buying up the mine himself. There was quite likely to be oil there. He could form a syndicate when times grew better. But he shrugged the idea away. That wasn’t his job. He must stay the middle-man. If once he started speculating, he would be no better off than a Bauer.

  He wrote out a telegram to Newton.

  “You may consider the French Caribbean Syndicate wound up,” he told his secretary.

  Later on, perhaps, when the storm had passed, when confidence returned, when the Golden Tripod was again set upon its feet, it would be possible to form another syndicate: to continue excavation; to strike, perhaps, a rich fountain of wealth. But for the moment speculation was at an end. People were too busy patching up their separate ruins to consider anything but their own safety, their immediate needs. There had been an earthquake; the world was busy searching among the ruins for its scattered possessions.

  In New York, as in New Orleans, as regarded those who had been linked with the fortunes of Santa Marta, the typhoon had passed. John Shirley had saved what he could out of the wreckage; as Roy Bauer had saved what had seemed important to himself. Julia Maine and Caroline Summers, who had been cast aside, were left to make such shift as they could manage for themselves. As far as New York and New Orleans were concerned at that one point of issue, the work of destruction was complete.

  The typhoon had yet to hit London with its full force.

  XVII

  That night Frank Newton sat at his desk with Bergheim’s telegram in front of him and at his right side, waiting for his signature, the document which was to settle fifteen thousand pounds upon his daughter. At his left was a row of figures that proved beyond argument that he had committed himself too far: that if he were to sign the document, if he were to settle that fifteen thousand upon Daphne, he would be unable to find the money which had been entrusted to him by Sir Howard Allen’s will.

  He would be driven to a discreditable bankruptcy. His last years would be of a dishonoured, dishonourable dependen
ce. Ruin faced him as it was facing many another man. He had been over-confident in the good times: he had refused to recognize the storm signals. He had behaved as though the good time was everlasting. Looking at the rows of figures he saw only one way out.

  Bergheim had said that in a crisis a man learnt what was real to him and what was unreal; that he became himself, choosing what he really needed. The same problem that had been set to Shirley and to Bauer was in a far acuter form set now to Newton. He had to choose between his daughter and himself. If he were not to sign that document, he would be able to pay Sally Allen back her money. He would also be able by diplomacy, by the tactics experience had taught him, to retrieve his position. But if he did not sign the document he would prevent his daughter’s marriage: ruining, perhaps, her happiness for ever.

  He did not hesitate. Now that he knew the facts, he still saw only one way out.

  He rang the bell.

  “I want you to witness this signature,” he said to the servant who answered it.

  He folded the document, sealed the envelope.

  “I want this posted at once,” he told the servant.

  He then drew towards him an envelope and a sheet of paper. He addressed the envelope to his wife.

  “MY DEAREST ONE,” (it began)

  “I hope you will forgive the action I am about to take. I have not the courage to face any other. I have learnt to-day that I am suffering from an illness that gives me less than six painful months to live.”

  He could see no other way.

  His life insurance would cover all his immediate liabilities; this act vindicate his name; would leave his daughter’s marriage unhampered. There would be enough money for his wife. As conditions improved, many of his frozen assets would grow liquid. His position even now was not actually unsound. It was a question of time, and his obligations would not allow him time. His reputation would stand clean. Suicide had come to be accepted as the reasonable act of a man stricken with an incurable disease. Whatever the doctors might think or a coroner might think, the letter would be allowed to stand. People never spoke ill of a man when he was dead. The solicitor who examined his books might wonder at certain things: might say, “He died at a lucky hour for his good name’s sake.” But nothing would appear in public. That was all that mattered, as far as a man’s good repute was concerned. He had preserved that: or rather, would preserve that.

  It was in an acuter form the same problem that Bauer and Shirley had been set. Newton had spoken once of the three loves in a man’s life: the mother, the lover and the daughter. The three loves that in turn absorbed, coloured and directed a man’s life; for which he worked and dreamed; for which, if the need were, he died.

  Shirley, a mature man, faced by a series of alternatives, making a mature man’s choice, had taken the lover. Bauer, though a man in years, being still mentally an adolescent, had made the adolescent’s choice, had abandoned Caroline and returned as a child does to his mother. Newton, an old man with the love of mother and wife behind him, had made an old man’s choice, had sacrificed himself for his daughter; as thirty years earlier he would have for his wife or sixty years earlier for his mother.

  As he put down the pen with which he had written the letter to his wife, with his left hand he opened the middle drawer of his desk and took from it the revolver his brother had brought back to him from the front. It was small, German, an automatic. He wondered under what circumstances it had been fired last. He rose to his feet. There were servants in the house still awake. So as to deaden the sound of the shot he turned on the wireless. He did not want people to come rushing in. He turned the volume needle round; the music swelled gustily into the room. Its noise was so considerable that at first he did not recognize the harmony as more than a familiar one. Then he realized. But of course, yes: this was Faust that was being relayed from New York: an experiment in international broadcasting. The garden scene; Marguerite was on the bench sewing; in another minute there would be that lovely song. It was one of his favourite passages. He would like to wait for that. Where was it that he had heard it first? As a small boy when his father had taken him to Covent Garden. And the last time he had heard it was when he had taken Daphne there in her first season. Only a few bars now: there it came: the lovely, elusive thing. It bloomed, flowered, and was gone. Mephistopheles had started his reply. Frank Newton lifted the revolver to his temple.

  • • • • •

  The report rang out, drowning the sound of the music in the room. There was the thud of a falling body: a groan: the scraping of a heel. Then once again the strains of Gounod beat clear and sweet through the unhampered air; just as they were beating, relayed by a million microphones, through a million rooms.

  • • • • •

  They beat through the noise and the laughter of the bachelor’s evening where Captain Stewart Fraser was celebrating his victory at the Doncaster. Of the five hundred that he had earned on commission from the sale of Appleton he had lost half in the City and Suburban. But the remainder put at long odds on an unknown mare had ensured a comfortable, a more than comfortable year for him.

  They beat in subdued rhythm in the bachelor bed-sitting-room where Daphne Newton and Seton Rivers sat drawing up a list of their wedding guests. “Let’s make it a big show,” she said. “No half-ways. Forty people or five hundred.”

  • • • • •

  Sally Allen heard them as she lifted her glass laughingly to chink it with the glass of the middle-aged guardian who was fêting her engagement.

  • • • • •

  They beat over the summits of Manhattan: in the luxurious apartment in the East Fifties that Roy Bauer was planning to dismember. “I don’t mind for my own sake,” he was saying. “It’s for you I’m worrying, mother.” And she who had moved her habitation so many times was answering, “Very good, dear. But do let us get settled this time.”

  • • • • •

  They beat through the apartment in the West Eighties where Joseph Bergheim was keeping open house. There was rye and dancing; and baccarat for those that liked it. Caroline, in a silk slip, had just executed an exceedingly high-kicked pas seul. She was reclining now on the sofa, laughing and out of breath: a half-full highball in her hand: the fingers of a gay, wise-cracking Jew-boy tightening upon her shoulders.

  • • • • •

  Southwards and westwards they beat over the crescent city where Julia Maine, a book propped open on her knees, read with the mind’s eye the letter that had been handed to her by a darkie an hour back; schooling herself to realize that it was better so; trying to phrase the sentences in which she would break the news to the three people who sat, the one knitting, the one reading the fashion news of the Sunday supplement, the third pondering an article in Harper’s.

  • • • • •

  Southwards and eastwards further over the Caribbean the same strains beat, caught by the vast amplifier in the liner’s bows, to be whispered down the long corridors to the stateroom where John and Marian, close-clasped in each other’s arms, renewed the mystery of carnival. That evening they had been married by the Captain. They had as little idea of what lay ahead of them as had the ancestor who had sailed from Europe. They were content to have each other.

  • • • • •

  Southwards and eastwards further they creaked wheezily into the bungalow of an English oil prospector. “Confound these mountains!” he thought. “Too much electricity.”

  He was busy packing. That morning he had had orders to lay off work. Trinidad again. Port of Spain, starched collars; nice young girls at the St. Clair Club. That woman waiting to catch “The Humper.” Perhaps she had found someone else by now. She might well have done. Six months. It was a long time; long enough. On her account a good deal of extra money had been poured down the mine. He didn’t suppose, if it hadn’t been for her, that he’d ever have sent that cable to Frank Newton. It hadn’t done any harm, he supposed. It had given “The Humper” six months longer run.
No, he couldn’t believe it mattered any. Santa Marta was such a little place: little and far away. So unimportant that you couldn’t even get the radio programmes properly. He didn’t imagine that this extra six months had made a damn of difference, anywhere.

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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  ISBN: 9781448200405

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