The Trespassers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  “God, darling, I sure did run out on everything, didn’t I?” he said. ‘Were you angry?”

  “You were pretty done in, weren’t you?”

  “Lord, I was plumb beat.”

  “Beaten.”

  He laughed. There was gratitude in it, and relief. He ate enormously, glancing at the newspaper headlines, keeping up a line of running comment on the growing crisis over the Sudetenland. “Another Nazi Party rally next week at Nuremberg—Hitler and Göring going to scream Lebensraum in public again.” …Oh, God, more plebiscites.”…“How about your Vederles, Vee? Any news about them?”

  It was the first time he had ever asked for news about the Vederles. He always seemed interested if she herself spoke of them, but for him to take the initiative was a surprise.

  “Nothing much seems to be happening,” she said. “I worry about them.”

  “No use, I guess. These things always take time.”

  “I suppose so. I haven’t heard from them for weeks. His last letter said there was some peculiar ruling about which quota Frau Vederle would go on, he wasn’t sure how that would come out. He might even have to come over ahead of them, so he was proceeding anyhow with the new applications. I suppose that’s cleared up by now, or I would have heard.”

  “One of these days they’ll be cabling from a boat to meet them at a dock.”

  “I hope so. But it’s nearly six months now. They must be pretty miserable, just the waiting and wondering.”

  He made no answer. He had turned to the radio column in the newspaper and was examining it, frowning, completely absorbed.

  “Damn, there was a thing I meant to listen to last night—” He broke off with a grin. “Better not mention last night again, I bet.”

  Vee reached a hand across to his.

  “Jas, dear, I was a little put out when I saw you were gone for good,” she said in the reluctant voice of confession. “But I’m glad that you rested. This is another day.”

  He took her hand and kissed it. He squinted up at the clear, deep sky. He waved at the universe.

  “And it’s ours, and made to order. We’ll swim, and lie around on the sand, and drink swizzles, and I won’t think about my troubles for one minute.” He lit a cigarette, handed it over to her, and lit another for himself. “And tonight’s ours, too.”

  An hour later, while they were swimming, the telephone rang in the house. Out in the water, they both heard the shrill insistence of it. Dora appeared in the doorway, nodding to Jasper.

  “Oh, damn everything,” he said. “That’ll be Giles or Ken.”

  Vee followed him out, and sat down on the big beach towel on the sand. It was nearly ten minutes later that he came out to her.

  “I’ve got to get on a plane to Cleveland,” he said abruptly.

  “Oh.”

  “The biggest damn tire account on the air—Giles thought they were signing tomorrow for a daily quarter hour for the first thirteen weeks. They said they would, the agency said they would. Giles celebrated all Friday night. So now they tell their advertising agency they think they’ll wait awhile and see how we make out.”

  She listened to every word; at the same time she was telling herself that not one sign of anything must show in her face, voice, eyes.

  “And you have to go and persuade them yourself?”

  “God damn it, a year from now, I’d kick them off the network for even trying this on. But now—sure, I’ve got to go out and kiss their God-damn behinds.” He ground his teeth so that she could hear the sound.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “It’s a shame you can’t have a day for fun.”

  “Damn being polite, anyway,” he said angrily. “You’re angry, and it’d be better to admit it.”

  “Why, I—”

  “Sure you are. All women are. They can’t understand that a man’s work comes first, that it’s got to, got to come first, always, and forever first.”

  “Oh, Jasper, don’t. I do understand. Of course I’m sorry that we can’t have today, but I do understand.”

  “You say you do. Sure. Then you’ll confess you were ‘a little put out’ and I’ll feel like a brute. You hate having your day spoiled; that’s all you’re able to see.”

  “Jasper, you’re being impossible. That’s what I hate.”

  “That’s not what you hate. You hate the network, you hate it because it’s bigger than you and me being together, because it takes everything I’ve got and that’s what you want.”

  “That’s not true. I don’t hate the network. I never thought of hating it.”

  “You think I don’t know. Women live by love, and men by work, and God damn any man who forgets it.” He glared down at her. “Or any woman.”

  She stared up at him. His rage was Gargantuan; his strange forehead with the protuberant arcs of bone over his eyes menaced her. The eyes were dead and cold wrath.

  Slowly she rose to her feet, looking up into his face all the time. Erect, silent, she stared at him. He stared back. Then she turned away and began to walk up the beach. A low stone wall separated her strip of shore from the next one. She climbed over it and went on. Beyond the next wall, the land curved inward and she was out of sight. She flung herself down and bent her face into rigid hands. She forced herself to sit there for a long time. When she went back to the house he was gone

  The Cleveland plane would not leave for two hours. When Jasper arrived at his apartment and discovered that, he gritted with exasperation at Giles. To have just driven down at top speed and then to find a note saying that Giles had confused the Sunday and daily air schedules—in his present mood of feeling baited and angry the wait seemed insupportable.

  He did not want to think. Since he had left Vee he had not wanted to think. The drive had helped him, for he had had to clamp his entire attention to the physical problem of sending the car at headlong speed in and out of the sluggish Sunday traffic.

  Now he was faced with two hours of thinking. He poured himself a drink, took a cold shower, and dressed again. An hour and a half. He reached for the telephone, and then pushed it from him. Time enough to discuss things with Giles on the plane.

  He reached for a stack of correspondence, memorandums, reports, that had piled up. He read the top sheet and then his arm swept the whole stack slithering across his desk. He was sick of reading reports and letters. He was sick of everything. He sat motionless.

  Yes. By God, this was the time for a final showdown. He was always too pressed for time when he talked it over with Beth. Now he would have a full hour; they could make some headway. He dialed her number.

  She was at home. Yes, alone. Within ten minutes he was pressing a bell under which a strip of engraved card said, “Mrs. Jasper Crown.”

  Beth opened the door of her small apartment.

  “Hell, Beth. I have about an hour, so—” She nodded. For a moment, she stood square in the doorway, looking at him closely. Then she moved back and he could enter the small, beautifully furnished room behind her.

  She was almost as tall as he was. She had dark-brown hair, loosely threaded with gray; her eyebrows made very black and delicate crescents over her sharply brown eyes. Her skin was pale and her mouth scarlet. She was Jasper’s age and looked older, because she was too thin, too fined down in mouth and neck and body.

  She seated herself and looked at Jasper. She had not yet said one word. He stood before her, watching her. There was something at once spiritless and stubborn about the way she sat. Vee’s face came to him, so vivid and responsive. He felt a torment of longing to be with her that very moment, to make up their quarrel, to behave as other men behaved. He meant to, he wanted to, yet…

  He shook his head, to clear it of irrelevancies.

  “The divorce again?” Beth asked.

  “Look here, Beth, we’ve got to get together on it this time. Last time you said you’d think it all over again. Have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I told you I
would. I told you that the first time you asked me. That was the first week of July. I told you again that morning you came over.”

  “Well, but I mean, when? I told you I wouldn’t rush you. But the lawyers have worked out everything now and I can’t see any sense in not winding it up.”

  “You always want everything wound up, Jas.”

  He started a gesture of impatience, but caught it before she could see it. He must not get her worked up into an argument, a scene, tears.

  “I guess I do,” he said ruefully. “But this is a little tense for both of us, isn’t it, just waiting around to start?”

  “I suppose I ought to feel anxious to get it over, too.”

  “But you don’t? Oh, Beth, it’s like an operation. It’s—”

  She smiled. Her lips scarcely widened, her face remained inert.

  “That’s what everybody says to me. Ann said it just the other day. But—some people are afraid of operations.”

  “Ann? Ann who?”

  “Willis. You know I still see her and Fred.”

  “Oh, her. Yes, I forgot about her.” A question darted in his mind, but it was unthinkable that he should ask it.

  “She’s awfully good for me, Jas. I know you never liked them much, but I’ve been seeing a lot of her.” She smiled, a sly smile. “She doesn’t like you so much either.”

  “It’s all right with me. I suppose she spends a lot of time discussing what a heel I’ve been to you.” He still hadn’t asked it.

  Beth’s face did not change.

  “Not any more. When we first separated, she did. But for the last year or so she just won’t mention your name.”

  He drew a deeper breath. He had not asked it, but Beth had answered it.

  “I’m glad you’re friends,” he said with unexpected warmth. “She’s a hell of a nice woman in a lot of ways.”

  There was a pause. Talking with Beth always used to be this way. The talk had to be pushed, shoved along constantly, or it came to full stops. She seemed always ready to fall silent.

  “Well, to get back. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that about the operation. It’s a stupid cliché, anyway. But, really, Beth, you know you’re going to do it, you said so, and it’s not very—very—well, it’s not conducive to your peace of mind to let it hang fire this way.”

  “Jas, don’t pretend you’re thinking of my peace of mind. You never did and you’re not now. You told me I needn’t hurry, didn’t you?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Well, it’s easier for me not to. I can’t bear the idea of being a ‘divorcée’—I hate the very word. It—it sounds so discarded. I’d rather go on this way as long as I can. I’m used to this now. It isn’t so”—her voice broke, but she controlled it at once—“horrible as it used to be.”

  A knob of anger rose in his throat. He wanted to shake her loose from this quiet, stubborn something which sounded so acquiescent and yet balked every wish he expressed. There was a terrible strength about this kind of passive woman. It was the untouchable strength of inertia.

  “You’d get used to the other, sooner than you think,” he said. “Beth, truly it would be better for you to, to be free really, to be able to marry somebody who’d be right for you.” The anger was gone, the voice and manner of sympathy engendered the feeling in him. He went to her, sat down beside her, and put his hand on her arm. “I wasn’t right for you—God knows whether I’d ever be right for anybody. There’s something so damn awful inside me when I get the feeling of ‘belonging’ to a person.”

  She looked at him and saw that his eyes were intense. She knew he was being honest; she remembered that after their first quarrels he would often take the blame, would often loathe himself with the same energy he put into everything else he ever did.

  “You’re trying to get me to start for Reno right away,” she said. The very words mocked at her own hopes. For over two years she had dreamed that she would fall in love first, want the divorce for herself, go to Reno knowing that at the end there would be happiness to return to. But it hadn’t happened that way.

  He said nothing. He must not press her. He had never really pressed her about the precise time. But the whole summer had gone and she still was here. The legal arrangements had all been drawn, and she was still here.

  “I’ve thought that perhaps some friend of mine would be going West,” she said, half contrite and half defiant, “or maybe this winter to Florida. If I didn’t have to go alone, it would be easier. And since you said there wasn’t any specific—”

  She broke off, looked at him closely.

  “Jas, it isn’t because you want to marry somebody else? You said it wasn’t—”

  “You asked me if I wanted to marry, and I said, ‘You know how I feel about marriage—and especially if you can’t have children.’ That’s what I say now.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Look, Beth, I don’t want to imply that I’ll never marry, either.”

  “No, I understand that.”

  Again a silence fell between them. Jasper glanced at his watch. He went to the window and looked at the sky. It was clear and hot; it would be bumpy in the plane. If he had a few minutes at the airport, he would phone Vee. No, it would be better to let some time pass. He could call her from Cleveland, after the mess there was cleared up and he felt better inside about everything. Premature efforts at conciliation blew up in your face nearly every time.

  “I have to leave for the airport, Beth,” he said as he turned back to her. “Don’t wait for Florida. That’s next winter and you’ll just be brooding about it that much longer. It’s hard for me too, with everything about the network driving me crazy, anyway.”

  She nodded. Her thin scarlet mouth trembled for the first time.

  “It would be the best, to pack my bags and get the next train,” she said slowly. “I know that, with my head.” .

  “I’m sorry—about us,” he said. His eyes told her he meant it. For that moment he meant it.

  “I know. Well, Jas, I’ll try to get my nerve up soon.”

  He left, with that. In the cab, on the way to the airport, he felt the anger knob up again. Showdown, indeed. He was, when you analyzed it, precisely where he had been after every other talk with Beth this summer. Which was nowhere. She would go when she finally decided to go. There was something implacable and unbeatable about a passive woman.

  He could force her, he could make her go at once. The one thing he did not want to do was to dominate and browbeat her into going. She could drive him to just that. Drive him through her very inertia. And then, having driven him, she would forever after brand him as cruel, brutish about other people’s reactions. Oh, Christ, that was always the way.

  You finally acted in self-defense, in self-protection—and then it was you who were ruthless.

  “For God’s sake, step on it,” he rasped to the taxi driver. “You want me to miss my plane?”

  “Take it easy, bud. I’m doin’ fifty now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  FRANZ’ SECRET rubbed at his nerves. In all the long years of their marriage, he had never had a personal secret from Christa, and he felt distaste for the burden of it. But he did not waver about keeping it.

  She knew everything else. He read her his letters to Ramsey-Smithe, to Cresselin, to colleagues in Belgium and Holland, and then as their answers came, he read those, translating loosely so that the nuances of discouragement did not come through too clearly. But there was no way to conceal the fact that permanent settlement in Europe looked impossible for them.

  Hewlett Ramsey-Smithe replied at once, eager to help, and personally angry and ashamed over the medical situation in England. He wrote that during the very week of the Evian meeting, the British Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hare, was waited on by groups from the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Surgeons, making official protests against allowing in any more refugee physicians or surgeons. A few days later, in the House of Commons, the strongest de
mands for such restrictions were made again; the press quoted certain leading doctors as threatening to organize a national “stay in” strike of English doctors unless the doors were completely barred and at once. Since 1933, England had extended permission to 137 German physicians to practice there, and since Anschluss to 50 Austrian doctors as well. That was enough. German doctors, Austrian doctors, any outside doctors, had different standards, different methods, different fees.

  But Hewlett Ramsey-Smithe was investigating the chances for him in other parts of the Empire and in the Commonwealth. As soon as he had something definite to report, he would write or, better yet, telephone, for he could well imagine the position his good and able colleague now found himself in. The most likely suggestion he had yet heard was in the Union of South Africa. Would Johannesburg appeal at all? Might it not do as a steppingstone, anyway? If they were to go there and it turned out they didn’t like it after a bit, they could apply for American visas from there.

  Everything in Franz rejected the suggestion, but he was grateful for the concern behind it. Cresselin’s letters and all the others told of new bars going up in every country for all professional men; the letters varied only in the degree of warmth with which they offered help in spite of the difficulties. After two or three exchanges, some sixth sense told Franz that in all the world he had found only two people who were really persisting in their drive to help them. One was Vera M. Stamford, on the other side of the Atlantic; on this side was Mr. Hewlett Ramsey-Smithe. And from each of the Englishman’s frequent letters, one idea kept emerging. Their best hope lay in South Africa.

  Franz began, reluctantly still, to consider it. “A steppingstone to America”—a far-flung one, but perhaps the surest, after all. He forced himself to adjust his point of view about the pattern of their future, to see it with this new detour in it. Casually, he introduced the subject of South Africa in talks with the children and Christa; as he awakened their interest, he even found some genuine curiosity stirring in his own mind. Cape Town, Johannesburg, that great unknown stretch of world—it might be.