by Alec Waugh
He woke five hours later with the uncertain feeling that follows a heavy night. He lay blinking at the ceiling; wondering if he were feeling ill; trying to remember what had happened on the previous night. He had telegraphed to Stanley; he was going to Hollywood. Colours seen by candlelight did not look the same by day. Was that going to be a good thing? He did not know. He did not care. It did not matter much to him what happened. He might just as well go there. He put his hand against his forehead. He seemed all right. He got up. The sun was shining brightly across the brown carpet of the sitting-room. He felt gay and happy. Thanks to steam heat one never had in New York that grey waking to the cold one had in London. The telephone bell rang. It was Joan speaking.
‘Darling, how are you?’
‘I’m all right.’
‘Then don’t eat anything.’
‘Till when?’
‘Till lunch time. Then have a cocktail first.’
‘All right.’
‘We’re not lunching, are we?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘But we’re going on somewhere afterwards, aren’t we?’
‘There’s a cocktail party at Edie Wassermann’s.’
‘And weren’t you taking me to some friends of yours first?’
‘I think I was.’
‘At any rate, you’ll call for me the moment lunch is over.’
‘I will.’
‘And some time between now and then,’ thought Gordon, ‘I’ve got to prepare the speech I’m going to make tonight.’
It was the last dinner of Eve Stuart’s season: and it was her biggest. There would be the best part of seven hundred guests. He was very anxious to speak well. Both for the occasion’s sake and because of his quite genuine personal affection for Eve Stuart. Speakers were allowed a free choice of subject. He had meant to say something about English poetry. He would apologize for being serious. He would say that there were only two subjects on which Englishmen were forbidden to be flippant. One was cricket, the other poetry. He had thought of developing the idea that the qualities on which the fame of a nation rests are usually opposed to what are supposed to be national characteristics; that whereas the English were always pictured as composed, unsentimental, conventional, England is chiefly famous for what has been achieved by men who were the opposites of that: by the rebellious, and the adventurous; by colonial administrators who had disregarded the authorities of Whitehall; by sea captains who had held their telescopes to their blind eye; by all those who had represented the poetry rather than the prose of living. So that by the irony of contrast this so solid-seeming people had produced the greatest body of poetry of any country since the days of Greece. There should be a good speech along those lines. But somehow he could not get the phrasing of it right, as he walked down Lexington in the cool spring air; as he stopped at the florist’s at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street to send a spray of gardenias to Joan; as, perched on a stool in the drug store opposite, he drank his morning coffee.
On his return to his apartment he tried to get his thoughts clear by putting them on paper. But he could not think on paper. ‘It’ll come all right when I get there,’ he thought. And he spread open the vast Sunday supplement of the New York Times. He opened it at the book section. On the list of forthcoming novels he read ‘Exiles of Eden,’ by Gordon Carruthers. It would be out in early April. He would be getting his six advance copies in a day or two. It was already out in England. He wondered what Faith would make of it. When he had written it he had thought of nothing but her. It had been her book. Now he did not care whether she liked or didn’t like it. He didn’t feel that way about her any more. Soon he would be saying good-bye to her; in all probability for ever. He would stand under the canopy of an apartment building. He would take her hand. It would be over. There would be other people in the taxi to be dropped. People in the seventies and eighties. Then the car would swing south again. There’ld be the long sweep of Park with the red and green lights flickering, and the great golden dome of the Central building covering it. In eight days’ time.
But then he remembered that in eight days he would be half-way across America. He would not be giving that last party on the eve of sailing. He would not be sailing at all. He would be rattling across a continent to the coast. How would he say good-bye to Faith, then? Would she come to the train to see him off? Would he have a party on the Friday instead of one on the Monday, as he had planned? How would he feel when the moment of good-bye came? How would she feel? For all that this sudden glamour had come back to dazzle her, would not her very possessiveness be troubled at the loss of him? No one cared to lose what they had once owned. What was it she had said once? ‘I’ve got no hold on you when you’re away.’ Hadn’t she realized that then she had all the hold she needed, her need of him? And with that need loosened, her hold had loosened, too. Pacing backwards and forwards up and down the narrow square of his apartment, he argued and reargued the situation out. He tried to concentrate on his speech for that evening’s dinner. But between his thoughts and his resolve came the picture of that first meeting with Faith on his return, of her quiet voice saying to him: ‘He’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen.’ Every intonation of that voice was photographed upon his mind. ‘I must be getting down to the squash court,’ Gordon thought. His eyes were heavy; there was a throbbing beginning about his temples. Nothing that he saw seemed real. But as he had so often found before, keenness of eye had nothing to do with health. To play football one had to feel supremely well. But you could go on to the cricket field feeling that you would like to run a twenty-five mile Marathon and be unable to time the ball at all. Whereas at other times you would feel so limp, so blear-eyed, that you would never want to leave the deckchairs by the pavilion rails and yet in the open find yourself seeing the ball as though it were five times its size.
‘I’m feeling like death,’ he told the pro. ‘You’d better give me seven.’
‘I’m giving you six and this is going to be my lucky day.’
It didn’t prove to be, however. Gordon had never seen the small black ball so big. He was volleying shots that ordinarily he would not have attempted. He swung cricket shots with his left foot flung forward. He hadn’t played so well since the day that he had promised Faith he would go to Villefranche.
But when the game was over, and he had his shower, weighed himself and found that in the last twenty-four hours he had lost three pounds, he knew none of the exhilaration, the loose-limbed, loose-jointed delight in living that follows usually on a hard-played game. He was all in. He sat forward: his head rested in his hands. He was lunching with a congressman whom he had met at Albany on New Year’s Day at the inauguration. He did not know whether congressmen served liquor or did not. He was a democrat and a wet. But the majority of prominent American politicians, however opposed they might be to prohibition, kept the law as long as it remained the law. He did not know how he would get through lunch if they didn’t serve a cocktail. ‘I ought to go back and have a shot of rye before I start.’ But there might be cocktails. And he was afraid in his present conditon of mixing drinks.
There were cocktails. After the second he felt well again. He entered livelily upon a Tammany debate. If they wanted a democrat President in 1932, he said, it was no good letting the rest of the United States think it was just someone running on the Tammany ticket. He did not believe, he said, that New Yorkers realized how jealous the rest of America was of New York: how infuriated they were when they thought that Europeans were judging America by New York: that they resented New York’s claim to be the capital of America: that they were afraid of being governed by New York: and if they thought that a Presidential candidate was run by Tammany, they would vote republican and dry, although all their convictions were democrat and wet. He thought clearly. He talked clearly. He felt well and happy. But none of it seemed quite real. It seemed no more real two hours later in a drawing-room where a cocktail party was beginning, as he talked to the hostess’s daughter,
a college girl from Brynmawr home for the weekend. She was very slim, exquisite and willowy. She had the frank friendliness that the girls of no other country possess to the same extent. She was one of the people he was fondest of in New York. They were talking of the débutante system, of how you were one of four hundred in a season, of how a dance was given for you; then you were asked to other dances; of how proud you were to be cut in on every moment; how you grew so blasée that you couldn’t be bothered to turn up to the dinner-dance before half-past ten; how you dined first at home; how the moment the dance had started you grew bored and insisted on being taken to a speakeasy.
It was a woman’s country, Gordon thought. With girls brought up like this, with their staglines and their cuttings-in, how could you expect them when they became wives not to snatch at as their right the man they loved, the man they were in love with, the man by whom they were fascinated? But neither the girl he talked to, nor the talk that they exchanged was real. Only Joan was real: as she sat very straight in her chair fingering the long chain and locket that she had bought in the Caledonian Market, fluttering a lace handkerchief as she talked. She looked so calm, so composed. No one would think that she was homesick for an insolent and lovely lad who in fifteen years would have lost his looks, whose insolence would have become a whining, ineffectual aggressiveness. No doubt he himself looked as unflurried. ‘I’ve got to make a speech tonight,’ he thought. ‘We ought to be going on to Edie’s.’
It was a large party at Edie Wassermann’s. So large that the large, book-lined drawing-room was made to seem quite small. There were familiar and friendly faces. Gordon was on a sofa seated by Fania van Vechten; he was telling her that he was going to Hollywood next Saturday. She said that would be exciting and new for him. He said that life was always exciting but never new; that you just went round having the same things happen to you; that you were always cast for the same kind of part; that the Almighty might have an immense Stock company, but he had only room for you in one particular rôle. ‘You don’t believe that,’ said Fania. ‘If you believed that you’ld commit suicide, right here.’
‘I’ld do nothing of the sort,’ said Gordon. ‘I should only find myself cast for the same role in a different play.’
They argued about the way in which life was a series of repetitions; that only oneself changed, so that one was perpetually seeing the same situation from a different angle.
One day, he thought, there’ll be another Faith. She’ll say her heart’s breaking. We’ll part, there’ll be an interval. When I come back to her, I’ll know that it’ll be about another man that she’ll want to speak to me. And as I shall be expecting it I’ll be very patient with her and gentle and give her a shoulder to cry upon. ‘We all have our little griefs,’ I’ll say to her. And she’ll never guess how much has to be shrugged away before that can be said light-heartedly. She’ll be so grateful to me that I shall win her back. Faith would have made him a good lover for another woman. She would have taught him what to expect of women since he had learnt what they would expect of him. ‘One plays the same part differently but it is the same part.’
So he talked, but none of it was real. Joan was at the other side of the room, but looking at her he could hear her voice though it was low pitched through all the other eddying voices of the room. She was making a mock political address. ‘Hoover,’ she said, ‘is an animated penguin, sitting on the Coolidge eggs.’ She fingered the silver chain about her neck, the lace handkerchief fluttered before her face. Gordon moved over to her. ‘What do you think Stanley will say?’ he asked.
‘Have you any money there at all?’
‘I don’t think I have.’
‘When will you get any money from your novel?’
‘Not till it’s published.’
‘When will that be?’
‘In the autumn some time.’
‘Darling, you’re going to be very poor.’
‘I’ll lie for a little very low.’
That was one of the advantages of being a writer, he explained. You had not to keep up an establishment. You hadn’t got to stay, as a business man had, by your work. You could take your work with you. You could go away quietly to some place like Villefranche and work there till things were straight.
‘And I never thought that you needed to worry over things like that,’ she said.
‘People get told about the big prices authors get. They never realize how little they can get.’ And he told her of an evening when he had been dining with Stacy Aumonier. The evening paper had fallen open at the review of Michael Joseph’s book on ‘Short Story Writing for Profit’, to which Stacy had contributed a preface. ‘Mr Stacy Aumonier,’ the review began, ‘is one of the half-dozen living writers to whom the short story is an art.’ Stacy had laughed. ‘That’s pretty ironic,’ he had said. ‘Every post brings me in a great wad of press cuttings saying that I’m one of the six best short story writers. I’ve not sold a story in America for eight months. And I’m so poor that I don’t know where the money comes from for the weekly bills.’
‘You won’t be able to stay very long in Hollywood, then.’
The journey there and from California to London, if he went second on the boat, would cost a hundred pounds. Whatever was left over from Stanley’s generosity he could spend in Hollywood. He supposed living would cost him there about forty pounds a week. He could not see beyond that parting. Life would have to be begun again then. ‘I’ve got to make a speech this evening,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go.’
She asked him when he expected to have done his speech.
‘At the latest by twelve.’
‘I might be at Toni’s then.’
‘I’ll look in on the chance.’
‘Do that.’
As he walked up Lexington to his apartment, he began to phrase his speech. But though he saw the outline of his speech, though he knew how one argument would lead him to another, he could not frame the actual sentences. ‘It’ll be all right, when I’m on my feet,’ he thought. As he lay back in the warm water of his bath, he felt confident and unflurried. And then just as he began to dress, the drink died on him.
It was a sensation that he had never had before; that you never would have out of America. In England if you drink too much, you become drunk and that is all there is to it. In America drink has the cumulative quality of a drug. For a week Gordon had been drinking heavily. During the last thirty-six hours he had been drinking solidly. At no point during that time had he been within miles of being drunk. He had had complete control of all his faculties. He had behaved normally. He could remember everything that had happened. He had scarcely felt unwell. But all the while the world he had been looking at had grown more and more unreal. He had seen it through drugged eyes, and now suddenly the support that had sustained him during those hours was removed. He did not feel ill. He did not feel unhappy. He just felt inert, lifeless, sunk, incapable of effort. He knew now what people meant when they talked about ‘drink dying on you.’
With a detached indifference he made his way down the passage to the Biltmore, with its throng of expensively dressed men and women. Eve Stuart with an excited air and vast corsage of orchids was welcoming her guests. He was sitting between Blair Niles, she told him, and Amelia Ear-hart. Blair Niles was one of his oldest New York friends.
He wanted to ask about her new book. It had been described to him as a male ‘La Prisonnière.’ He had wanted to know what her attitude was to the problem. He had been told that she had treated it pathologically; that men were born that way, she had said. And there was nothing to be done about it. Himself he had believed that once. He didn’t now. It was because women had become so tiresome that men went that way. It was as much a faute de mieux as schoolboy orgies were. Men couldn’t be bothered with what they couldn’t trust. When women demanded three men at the same time they shouldn’t be surprised if men walked out on them; if they took a grubby substitute.
For Amelia Earhart he had the respect an
d interest that over five continents her gallantry had won for her. Yet as he sat next her at the high table that was raised in a circle round the pit in which the seven hundred guests were gathered, he had no wish except to sit back in his chair, silent. He did not feel curious or hungry or excited. He did not even feel nervous about his speech. He did not care.
The evening went its course. He knew that probably the last thing Amelia Earhart would want to do would be to discuss flying with someone who knew nothing about flying. But he could think of nothing else to talk about. So he talked of that, not very intelligently, and bored her probably. Then the man on the other side of her turned to her. And she began talking away from him. He turned round to Blair Niles. He felt they were good enough friends to make allowances for one another. ‘I’m just sunk, Blair,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I sit quiet?’
And she nodded sympathetically. In America one could make an excuse like that. In a world where one was pouring poison into oneself every day one had to accept excuses of that kind. So he sat quietly and looked down into the pit where the subscribers sat, and across the pit to the opposite curve of the horseshoed table. It seemed very far away. It would be hard, he thought, to make his voice carry to the far corner. Then the speeches started. Eve Stuart began to introduce the guests. They placed a microphone in front of her; from the other side of the room the voice echoed back six seconds later. That must be hard to speak against, thought Gordon. It blurred every sentence. It made a whispering gallery of the room. He had not guessed how hard it was going to make it till he himself rose to speak. It’ll be all right, he had told himself, as he sat there waiting. An audience was like an electric current. The moment he was on his feet, he would catch vitality from them. But the room seemed blurred when he stood up. He did not feel nervous, simply lost. He pitched his voice to the farthest end of the room; he had got there, he felt. He wondered if those on the nearer side were hearing. Then the announcer moved the microphone in front of him. It was the first time he had ever talked into a microphone, except upon the radio. His voice bellowed back at him, a second later than he spoke. To be repeated from across the room six seconds later. He lost the audience. He did not know if he was talking to the people in the pit or to the metal contrivance that re-duplicated his voice to him. His voice had no reality for him. The moment had no reality for him. He hesitated. He was nearer to panic than he had ever been. If he had cared at all, he would have panicked. But he did not care. The one person who had mattered had got lost. He could not be bothered about these people. He would stand here and say his piece and then sit down. He did not know if he had succeeded or if he had failed. He stood there and talked. His voice booming back at him, the people in the pit a mist. He was out of touch with his audience. But he found and gave utterance to words. There was applause when he sat down. He lolled back in his chair. ‘I shan’t be able to make Toni’s tonight,’ he thought.