by Alec Waugh
He had felt proud to have a nephew who wrote novels that his friends could not understand. He had felt so proud that he had left his nephew his entire fortune.
‘It is the kind of thing,’ the novelist concluded, ‘that could only happen in third-rate novels and in real life.’
There was a burst of laughter and a ripple of applause as he sat down. He had not looked at Faith once while he had spoken. Though there was not in anything he had said one remark personal to her, he was conscious the whole while of her eyes watching him. She had sat very still; her eyes fixed upon his face; with that look in them of detached attention that he had seen there when some member of the State Assembly had explained to her some detail of routine; as though she were taking a great interest in what was said; but no interest in who was saying it.
‘That was interesting, very interesting,’ she said, as the meeting broke up into separate groups.
There was no sign in her reception of him that she was aware of any antagonism in his attitude.
‘I had no idea you’d be so audible,’ she said.
Several members of Miss Stuart’s group had been invited that day to lunch by a rich Iowan who had broken his State’s convention by settling on his retirement in a Fifth Avenue apartment building instead of a Spanish bungalow in California.
‘I’ve got my car here,’ said Faith. ‘There’s room for four in it.’
It was a bright, cold April day, with the sky blue and the sun pouring in a faint amber radiance over the leafless brown-grey expanses of Central Park. The cars purred and neighed down the shining roadway; panting like reined steeds for the red lights to flash to green. There was a sense of life and animation; of imminent adventure. But in Gordon’s heart was an annoyance that was causeless, that he could not explain.
There were twelve covers laid for luncheon. Gordon was on his hostess’s right. Faith was across the table. The conversation was general to begin with; a discussion of the morning’s meeting. Then gradually it split up into its component parts.
‘And how long will you be stopping in this country, Mr Carruthers?’ his hostess asked him.
Until that moment he had had no settled plans. He had known that in the course of the next fortnight he would have to make his plans. He was spending a great deal of money in New York. During the four months since he had left Tahiti he had written nothing. If he was not careful he would be finding himself in extreme difficulties before the winter was at an end. He had known that soon he would have to go, but he had come to no definite decision. It was only now, with the longing to prove his independence of Faith itching him, that he made his decision suddenly.
‘I’m going at the end of next week,’ he said.
Across the table Faith was stabbing at a jellied egg with a forlorn right hand. If he had expected her to start, to show surprise or annoyance, he was disappointed. She lifted her eyes from her plate and fixed her slow green gaze tranquilly upon him with that same expression of detached, impersonal interest.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked. ‘Back to London?’
The question was set on a tone of interested indifference that matched the expression of her face.
‘No,’ he said, ‘to Martinique.’
‘How interesting. You’ll like that.’
‘I want to work.’
‘Won’t it be very hot?’
‘It will be very quiet.’
And he began to discuss Martinique as he had seen it during the few hours of the ship’s stopping there on its way to the South Seas.
‘Will you stay in Fort de France?’ she asked.
‘Only if I can’t get a bungalow in the country.’
‘I think you’re very wise to go there.’
‘There’s too much happening in cities.’
‘For those who like quiet.’
‘And I do.’
No one would have realized that they were sparring with one another. Gordon was even unaware himself of whether she was conscious of their antagonism. The questions were set as friendlily and naturally as were the answers given. The passage only lasted for a minute. A conversation can scarcely be conducted for any length of time across a table. Within a minute or so Gordon was comparing with the lady on his left the colour problem of the Southern States with the colour problem in the Antilles.
‘Sooner or later the West Indies will have gone Mulatto,’ insisted Gordon, and proceeded to defend the thesis; while across the table Faith Sweden in her slow crooning voice was explaining her dissatisfaction with the last act of ‘Street Scene.’ ‘It didn’t grow out of the other two acts,’ she said.
It was not till they were in the drawing-room again, with coffee and brandy served, that Gordon spoke again to Faith. It was she who made the first move.
She came across to him as he was talking to Eve Stuart. She sat beside him. She waited for a pause in the talk, then very quietly and with her eyes fixed on him: ‘It’s silly for us to quarrel, isn’t it?’ she said.
In an instant every trace of his displeasure had been removed. So she had been conscious, then, of his mood as he of hers. ‘We’ve such a little time,’ she said; then after a pause, ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea of yours, that going to Martinique.’
‘Not very good?’
‘I’ve been meaning to suggest to you. We’re going down in July to the South of France. We’re renting a villa in Cap Ferrat. If you were to come down to that part of the world, we’ld see quite a little of one another. I think that would be a better scheme, don’t you?’
With a light heart Gordon drove away from that luncheon party. They were friends again, as they had never been. He was playing squash that afternoon with his New York agent.
‘I’ll give you a wretched game,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a three-course lunch, two cocktails, three glasses of claret, and a benedictine.’
‘And I’ve had one cup of coffee and a combination salad. We’ll have half a buck a game. I’m cashing in on this.’
But in spite of the heavy lunch, and the alcohol, in spite of the slim figure with flaxen hair falling over a low forehead that danced before his eyes, in spite of the sound in his ears of that slow drawled voice, he played with a concentrated energy that rattled his opponent. He was seeing the ball as large as though it were a football. He vollied shots instead of playing them off the wall that had the other breathless and harassed, panting from one side to the other of the court. Within twenty minutes Gordon was five dollars up.
‘I’ll give you double or quits on this last game,’ he said.
He got his fifteen points before his opponent had reached double figures. ‘This is my lucky day all right,’ he said. He made no attempt to define and analyse his fortune. He did not look ahead. There was a timeless quality about his happiness.
He was sad, though, a week later when he caught a morning train from the Grand Central Station to Poughkeepsie. On Tuesday night he was sailing on the Aquitania. This was his last week-end visit to the Swedens. In ten days’ time he would be in England. It was eight months since he sailed through Panama. He should be, he knew, elated and excited at the prospect of return. But his heart was heavy. ‘It’s ending there,’ he thought, as he followed the porter through the vast square towards the narrow tunnel through which he would be projected into the sunlight of Ninety-sixth Street. ‘This is the last time,’ he thought, as he gazed down the narrow avenue of houses towards the boughs and expanses of the Park. How much would have happened to him, he thought before he saw again that momentary vista.
He had the same feeling of last moments as the train drew up at Poughkeepsie, as the familiar chauffeur welcomed him at the station’s mouth, as he drove through the impersonally standardized little town out into the country. Here it was, as he had found it; as it would be tomorrow, with just this of difference: that he would be out of it.
On the lawn in front of the old Colonial house that retained in spite of additions and renovations, its firm dignity of colonial line
, the invariable set of tennis was in progress. ‘There’s a crowd here, of course,’ he thought, ‘there always is.’
‘You’re in the blue room, Mr Carruthers,’ the butler told him. ‘Mrs Sweden thought you’ld like the view over the river.’
The butler, like all the best American butlers, was an Englishman. He was so dignified that any foreigner might have been excused for imagining him the host.
‘So you’ll be seeing the old country, soon, sir. Well, well, I envy you. I don’t suppose I ever shall again. No, sir, I don’t suppose so.’
The butler’s melancholy touched a responsive chord in Gordon. It was amusingly ironic, he thought, that here should he be pitying himself for going home and Simpson envying him for that very cause.
It was half-past twelve when he came downstairs. There were upwards of a dozen people sitting on the sheltered porch, imagining that it was by the sun and not the concealed radiators that they were being warmed. As Gordon joined them there was a general rising of men to feet. ‘Now, I think,’ said Faith, ‘that you must know quite a number of people here.’
A number of faces were familiar, but in spite of the formal and audible introductions, Gordon could never memorize a name that he had not seen in print. He grasped a number of outstretched hands, replying ‘It’s good to see you’ to the ‘Hullo there, Mr Carruthers. How are you?’ The conversation that he had disturbed and that was almost immediately resumed was, as was inevitable in any gathering to which Mr Sweden was attached, general. And, as was inevitable to any such meeting, was conducted by Roger Sweden. Sweden was in holiday mood. He was, that was to say, wearing a brown leather golf-jerkin, a striped tie that in England would have been taken to denote membership of a club, grey flannel trousers, and black and white buckskin india-rubber-soled shoes. But he seemed no more informal in such attire than he had seemed formal in a tuxedo. He was always pretty much himself. And again, as nearly always, Gordon was conscious of a feeling for him that was more than respect and less than friendliness. ‘I’ld have liked to have had him as an uncle,’ Gordon thought.
As a week-end it was like all other week-ends that he had spent at the Swedens’ house. There were the long cocktail hours; the hurried meals; the rushing to golf and tennis, the noise of radios and gramophones; the general talk that, as is inevitable when talk is general, was light, brisk, witty, punctuated by laughter; talk in which Gordon for lack of familiarity with the background could take little part; but into which every now and again Sweden would draw him, throwing out some remark or question in the same way that a sailor will fling out a lifebelt to a struggling swimmer. It was gay, happy, inconsequent, but for Gordon it was shadowed by the knowledge that for him it would so soon be ended. Now and again his eyes would turn across the crowded room to Faith. At the same time, usually, he would find her looking at him, and in her eyes there was the same intent, questioning look. After lunch for a moment they found themselves together.
‘I’m so happy here,’ he said. ‘There’s no one who can give parties in the way that you can.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I ought to be able to, since it’s all I do. That’s what my whole life is: giving parties. It’s one crowd after another all the time. Do you wonder that I want to get away into the quiet, to Cap Ferrat?’
‘But why should you think it’ll be very different there? As likely as not it’ll be crowds there again.’
She shook her head, broodingly. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘It’ll be quite different there.’ She hesitated, as though there was something more that she would have said, but before she could say it one of her guests was at her side.
‘Now, what about cutting in for a fourth at bridge?’
Immediately she rose and followed him. It was not till late in the day that he was again beside her; and then by what in her atmosphere amounted very nearly to a miracle, they found themselves almost for the first time in their lives, alone together.
It was a little after six; the majority of the guests were resting. Tennis and golf were over. A desultory game of backgammon was being shaken for on the porch. They were alone together in the first-floor drawing-room whose balcony looked over the lawn that ran green towards the Hudson. It was very lovely in the evening light, the grey water curving towards the bridge that spanned it, a tug puffing its slow way to Albany; on the other side the massed bank of trees trembling into leaf. Quietly side by side they stood, their hands rested on the railing. Then suddenly, with a little sob, she turned to him.
‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘what are we going to do about it?’
It was like a child’s surrendering of itself. There had passed no word of love between them, but to Gordon it seemed quite natural that she should speak that way.
‘I’m going to miss you so,’ she said.
‘If I tried to say anything I’ld cry.’
He did not lie. Life had brought to him no moment so highly charged with feeling. He who had known the strategy, the manoeuvres, the evasions of modern gallantry, the reluctance on both sides to self-committal, the cautious tiptoeing to see whether the ground would hold, was disarmed at this unreserved admission. Below them in the porch was the sound of a shaking dice and moving counters; behind them came the sound of a servant tidying the room. They were in a crowd, but they were alone, with beauty in their hearts, looking out on beauty.
‘What is going to happen to us?’ he said.
Suddenly, borne across the evening’s quiet, came the ringing of church bells. It was a sound that Gordon had not heard for many months. In cities you do not hear it. There are so many other sounds. And the bells that he had heard summoning dusky figures from the attar huts beneath the palms in Polynesia and Malaya lacked the softness and simplicity of this sound to which so many simple and childlike associations were attached. It was many years since Gordon had been to church. He had lost the habit and had not recovered it. In the conventional sense he did not particularly believe in anything; but these bells sounding in this strange country at this strange moment seemed personal to himself. He had a wish to answer that familiar summons. He felt that he would like to kneel quietly at Faith’s side, and ask whoever it was had guidance of their lives to be gentle with them, since they would have need of gentleness; to protect them against life and against themselves; to let stay with them this new-found sympathy. ‘I’ll ask her,’ he thought: then checked himself. She would only think it silly and sentimental of him. Then very quietly she said:
‘Don’t you think it would be nice if we were to go to early service tomorrow morning?’
As it happened, they did not go. It was past two before the last guests had left the drawing-room. The servant who had been told to call Faith mistook his orders; Gordon overslept. By the time they were both downstairs, it was ten o’clock with the routine of the day started: its bridge, and golf; its tennis and backgammon; its noise and cocktails. Gordon was catching the evening train into New York. The first words he spoke to Faith throughout the whole day were the very last: when he stood on the door-step saying good-bye to her.
‘Don’t worry,’ she had said. ‘August is quite close.’
It was with a heavy heart, though, that Gordon sat back in his Pullman chair; his newspaper dropped forward on his knees. He had said good-bye so often in so many places; on ships, on islands, in far countries. He had said so often: ‘I’ll be back soon,’ and hadn’t been. He had known before that twinge of the heart, that partir, c’est mourir un peu sensation. But never with this intensity. If only she were free. He had lived too long in an atmosphere of facile and fleeting friendships to have any great faith in the permanence of love. Yet he could not believe that Faith and he would have been like all the rest. The way as things were it was as well, probably, that he was going when he was. Things had not got spoiled as so soon probably they would have been. There was nothing really for them to share. They would only make each other wretched. It would be wise for him not to go to France. He could find some excuse or other. Then when th
ey met later, when he came out for his lectures in the spring, they’ld meet as old acquaintances. They’ld say to one another: ‘Have we been wise or foolish?’
Because there had been something between them once, there would be something between them always.
So he argued with himself, as the train rattled its way towards the bright lights and the tall buildings and the long straight streets; so he argued during such spare moments as came to him during his last hectic hours in New York, during his rushings to say good-bye first here, then there; during the pandemonium of the last party from which he had been escorted to the ship; even when he had found waiting for him in his cabin a large bunch of roses, and a card with ‘Come back soon’ scrawled over it in her curious left-handed script; so he argued as the Aquitania plunged and rattled and vibrated through a heavy sea. He had had a glimpse of something that he had never seen before. But it was something that ran too counter to the practical ordering of life. He had sent that telegram, but even so he had far better not go to the South of France. He could easily make some excuse or other that would spare her feelings. Time lessened everything. The things she had said on that last evening were the outcome of a last evening’s mood. One thought one was sincere. At the moment one did actually think those things. But they were of the seed that was scattered on stony ground; that sprang up quickly, that had no roots within itself. Even if it was love that she felt for him, still, it would pass. When they met next they could be simple friends.
Chapter Four
For the Londoner the first days of his return to London have a curious quality of peace. No one knows that he is back. His telephone bell is silent. The pages of his diary are white. He wakes in the morning to the knowledge that an entire day lies unmortgaged at his feet. He can go where he likes, do what he likes, see whom he likes. He is free, if he wishes, to change his mind: to accede to any sudden whim or chance suggestion. He is not forced, should he make any new acquaintance, to realize regretfully that his first free hour is four days distant. That period lasts for about a week. For the course of that week Gordon stayed with his parents in St John’s Wood. Then the sound of the telephone and the growing blackness of his diary convinced him that it was time to return to his own flat.