The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  Being an eager and sociable girl, she was overwhelmingly bored during the eight or nine hours a day that Toby spent in his office or at the docks. His friends, blue-jowled men in overalls and rope sandals who spoke no English, were useless to her, and she agreed with him that she should not flash upon the Anglo-Saxon colony busy in making believe that they were in England or America. Boredom led her to an attack of homesickness. Her love, unrequited except by Toby’s pagan and admittedly beautiful desire for her, raised a puritanism that was never very far from the surface; she became unpleasantly aware that she was living in what her father would call sin. For three more weeks she brooded over herself and Toby and her loneliness, then fled for refuge to America, a huntress worried by her own pack of hounds.

  That was that. Toby shook himself free with a sense of satisfaction, which endured just a day, a night and a day. Then he realised that twenty-nine years and experience of many women had not in the least protected him from falling in love but had merely blinded his power of self-analysis. He refused to send her pillowcase to the laundry, though the scent of her hair tortured him. He collected and hid in his desk an artificial flower, an empty powder box and all the heart-rending débris left behind by a feminine occupation of his chest of drawers. In vain he told himself that Ruth would never be faithful; in vain he swore that marriage was an unnecessary folly and that his sanitary Ruth was meant to be used and discarded like one of her own American paper cups. He wanted her body. He missed her companionship. His ears were hungry for the sweetly drawling voice uplifted at the end of each sentence, for the little double grunt that she spoke instead of “no,” for her talk, smooth as that of a well-trained hostess and full of humorous snap judgments of men and things. On the fourth day after she sailed he wrote to her to come back and marry him.

  Her answering letter was as passionate as his own. She would marry him, but she would not go back. Let him come to the United States, the land of infinite prosperity where even office boys were making fortunes and a man with his brains and energy could be a millionaire in five years. Ruth had found her country very good to the taste. Eager to make up for the lack of solidity of her stay in Europe, she had plunged at her Country Club, her Junior League, her bridge, her horses and her school-friends; if only the divine Toby could be added to these pleasures, she had nothing more to ask.

  Toby had no desire whatever to make his life in the States. Wealth and success, assuming they were to be had, were meaningless if not on his own territory—by which he meant half Europe with London as its centre. To go to America without a job was distasteful to him, for he was accustomed to pour scorn on the immigrant—at any rate, of his own upbringing—who took the easiest route to making a living by deserting to a new land. He spent the best part of a year urging her to return; but to Ruth he seemed merely cautious. She could not understand how a man could cling to a banana office in Biscay when Eldorado and his beloved awaited him across the Atlantic. It was ridiculous, she wrote, to worry about money. Her father would give him a job in his office; he needed someone with experience of European banking.

  Toby did worry, for he valued his independence. To trust to the goodwill of an unknown father-in-law was a blow to his pride and thoroughly unwise. In everything his love of Ruth and his vague, almost instinctive ambitions were opposed. He refused to admit it, and the difficulties only increased his idealisation of the girl. When letters and cables failed to move her, he gave Payne & Edwards three months’ notice and turned all his possessions into cash.

  He sailed on a Spanish freighter in late August 1929. The captain was a friend of his and the food and wine excellent, but the appearance of the rusty Cabo Culebra discharging general cargo in an obscure Hoboken dock that stunk of bone manure alarmed Mrs Beverley—whose mental picture of a Spanish ship had been a stately galleon manned by bullfighters—and even drew a mild and laughing protest from Ruth. Toby realised that for a day at least he had better be more English than the English and give his public what it wanted. On their drive to Long Island he behaved as a model of cool correctitude. Mrs Beverley, who had intended to impress the new arrival with the immensities of New York, decided that he might think it vulgar boasting and merely pointed out the sights with a casual wave of the hand.

  In her own country Ruth was very much the jeune fille. Toby loved her none the less for her discretion. Ruth’s parents, who, he observed, could deny her nothing, were naïvely thankful to find him so presentable. Her father was a spare, sandy little man, shy in mixed society, rowdy and cheerful with other men. Her mother was a capable and merry woman with iron-grey hair, the skin of a child and a beautifully dressed body which, though now angular, was still desirable; it was comforting to think that Ruth would look like Mrs Beverley at the age of fifty. They were a simple, hospitable couple, without pretence except that of attaining an ever more exclusive circle of society. Their white colonial house, prim and honest, permitted that pardonable affectation while forbidding any more serious.

  Toby spent with them an idyllic autumn, amazed at the kindliness with which he was received. These Americans gave so much for so little; all they asked was that a man should be a regular fellow. This Toby defined as one who pretended to some knowledge of sport, could talk intelligently of ways and means of making money, was neither surly nor eccentric, took the United States seriously but not its government, and drank cheerfully to begin with, regardless of how he held his liquor later—an essential point of charity, for no one could guess beforehand what the effect of his host’s cocktails would be. Only once was his popularity in danger, when he suggested in the changing room of the golf club that the bold and predatory financiers of the nineteenth century would have begun to sell short. Toby was no economist but he had watched inflation in France, Germany and half a dozen lesser countries and knew the symptoms. He was met by a storm of protest—each one of his listeners privately considered himself a financial genius, engaged in laying the foundations of a great American fortune.

  The Beverley Trust Company Inc. was a straightforward business for collecting, through local agents, the money which immigrants wished to remit to their families in Europe. Between the collection of the dollars and the purchase of the foreign exchange, Mr Beverley used the funds as cover for his marginal operations on Wall Street. He was quite unconscious of any wrongdoing and explained the principle to Toby with considerable pride in his own smartness. Bankers, he said, were not a bunch of hidebound conservatives in his country—no, sir! Toby politely agreed, and put off the unpleasant day when he would have to tell his prospective father-in-law that he would not enter the Beverley Trust Company. The difficulty was settled for him by the October crash. Mr Beverley held out for a fortnight by dint of sending all collections to his broker instead of abroad and then could stave off ruin no longer. Had he been a deliberate criminal he might have faced a term of imprisonment and preserved enough of his capital to live on; but he was convinced that he had only done his duty, and was utterly bewildered that an honest man could be so struck down by fate. Dramatic as a child, he pretended that he was going to throw himself out of the office window. Unfortunately he lost his balance and did so.

  Toby did what he could to comfort Ruth and her mother. It was not much, for his position was difficult. Whatever kindness he showed, to whomever he gave his shoulder for their tears, he still remained as futile as an expensive lapdog running about the streets of a deserted city. As soon as he decently could, he took a cheap room in West Twelfth Street and began to look out for a job. He answered and inserted advertisements, but the only replies he received asked for capital as well as services. He called on half a dozen business houses likely to appreciate his experience and was most considerately interviewed. On every occasion he was certain that he had got a job, and realised only later that he had underestimated American politeness. It seemed impossible for the head of a business to say no when he meant no—so long as the applicant was well-dressed. Meanwhile his savings, severel
y depleted by social expenses before Beverley’s death, were vanishing.

  Ruth, with the adaptability that was her birth right, had got herself employed as a salesgirl in her favourite hat shop, and had hired from a friend, at a nominal rent, a furnished apartment in the west nineties. She was impatient with Toby’s failure. For the first time she felt superior to him; and she was tired of feeling superior to men. It was absurd, she said, for Toby to complain that he could not find a job. America was still the land of opportunity though the stock market might have crashed. Even a high-school boy had only to walk into a shop or office and claim to be able to do whatever they wanted done. By insisting with sufficient assurance that one could jerk soda or work a calculating machine or write advertising, two weeks’ pay was certain before one was found out. And by passing from one employment to another a man was sure to find something he could do. Toby was quite incapable of following her advice; he had perhaps more positive qualities than the high-school boy, but not his brazen impudence.

  Mrs Beverley was being looked after by a distant cousin until the Beverley estate, if any, should be cleared up. The cousin was obviously in decorous love with Ruth, and whenever Toby called at her apartment he found his rival in possession and earning deserved popularity with gifts of gin and ginger ale. He lived in an agony of jealousy, and it was the more pain since he could not fight. His rival was, he fairly admitted, a first-rater, a gentle soul in the late thirties who managed a prosperous string of filling stations and was neither mean nor ostentatious with his money. Meanwhile he himself was imprisoned in his poverty. It was ridiculous to make Ruth marry him when they had nothing but her earnings to live on. It was absurd to ask her to wait when every day only showed up his own inability to adjust himself to the civilisation in which she was born and bred. He was humiliated by his failure. True, he had fallen on a strange land in hard times, but that was no excuse. Let alone Ruth’s damned high-school boy, he knew that any one of his Spanish friends could have fished as well in troubled waters as in calm. He saw less and less of Ruth. Bitter shame kept him away from her. He felt her impatience and could not endure her pity.

  By the beginning of December his money had gone and he was pawning his wardrobe for what it would fetch. The rent was a month behind—his landlady was unhurried, for she had not the faintest idea that he was completely broke—and he could not afford decent food. He lived on bananas and biscuits, a diet which, to his inexperienced belly, seemed to give the most nourishment for the least cost. All the while his desire for Ruth tortured him. He recalled their weeks in Spain and cursed his folly in leaving it, in leaving Vienna, in ever being such a fool as to step off the beaten track. He reviewed his restaurants and his careless living, and that ended in the vision of Ruth enjoying all the transports of all his women in the arms of another man. In the floating wreck of his emotions, so conflicting that they forced him to talk aloud as he walked on the street, there was but one solid left. It was his pride. He would not leave the country. He would not write to his father for money. If he were bound for the bottom of society, then, by God, he would go there.

  VII

  THE VISION

  For some time Toby had haunted the translators’ offices, begging for their miserably ill-paid work. Even this was hard to get, for neither the proprietors nor their clients cared whether their own or any other language was correctly written, and the work was entrusted to recent immigrants who were equally illiterate in English and their mother tongue. The most promising of the offices was Regan’s. Regan scented in the Englishman an outlaw from society and, though he gave him no translations, showed his goodwill by talking freely of his past.

  Old Regan had learned Spanish and salesmanship while acting as bawdy-house runner in Buenos Aires. When he returned to his native New York he touted enough business from the lower end of Broadway to set up a translation bureau. He did the Spanish himself and employed outside workers for other languages; two clerks handled the correspondence. His office, with black windows opening on to the Elevated Railway, was bare of all but desks, files piled on the floor, a few dictionaries, and handbooks of commercial correspondence; it was thick with dust and he himself looked dusty. He had a bald head speckled with the brown scabs of some unpleasant disease, and wore a sandy and white beard grown to impress customers with his learning—which it did.

  On a third visit Toby got from him a German catalogue of lenses and microscopes. The firm’s agent had twice returned the translation as unsatisfactory; he could not write English, but at least he knew, having studied it in Gymnasium, that when read it should make sense. Toby went into retreat in the Public Library and spent a day mastering the elements of optics before he tackled the translation. For two days’ work he received two dollars. He was proud of having upheld his own standard of scholarship on one meal and no tobacco. It restored his self-respect.

  As soon as he received his pay he treated himself to eggs and bacon and a sirloin steak, followed by a double portion of wheat-cakes with unlimited maple syrup. He then bought fifteen cents’ worth of tobacco and filled his pipe. That smoke on a full stomach was, he admitted and believed even in the midst of any self-indulgence, the most exquisite physical sensation he had ever known.

  Regan now gave him enough work to pay for one solid meal a day. It was a wretched existence, but neither hopeless nor humourless. After three weeks of it, there came a morning when he stepped out of his bath and began to sing. He stopped in surprise, suddenly aware that he had not done so for a year. He prodded his desperate longing for Ruth as a man sucks at an aching molar. There was no pain.

  “By God!” exclaimed Toby aloud. “I’m out of love!”

  “We praise thee, O Lord!” he chanted. “We acknowledge thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth worship thee, the Fa-a-a-ther everlasting!”

  He dressed to a chorus of his own exclamations of delight. This was a far cleaner delivery than his slow forgetting of Irma. It was clear and absolute. He was a bachelor, salted, a free man. And he had fallen out of love at the very time when he was aching most desperately for his girl, when his desire was unsatisfied by any woman and his dreams most excited. The moral of it was crude, vivid and never to be forgotten; it became as deep a part of his experience as the knowledge that if he had no money he could not eat. Marriage, for him, would be sentimental folly.

  He breakfasted on coffee and toast at a drugstore and swung away across Washington Square, bound downtown for Regan.

  Regan was luxuriating in the midst of a tabloid morning paper heavy with badly printed photographs of female legs which left their black dust on his caressing fingers.

  “Too early!” he growled. “Get out! Shut the door!”

  “Too early?” Toby answered severely. “What did Washington say at the battle of the Potomac?”

  “What did he say?”

  “Damned if I know! I want work, Regan.”

  The translator put down his newspaper and fixed Toby with a stare that was meant to be tough. It failed to make any impression on the aura of genial vitality that surrounded his visitor. Regan picked up his tabloid and grunted over the top of it to his clerks:—

  “What have you got to-day, boys?”

  “‘And the eunuchs answered!’” quoted Toby.

  “Say, what’s eating you to-day?”

  “Empire Day,” Toby declared. “You behold a citizen of the Great British Empire upon which the Sun Never Sets celebrating his independence.”

  “You pie-eyed?”

  “Pie-eyed with joy, Regan! Give me work, you bald-headed old coot! Give me work. We want work and we won’t wait. Rumanian and Bulgarian, Greek and Gaelic.”

  “Here’s some Greek,” said one of the clerks.

  “Say! You never told me you knew Greek!” Regan protested. “We get a lot of business from Greeks. Seems like every day they don’t see their cuties they have to write to ’em, see? They come here to have it done i
nto English, see? And I do it cheap, because they’re all the same.”

  “It ain’t a love letter,” said the clerk. “It’s from a preacher.”

  “Shall unconquerable Eros strike only upon the shoe-shine parlours and cafeterias?” Toby declaimed. “Shall he not fall upon the rich and the preachers? Give me that letter!”

  He grabbed it and looked it over, hoping that a classical education and a dictionary would allow him to make out the tongue of modern Athens.

  “But this is ancient Greek!” he exclaimed.

  “It come in on this morning’s mail,” said Regan firmly.

  “Okay!” Toby answered. “I’ll let you have the translation this evening. Got anything else?”

  “Not unless you want a kick in the pants.”

  “Don’t boast, old son! You couldn’t stand on one leg if you tried.”

  Regan grunted amiably and made an obscene gesture with his thumb. He liked Toby and considered him vastly improved by, as he supposed, gin for breakfast.

  Toby walked briskly up Fifth Avenue to the public library and chose a chair from which he could see the maximum number of lovely young Jewesses improving their minds. The job was a dozen lines of Greek on a slip of paper, accompanied by a letter from Dr Carnaby Postlethwaite, St Anthony’s Rectory, New York City, asking for an immediate translation. Toby had almost forgotten his Greek, but two minutes with a dictionary were enough to show him that the passage came from the New Testament. Reference to a bible identified it as Matthew VI. 24-25. Here apparently was the rector of a metropolitan church unable to recognise the original of the Sermon on the Mount. Toby rejoiced exceedingly and, conquering the temptation to make friends with the savage and spiritual reincarnation of Esther who sat opposite him, shot off on a sudden impulse to interview Dr Carnaby Postlethwaite.