by Alec Waugh
It was worrying that she should have heard that he was in London. How had she found out? She knew none of his friends, as far as he knew. Through a Press paragraph, he supposed. He tore open the envelope. ‘Gordon dear,’ it said, ‘there was a paragraph in the Express today by Dragoman saying that he had met you at a party, and that you were going to America next week to lecture. Couldn’t we meet before you go? I’m very busy just now, with examinations only a week off, and can only manage an hour for lunch. So perhaps if it isn’t too much trouble you could meet me at the College and we could lunch near by. I expect you’re very busy, but I’ld like to wish you bon voyage and good luck. As ever, Gwen.’
The letter touched him, more than anything that had happened to him since he had seen the train steam out of Nice. She had realized from that paragraph that his life was in some kind of jam: that he had not wanted to meet her as a lover; and so since she had wanted to see him, she had so arranged it that it would be possible for them to meet in a restaurant without embarrassment. It showed an exquisite and touching tact. Maybe, he thought, she’s the one person that’s ever really liked me. One always liked more or less than one was liked.
Directly after breakfast he rang her up. Her voice, that he had not heard for four months, sounded fresh and friendly. It was a little hard to arrange a date. Gordon’s spare time during his last few days was mortgaged heavily, Gwen’s seemed occupied. In the end, the last morning before he sailed was the only one that could be fixed upon.
His train left Paddington at three. He had said all his farewells on the previous evening. As he saw Gwen come through the main hall of King’s College and hesitate in the quadrangle, he started. He had forgotten how attractive, how gay, she was. He had not expected to be quite so pleased at seeing her face light up with a smile. He had forgotten how much he liked her: how much at ease he felt with her. Masters had once said that you were never friends with a man till you had been drunk with him, nor with a woman till you had been to bed with her. ‘It’s the test of a relationship,’ he had said. ‘It makes or ruins it.’ Certainly the many hours he had sat on the edge of a bath, chatting while Gwen lifted her toes above the water, had bred between them a barrierless intimacy. As they crossed the Strand, into Southampton Street, and a few yards up turned into Boulestin’s, they talked as easily as though they had met the day before. There was none of the uneasiness that Gordon had felt when they had met in his flat on his return from America. He told her about the book that he had finished; about how he had gone into the country the moment he had returned and stayed there till it was finished. When he told her that he had been down in Ville-franche, she said: ‘That’s where Paul Morand comes from.’
‘He’s got a very pleasant pied-à-terre house. How did you know that?’
‘I saw Villefranche at the end of his New York book. Did you meet him there?’
‘He wasn’t there this autumn.’
‘You do know him though?’
‘A little.’
And he told her how they had gone into the bay together in a row-boat; and a speed-boat had passed by and offered to tow them to Passable. And it had gone so fast that a wave had washed right over the row-boat and flooded it and shot Morand and him into the water. And how they had got back by hanging on to the end of the boat and being towed at thirty miles an hour back to Ville-franche.’
‘It’s what I imagine surf-riding must be like,’ said Gordon.
‘And what’s he like, himself?’ she asked.
‘He’s a very rare combination,’ Gordon said. ‘He’s what a great many people would like to be. He’s a man of the world, and he’s a man of letters.’
‘But this time,’ she said, ‘there wasn’t anybody interesting?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nobody really interesting.’
‘Well, in a fortnight’s time you’ll be where there’re plenty. I wonder if I’ll be married by the time you’re back.’
It was said so casually that he did not know whether it was said on purpose. He did not fancy, however, that jealousy was a card she ever cared to play; with him, at any rate.
‘Are you thinking of it?’
‘It’s about time I was settling down. What do you think, Gordon?’
‘You know what the French cynic said: “All women should be married, and no men.” ’
‘Do you think I’ld be happier married?’
‘It’s nice to feel that a life’s headed somewhere.’
‘I suppose that’s what I’m missing, really. But . . . it’s such a responsibility. And I’ll take marriage seriously if I marry. I’m not going to make what’s called a modern marriage, and. . .’ she paused, ‘. . . do you think I’ld make a good wife, Gordon?’
‘I know you would.’
‘Do you? I wonder. Oh, well, never mind. Let’s talk of something else.’
And, I wonder, thought Gordon, as they walked a few minutes later down Southampton Street towards the Strand, whether I shall ever see her again. Before he was back again, she might have gone to Malaya to her fiancé. He might have eloped with Faith. It might be years before they were in the same town again. It was hard to reestablish a relationship on a different basis. This might be their good-bye; just as this lunch at Boulestin’s might be his own good-bye to the life of a London bachelor. He was glad that she should be the last person that he saw before the sailing of the ship. In the gateway leading into the Strand, she shook hands with the same firmness that a man might have who was wishing a friend good fortune on a voyage where he would have need of fortune. Her eyes, though, were womanly and tender.
‘Bless you,’ she said.
Chapter Three
It was late in the afternoon that the de Grasse docked. A December fog hung low over Manhattan. As the ship swung past the battery Gordon was standing in a passport queue. By the time that he came again on deck the bustling little tugs were wedging the large liner into its cage. It was very cold. But in spite of the bitter wind that blew from Jersey city, there was a large crowd thronging the gangways and the pier-head. They were wrapped close in mufflers and furs and huge tan coats. Their eyes peered anxiously. Every minute or two one of them would wave a hand and shout. It was good to hear the twang of American speech again. There would be nobody there for him. To one or two of his friends he had written to say that he would be arriving roundabout such a day. He had not mentioned by which ship, however. He wanted to get settled in before anyone began making plans for him.
Leaning over the taffrail, Gordon ran his hands meditatively over his flask-lined coat. He suspected that he had overdone it. ‘If you want people to be pleased to see you,’ Stanley had said on his last day, ‘I’ll show you how.’ So he had taken him to the Army and Navy Stores and showed him just how many curved brandy flasks could be concealed about his person. There were seven flasks in all. And as Gordon surveyed himself before the mirror he had to admit that he looked scarcely plump.
‘The man who carried real brandy on his hip,’ said Stanley, ‘is worth his place in any party.’
The responsibility of those seven flasks had weighed heavily on him as the trip progressed. He would never be able to get them all in. When a Tombola had been arranged for les oeuvres de mer he had handed in two flasks as prizes. ‘Lost your courage?’ the organizing secretary had said. And now once again as he saw beyond the gangplanks the outline of the customs, his courage ebbed. He went below decks to examine himself. His steward was busy stripping the bed.
‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t,’ as Gordon turned slowly before the glass.
‘But you can’t see anything?’
‘A man who’s looking for something would. If you saw a big tan coat like that, wouldn’t you feel suspicious of it? Besides, a customs officer doesn’t only look, he feels. He bumps against you accidental. And if he feels it, well, there you are, you’re for it.’
It sounded sense. Gordon tapped his side pockets and they rang. He put two flasks upon the table.
‘Tha
t’s better,’ said the steward, ‘but it’s hip pockets they aim for. I’m not even sure that the breast pocket’s safe.’
In the end Gordon was left with one flask unobtrusively concealed in the folds of his breast pocket.
The steward appeared relieved.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t care for you to get in wrong.’
It was not till he was on deck again that he realized how valuable to the steward his uncargoing would prove.
‘No, hell!’ he thought, ‘I’ll risk it.’
But when he got back to the cabin, both the steward and the flasks had vanished and already there was the gangplank down.
‘It’s too late now,’ he thought. ‘Maybe it’s as well.’
But the customs officer, in spite of a rigid examination of Gordon’s hairwash, kept at a respectful distance from his person.
‘A gallon of good brandy wasted,’ he thought angrily, as the taxi began its slow, frequently held-up journey across the town. He felt bad about it. It was extraordinary, he reflected, how within a minute of landing in New York the mere fact of liquor had been made dramatic. He supposed that he would tell the story of the customs on an average twice a day for the next fortnight.
* * *
His main luggage he had checked through to the Chatham. There was the same lean, tall porter to open his taxi’s door. There was a thin smile o£ welcome on his face.
‘Glad to have you back here, Mr Carruthers. We certainly are glad to have you back.’
At the desk there was the same sense of home-coming.
‘We’ve got your old suite for you,’ he was told.
As he walked into the warm, thick-carpeted drawing-room he had the feeling that he had never been away.
It was eight o’clock before he had bathed and unpacked his suitcase. It was too late to try and get hold of anybody now. But he felt restless; in need of movement. He did not feel like dining in the restaurant, or having a meal sent up. He wanted to get back into the atmosphere of New York: to sit on a high stool and order a toasted sandwich: to drink coffee that was coffee. At the corner of Madison and Forty-fourth there was a Liggett’s, he remembered. He walked northwards. The fog had lifted. The sky was clear and starry but the wind blew bitterly round the corner of every block. He pulled his coat collar tightly round his throat. He was grateful for the drug store’s warmth. In the centre of the store was a table piled high with books. They were marked at a dollar or at 75c. No one, he had been told, would pay more than a dollar for a book, because no one had it.
At the stool next to him a man in a vast, but threadbare coat, with a dirty felt hat pulled low over his eyes was grumbling to the attendant across a bacon-and-salad sandwich. He had just lost his job that day. Not for any fault of his own either, he explained. The boss had had up every man who had joined the staff since December 1924 and handed him a week’s salary. ‘And how could I have joined the staff before, I’ld like to know? The corporation that I worked for was only merged with it that fall. I asked him if he had any fault to find with me. “No,” he said, “no fault at all.” It was just depression. As soon as depression was over he’ld be delighted to take me back. He would give me letters of recommendation. And what use would that be to me? What chance would I stand of getting a job anywhere at a time like this? Depression indeed.’
He snorted angrily.
‘And when you remember the things I thought were coming to me, when I registered my vote for Hoover. I reckoned I was cashing in all right.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said the attendant.
On his way from Madison to Broadway, although he was walking quickly, five or six men touched Gordon’s arm.
‘Gimme a dime,’ they said.
One of them handed him a card. It bore an address in the West Fifties. It was the New York equivalent for the London streetwalker. In New York, being a woman’s city, it was the men who did the walking.
Broadway was its unvarying, triumphant blaze of light. He had seen it described a hundred times. He had driven down it many dozen times. He felt as at home there among the chop sueys, the cafeterias and the twinkling lights as he did in the Avenue de l’Opéra. Yet even so he could not help feeling that this was not the New York he had left. There was a change of atmosphere. The lights were flashing as brightly as they had ever flashed; the pavements were as thronged; the jam of the traffic as intense. But there was a different expression on the faces that hurried or loitered past him. There was a frown on Broadway. He became conscious of it minute by minute as he edged his way down the bright-lit river. Later he would be, he knew, unconscious of that frown. It was only because he was seeing it with new eyes that he saw it now. In the same way that when you met a person after several months, you were always conscious of the change in him; he had thinned or fattened: grown grey or bald; sad or prosperous: fortunate or ill-conditioned. And then, that first shock past, you became unconscious of the change, seeing him again as the person you had known before, though the change was there. Tomorrow Broadway would seem to him as it had always seemed. He would be unconscious of the frown, though the frown would be still there. The gaiety had gone.
At the triangle where Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersected, there was a vast electric-lit Christmas tree. It had been set there by a daily newspaper. It blazed a welcome to America and to the stranger within her gates. It was advertising a bread-line. It was the first bread-line that Gordon had seen. It was utterly depressing, that long row of men waiting for hours in their thin coats, in that bitter cold for their basinful of soup. Their faces were sullen, beaten, resentful. They had got as low as anyone could get in the human scale. It might be that up to a point the discipline of adversity was wholesome. Beyond that point it broke men’s spirit. In the last months of the war Gordon had been taken prisoner. During the first weeks, while the men had been moved back from the line to a permanent prison-camp, they had been ill-fed, ill-housed, with no change of clothes. They had grown ill, verminous. Their sense of self-respect had left them. The men who a few days back had been straight, self-respecting soldiers, had become slovenly, cringing, unshaved, furtive-eyed.
Gordon noticed the same change now, in the men who stood shivering in the cold, waiting to reach the soup kitchen. The fight was out of them. He could imagine with what anger they must be seeing the smart cars, and the smart clothes on the theatre pavements; and with what sense of guilt those same smart people must see out of the windows of their warmed cars that shivering line. It seemed to Gordon as he stood there that for all that might be said in England about the abuses of the dole, there was a good deal to be urged for any system that in a period of universal depression could keep such spectacles out of the country and could keep its unemployed, the majority workless through no fault of their own, out of such degeneracy.
For a moment he stood looking at it, then turned slowly home. Here was the end, he supposed, of the particular brand of American prosperity that for a decade had dominated and exasperated Europe. Another type of prosperity would come, a country with the resources and vitality of America could not remain for long submerged. They would be riding the storm again, if not this year, then the next, or the year after. It would be a different brand of prosperity, however. In the same way that adult people accepted both their good and evil fortune with a measure of detachment, knowing that things went in cycles, America when success returned would accept it in the spirit of the Greek father who when his sons won laurels in the Olympic Games, was found upon his knees within the temple, not in gratitude for their success, but in supplication that the compensating evil might be slight. A lesson would have been learnt. The tapageur spirit would have gone.
It was a good thing, he supposed. The world was too interknit for one nation, even for one class, to be prosperous while the rest of the world was sick. Civilization was self-contained, was in a sense allied against the assault that was being driven against it from the Soviet snows. Nevertheless, as he undressed slowly on his first night in the
city for a return to which he had planned incessantly over the last three months, Gordon was oppressed with the memory of that bread-line. It was temporary. But it was symbolic of what life was going to be like in New York during the next few months.
First thing next morning he went round to the agent who was responsible for his lectures. The arrangement had been made during the last days before Gordon had left for England in the spring. It was too late for fixing a very profitable tour, as the majority of the women’s clubs on which the visiting lecturer in the main relied, arranged their programmes a number of months to a year ahead. He had little idea how many lectures had been arranged for him; he did not know whether he would be away from New York for considerable periods of time, or whether he would be going away for occasional nights.
‘Well,’ he said as he walked into the agent’s office, ‘and how are things?’
His agent, Cornelian Mendleheim, who had handled, in his time, a great number of English and European lecturers, was vast, three-chinned and middle-aged. His plumpness had set his features into the shape of an eternal grin. His smile, his rivals said of him, was his capital. He made everyone with whom he had any dealings, believe that he was doing the very most that could be possibly done for them; and that that most was pretty good. In March, when he had discussed the prospects of a lecture tour with Gordon, he had spread a map of the United States on the table. He had traced the tour he had arranged for Martin Travers and the tour he could have arranged had he had its handling for Hugh Walpole. He had explained the difference in mentality between the women’s clubs of New England, California, the Middle West and Alabama. He spoke of the fees paid in Chicago, Detroit and Augusta, Georgia.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘we shall be able to do pretty well for you.’
Gordon had the impression that the intellect of forty-eight States was his for the plundering. Which is the American way of doing business. The American says more than he means just as the Englishman says less than he means. The American, doing business with an American, divides; an Englishman doing business with an Englishman, multiplies. Where Stanley would say to Gordon, ‘That’s not too bad a tale of yours. I think I might manage to do something with that,’ Gordon expected to be paid a hundred pounds for the first British serial rights. When his American agent rang up in high excitement to congratulate him on a ‘sure fire story that Ray Long would eat,’ there was a reasonable chance of getting a hundred dollars from the Argosy. As long as Americans were doing business with Americans and English with English all went well. But Americans who were told by Stanley that there might possibly be an opening for such and such a scheme, assumed they were being turned down and went elsewhere. While Englishmen tended to imagine from an American assurance of their prospects that they would be millionaires within a week and started ordering six-cylinder cars on the instalment plan. Gordon knew where he was with Stanley. But in America he never knew by how much he should divide.