So Lovers Dream

by Alec Waugh

  ‘I must go and talk to Mrs Butterman,’ he said.

  Mrs Butterman was discussing, as at that moment a great number of people in New York were discussing, Sinclair Lewis’s speech at Stockholm. Gordon embarked on a lively and animated defence of Lewis. He soon had Mrs Butterman laughing. This would show Faith, he thought, how far he was from worrying. He sat talking with Mrs Butterman till Faith said that she must be going. ‘I’ll get your coat,’ he said. He did not want to be alone with her. He walked beside her to the elevator. He could not think of anything to say.

  ‘You’ll remember me to Roger,’ he said, at length.

  ‘Of course. He sent you his love. I forgot to give it. He was so sorry he couldn’t come today.’

  ‘I was sorry, too.’

  ‘He hopes that you’ll be coming out soon to dine with us.’

  ‘I’ll love to.’

  ‘I suppose you couldn’t manage tomorrow night?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I thought it would be too short notice. I’ll ring up in a day or two and fix something.’

  ‘Yes, do do that. I’m always in between nine and ten.’

  ‘I’ll ring you up then.’

  ‘Fine!’ And that’s that, thought Gordon as he turned away and walked back into the room. Half an hour later the party was at an end. The room looked desolate with its emptied and dirtied glasses; its plates with broken and crumbled sandwiches; its solitary stalk of celery and its ash-trays stubbed with scarlet-edged cigarette ends. Josephine emerged from the kitchenette and surveyed the debris. She was so like May with straight, silvered hair, large smile, shuffle and West Indian laugh, that Gordon was not certain that it actually was not May and that in the same way that Miss Cowen had ordered twelve precisely similar libraries, she had not acquired twelve precisely similarly coloured maids.

  ‘They liked the stuffed celery,’ said Josephine.

  ‘You made a very nice party for me, Josephine. I’m very grateful.’

  ‘They were nice people, too, Mr Carruthers. I looked at them as they come in. I say to myself, which is Mr Carruthers’s young lady?’

  ‘I haven’t got a young lady, Josephine.’

  She cackled with laughter. ‘You’re not going to tell me, but I’m going to find out. I sure am that. Now, are you going to let me clear this place up?’

  Gordon had made no plans for the evening. He had thought that possibly Faith would have kept the evening free; that they would have gone to dinner somewhere. He did not know where to go. He wished that there were in New York some equivalent for the Granville, some club where he could sit quietly by himself, drink good wine, be waited on by many servants, and gradually recover a sense of self-esteem.

  Chapter Four

  He did not ring up Faith. Nor did she ring him up. Nor was any attempt made at a future meeting. But they had too many mutual friends not to find themselves meeting constantly at other people’s houses.

  ‘I’ve a nice surprise for you,’ a hostess would say to Gordon. ‘The Roger Swedens are coming to dinner. You’re sitting next to her.’ Or again, as he came into the room for some cocktail party: ‘You won’t need any introducing to Faith Sweden. I asked you for each other.’

  It was very much as it had been in New York during the spring and at Villefranche through the summer. Roger was as bustling, as busy, as self-important as he had ever been. The slump had not hit him nearly as badly as a panic-struck broker had led him to expect. He was riding the storm all right. He was on the whole rather enjoying depression, as a great many New Yorkers were. It was something new in a city that loved novelty.

  ‘Things are bad, very bad,’ Roger would say. His voice was serious, but his eyes were bright in the way that a schoolboy’s are when a row is imminent. He was relishing a situation that gave him so many opportunities to conduct dinner parties as though they were board meetings.

  To Gordon he was effusively genial.

  ‘It’s grand to have you here,’ he’ld say.

  ‘It’s grand to be here.’

  ‘You must come up and see us one day soon.’

  ‘You must come and see my new apartment.’

  ‘I’m certainly meaning to do that. I certainly am. But well, you know how things are just now. They are not easy. No, sir, they are not easy.’

  It was the familiar atmosphere of crowds through which, as in France and through the spring, he and Faith maintained a frequently interrupted conversation. They would begin to discuss their own problem: some one would join them, the talk would be cut across. Then a hostess would come up with a ‘Mr Carruthers, there’s a lady here who’s dying to meet you. May I take you over?’ By the time the conversation with her would be over. Faith would have left the party, and their argument would be held over till the next day: or the day after, or the following week.

  It was a cantankerous argument, with the need of each other running through it like a thread. In the things that mattered they were still so close to one another. Every now and then they would find themselves in harmony: on the brink of an understanding. Then at that very instant, they would be interrupted. The thin thread snapped. For the most part they argued.

  ‘You know that I’ve thought of nothing but you for the last four months,’ he’ld say.

  ‘How was I to know what I meant in your life?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be worrying,’ he said, ‘if I hadn’t thought you cared.’

  ‘And what makes you think now I didn’t care?’

  ‘How could you have, if within two months you can go back to someone else?’

  ‘It wasn’t a question of going back. That’s what you won’t understand. It was always there. A part of me. . . .’

  ‘. . . I’m not in love with him,’ she said at another time. ‘I’ve never been in love with him. I’m fascinated. . . .

  ‘. . . It was fate,’ she told him. ‘I always knew I should meet him again. I always wondered how I should feel when I met him again.’

  ‘Well, now you know.’

  ‘Yes, now I know.’

  ‘And when will you be seeing him again?’

  ‘The bicycle races start in March.’

  ‘You’ll be there, I suppose?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You’ll be seeing him?’

  ‘I suppose I shall.’

  All their talk sooner or later came round to that one subject. They never discussed it thoroughly. They never had an opportunity. They flashed casual, illuminatory lights. It was at the back of everything they thought or did or said. They could not escape it.

  ‘I’ll stop thinking about it,’ Gordon would tell himself. ‘I’ll forget it. We’ve so much else in common. We can be friends, anyhow.’

  But that was the one thing it was impossible for them to be. Not till they had this cleared up, not till they had been open with each other. For they had not been open with each other. Though she had told so much, and hinted more, of the essential facts he was still in ignorance. He did not know what had happened. Sometimes he told himself that nothing had happened; that if it had, it would have been impossible for her to have brought Horton and himself together. Besides, how could anything have happened? When or where could anything have happened? She lived in crowds. Whatever opportunity did she ever have of seeing anyone alone? Yet even though he argued that way with himself, he knew beyond point of cavil that the thing one needed one managed always to contrive. Particularly a woman such as Faith. With what resolution had she in his own case made certain of him? She had waited her chance and it had come.

  He learnt during those weeks what jealousy could be: for the first time he understood the last speeches of Othello. ‘Ah, spite of heaven, that we should call these delicate creatures ours and not their appetites!’ He had imagined a year back that masculine jealousy over the mere fact of physical possession was a barbaric survival; a primitive ownership; that or the itch of vanity. He knew now that it was more than vanity. He remembered that first talk with Faith, h
ow she had wondered whether the man who had never known jealousy had ever loved. Well, and she had been right, hadn’t she? he had not loved then. He had now, and he knew jealousy for what it was. Once in many times it rose out of a sense of outraged instinct. What else but a prescience of this had made him angry when she had thought Harlem fun; when she had danced with Rolo. It was with the very fact of possession that he was now preoccupied; by what had or had not happened. Before, he had thought that had not mattered, that to commit adultery in the heart was as serious as to commit it actually. He knew now that it was not so: that the very act possessed importance. He re-read the Swann and the Odette passages. It was like reading a description of a journey he had taken. He could understand now Swann’s self-torturing; his wondering whether Fourcheville had or had not been with her on such a night. The last year was a reliving of Swann’s experience. At Villefranche, he had been unable because of love to go to a place where anyone else in the wide world might go. He wondered as he read on whether equally a time would come when he would have grown indifferent as Swann had; that when the time came when it would be possible to put the leading question, when he could learn the fact on which he had debated, he would not be interested enough to ask. Was that to happen? Proust had foretold so much. Had he foretold that, too?

  One thing he had not told, however; he had not told the hatred that Gordon felt against the object of his jealousy: the hatred for the voice and face that had come between him and his happiness. Night after night, his imagination visualized her, held close against those muscled shoulders. If only it had been someone else. If only it had been for something else.

  ‘You called him a mucker. What did you mean by that?’ he asked.

  ‘That I couldn’t trust him. That I don’t believe a word he says.’

  ‘Yet you can love a man like that!’

  ‘I don’t love him. I’ve told you that what I feel for him has not anything to do with love.’

  ‘It’s stronger than love.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  She might say that.

  Whatever it was it depended upon a voice and upon a face. With a cupful of vitriol he could destroy this magnetism. He could make Horton impotent and powerless against her.

  To his friends he began to make inquiries, not as to Faith’s relationship with Horton, but as to the man himself. He would lead the conversation carefully round to six-day bicycle racing. If he found that his companion was in the least interested and in the least informed, he would particularize the discussion saying that he had met a bicyclist: wondering if the other knew him: mentioning, after some hesitation as though he were uncertain of it, the name.

  ‘Yes, that was it,’ he would say. ‘I remember now. Geoffrey Horton. That was what he was called.’

  He wanted to hear nothing that was not bad about him. He wanted to build up the picture of him trait by unamiable trait so that he could un-veil the final portrait of him. So that he could say: ‘This is the thing you’ve doted on.’ Yet at the same time every touch he put to the portrait robbed him of the pride he had taken in Faith’s love of him. If she could love a thing like that, he could be no longer particularly proud of her choice of himself.

  Sometimes it would seem to him that Faith was arguing with herself: trying to convince herself that Horton was not the mucker that she knew him in her heart to be.

  ‘Has he any brains,’ he asked.

  ‘He’s got a wicked wit,’ she said.

  Which was another field, Gordon knew, on which he could not challenge. He was not the kind who made sparkling talk.

  ‘And how much is he in love with you?’ he asked her once.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think he loves me enough to know. I believe there’s another woman somewhere.’

  As there usually was, Gordon reflected. Another woman to whom Horton would appear as everything that he was not to Faith: a woman who would see Horton not as the thing of beauty, glamour, wit: the Adonis who was masterful and gentle. But as a clumsy, stupid, tiresome, overgrown, sentimental, self-conscious gawk. He himself was not the same man to Faith that he was to Gwen. One was never the same person to two different women. He had once thought that it would be amusing to write a story in which three men at the end of their lives should tell each other of their one big love affair. Each story in setting and detail would be completely different. Different issues would be at stake. There would be no resemblance at all between the three women they had loved. Yet at the end they would discover themselves to have been lovers of the same woman. ‘All things to all men,’ he had thought of calling it. He would like to meet the woman Horton really was in love with; the woman before whom he would be abject, cringing, uncertain of his technique. Even as he himself was before Faith.

  And all the time, while this thread of quarrel held the sequence of his days in continuity, giving them significance and direction, his ordinary life went on its course. He settled into the routine of New York life, or rather, made for himself his own routine. He had lived enough in cities to know that it was the charm of cities that one could create a life of one’s own in them; that one could be for all one’s dependence upon groups and persons, independent of them.

  It was a bitter winter. Every letter that he received from London spoke of frost and fog; of colds and influenza and broken water-pipes. But in New York, though the puddles in the streets were frozen, though the grass blades in the park were rimmed with frost, five days in seven a sun shone out of a blue sky. Gordon had the feeling of waking to a summer day, in a steam-heated room with the sunlight pouring across its floor. It was in a picnic spirit that with his bath taken, his morning exercises done, he walked to the drug store at the corner of Thirty-fourth and Lexington and, perched on a stool, consumed a twenty-five cent special of orange juice, coffee and hot buttered toast. In London the idea of going out to breakfast at an A.B.C. would have appalled him, but he enjoyed the atmosphere of this busy bar; with its white-coated attendants wisecracking with the girls who hastily wolfed their muffins on their way to work, who wore all of them, in spite of the hardness of their lives, a look of smartness, and of gay confidence and defiance; who made a gesture, as they pulled their rabbit fur cloaks round them, and with a toss of their shoulders and a daub of kiss-proof on their pretty mouths went out into the cold. Only young people went there in the mornings. It was later in the day that you found melancholy people drinking bromoseltzers. There was reality there and hopefulness. And it was an hour during which one had need of hopefulness and youth.

  A year of depression, culminating in the drought and in the flooding of the Mississippi, had created an atmosphere of panic in New York. Depression had come as speedily, as unexpectedly, as prosperity had come. No one was prepared for it. A lengthily achieved success is accompanied by so many minor reversals along its course that its owner has become inoculated against failure. Moreover, graphs fall at the same curve as they rise. The failure that follows on a slowly achieved success is rarely sudden. It is a slow process; like the ebbing of any vital force. If England’s vast and varied greatness has, as some maintain, already passed its zenith, the descent is being taken at a glacier’s pace. It will be long and tender like one of its own northern twilights. There will be no sudden tropical eclipse.

  But America’s reverse was as meteoric as had been its rise. The reverse had struck at its most vulnerable point. By its politicians, its divines, its lawyers, and its pressmen, Americans had been taught to measure their success by material prosperity, had been encouraged to consider their country great not because of its soldiers, its statesmen, its poets, its painters, its engineers, its aviators and explorer, but because one person in three owned an automobile and every other family a radio. In a few weeks that particular brand of prosperity had been destroyed.

  The moment you begin to live in any place, the kind of life that is lived by its inhabitants, you absorb an atmosphere. In a hotel the atmosphere you absorb is international. By taking an apartment building oc
cupied by New Yorkers, with New York families above, below, and on either side of him; with his mail delivered, his ice provided, his elevator worked and the night door opened by attendants whose business it was to minister to the needs of New Yorkers, Gordon became conscious of New York’s personality in a way that he never could from the suite of a hotel, or the columns of a newspaper. As the weeks passed, his affection for New York grew and deepened.

  These were, he knew, weeks as unhappy as he had ever passed, such weeks as he never expected to pass again, weeks in which he would draw parallels between his own fortunes and those of the city of whose life he was a part. Many were the nights when he would toss sleeplessly, rehearsing and re-rehearsing scenes that would never be staged; writing letters that in the morning would be torn up; asking himself with what desperate medicine this desperate jealousy could be assuaged. They were weeks that he prayed he would never have to know the equal of again. But you can be happy in a place and hate it, just as you can be unhappy in a place and love it. Though so many aspects of New York were to remind him of particular dark-hearted moments, his fondness for the city grew.

  It was the city for such people as himself, whose lives were scattered about the Seven Seas. New York was no doubt a million other things. But it was that; with its network of trains streaming to the Pacific and the Caribbean; its river of piers stretching into Hudson River, it was the city for restless people. That narrow island of rock bounded by Brooklyn, Jersey and Harlem river was the symbol of speed, and change, and generosity of heart. Under its surface at all hours of the day, long, lean trains were scattering to the four quarters of a continent. Round the curve of the battery at all hours of the day, the ships of the Seven Seas were steaming. Boats were being met. Boats were being waved good-bye to. In no city of the world was there such a ritual of welcome and farewell. And in the very nature of its life, its informality, its hospitality, its open-heartedness there was a sense of transience; of things that had to be made the best of before they vanished. The other cities of America were jealous of New York. They said it was not America. And it was not America in so far as being America meant conditions so standardized that you could spend a week in half a dozen of its cities without knowing whether you were in Columbus, Canton, Kansas or Grand Rapids. New York was itself, as any great city is itself. It was complete, as elsewhere only London was. It showed as other cities could not show, for fifteen decades, a continuity of tradition and of growth. Other cities: Berlin, Paris, Budapest, Madrid, New Orleans, had sustained during those hundred and fifty years the shock of revolution and of siege. They were reconstructions. But the growth of New York as of London had been undisturbed. A solid and personal life had grown out of roots which ran deep and strong. London, with its background of the past, with its quiet squares, containing in Westminster, Whitehall and Buckingham Palace the power and administration of an Empire; with its home-life deep, intimate, and closely-guarded, symbolized the march of life. ‘We make and pass,’ was the message that London stood for. At every corner of its streets there was a warning against too ready a credence in what was immediate. There was an assurance of continuity; of forces moving slowly but surely to their end, with oneself a part of them. In New York, there was the same message, differently expressed. ‘We are here for a moment. We do what we can. We take fully of what lies close at hand. We know that our joys and griefs are transient. We destroy tomorrow what we build today. We are everything and we are nothing. We make and pass.’ It might be that those who knew as he knew London and New York, such other cities as Paris, Berlin, Chicago and Vienna, might find an equal atmosphere of completion there. He did not think so, though. Other cities were either too newly risen, or had too overpowering a past. They were parvenus or they were effete. They had inferiority and superiority complexes. They were living in the past or mortgaging the future. They were apologizing for themselves; they were excusing themselves; envious of what was older or newer than themselves. Saying, ‘We were this,’ or, ‘We shall be that.’ They did not, as London and New York, stand self-fulfilled, complete, deep-rooted: meeting their fate as it came towards them. Wholeheartedly he joined in the varied New York life that his interests touched. It was much the same life: of squash racquets; of cocktail and dinner parties; of theatres and speakeasies and road-houses on Long Island, that he had known seven months earlier. With this alone of difference, that whereas then he had been playing the whole time, he now arranged a very rigid discipline of work, writing, with the exception of the hour’s interval for squash, steadily every day till four; accepting no lunch invitations and eating in the morning no more than the salad that Josephine prepared for him.