H. M. Pulham, Esquire

by John P. Marquand

  “They would like you,” I said, “as soon as they understood you.”

  “But what is there to understand?” she asked.

  “Nothing, really,” I said. “It’s only if you see one type of person all your life you judge everyone else by that type. You wouldn’t understand them either.”

  “Maybe I would. I understand you,” she said.

  Marvin took a cigarette out of her bag and leaned toward me while I lighted it.

  “It’s easier for one person to understand another person,” I told her, “but it’s harder to understand two or three. What are you laughing at?”

  “At you,” she said. “If you’d only just let things go … I wonder what you would be like.” I did not answer immediately, but I liked it when she talked about me.

  “If I were bright like Bill King,” I said, “maybe I wouldn’t have to worry so much.”

  “Now, listen to me,” she told me. “Bill King isn’t running you. I wish you would get over deferring to him.”

  “Don’t you like Bill King?” I asked.

  “I don’t like what he does to you,” she said. “You’re just as good as he is. Have you packed your bag?”

  I told her that I had not packed my bag, but that it would only take a minute. The train did not leave until eleven.

  “Well, I’m going over to see that you get everything in,” she said. “You’ll be sure to forget something.”

  “That’s awfully nice of you,” I told her, “but I don’t know what they would say about your coming up to my room.”

  “What would they say?” she asked. “I have always wanted to see your room.”

  I had rented one of the front bedrooms in an old brownstone house on Lexington Avenue. The furniture was sparse and simple—an iron bed, a bureau with a large mirror, a small table and two chairs. No one said anything when we went upstairs, but I still had an uneasy feeling that she should not have been there. Marvin took off her hat and dropped it with her bag and gloves on the table.

  “Where’s your suitcase?” she asked. “It’s getting late.”

  I pulled the suitcase out of the closet and laid it on the bed. Then I noticed that she was looking at the pictures on the bureau.

  “Who’s that?” she asked. “Your mother?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s Mother.”

  “And that’s your father?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s Father.”

  “And who is the girl? Someone you haven’t told me about?”

  “I’ve told you about her,” I said. “That’s Mary, my sister.”

  “And what’s this picture?”

  “The officers in my regiment,” I said.

  “And who are those boys?” she asked.

  “They’re in my Club,” I said, “my Club at Harvard.”

  She leaned her hands on the bureau and peered for a while at the pictures.

  “All of you is there, isn’t it?” she said. “All that you’re going back to? It must be queer, being in two places at once.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I answered. “I’m not in two places at once.”

  “Where are your shirts and socks?” she asked. “If some maid or someone unpacks your bag I want them to know that you’re neat.”

  It was queer seeing her go over my shirts.

  “Now, your evening clothes,” she said, “and now that other suit I made you buy, and now your white flannels. Doesn’t anybody do any mending for you here?”

  “The laundry is supposed to,” I said.

  “Well, it doesn’t,” she said. “I’ll take that up with you some other time.”

  We called a taxicab at the corner and she rode with me to the station.

  “Harry,” she said, “you’re coming back, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I’m coming back,” I said. “I’ll be at the office Monday.”

  “You’re sure?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “of course I’m sure.”

  She spoke of it again when we got to the gate of the night train.

  “Be sure you come back,” she said. “Don’t let them take you away.”

  I turned as I walked past the train and saw her standing watching me and I waved my hand to her and she waved back. I did not realize then, or during my visit to North Harbor either, that I was already in love with Marvin Myles.

  XVI

  I Must Go Down to the Seas Again

  The nearest railroad stop to North Harbor was the Junction, at a little town called Hutchins about ten miles away, where the train from New York, one of those week end accommodation trains, stopped at five in the morning. In the fresh early light all its details possessed the vague excitement of old association, for I had alighted on that platform in summers ever since I was eight years old. The yellowish brown station building and the platform had not changed. In spite of the automobiles waiting, the ghosts of the old carryalls and democrats that used to take us over the long drive to the Harbor still seemed to linger in the driveway. The baggage-master was the same one I had always remembered, squat and fat but growing very gray. In back of the station was the general store and the white Methodist church that looked like something a child might make from a box of blocks, and then there were all the small white houses, each in its yard with its paling fence, and in the air the resinous smell of fir trees which one always associates with Maine. Patrick had come to meet me in the heavy limousine. I saw his round face and his comfortable stomach right away, the same Patrick who used to meet us in the carryall, but now turned into a chauffeur, and not such a very good one either.

  “Give me them bags, Master Harry,” he said.

  I told Patrick I would ride in front with him and he told me I should do no such thing, because it would not look right; I should ride in back, but he would lower the window so that we could talk.

  “If you do that,” I said, “you’ll pull the wrong rein and drive us into a tree.”

  Then I heard someone calling me and I turned back to the platform. For just an instant I was puzzled as to who it might be though the voice and the face were perfectly familiar, and then I saw that it was Joe Bingham. I had not seen him since the war, but there he was, just as he always had been, in a gray flannel suit, holding a suitcase. He must have come on the Boston section of the train.

  “My God,” he said, “you’re looking just the same!” It was incredible that I could be looking just the same. “Are you down for the week end?”

  “Yes,” I said, “are you?” Then a sort of diffident silence fell between us. I could not think of anything to say, although I liked him as much as ever.

  “Where are you staying?” I asked.

  “With the Motfords.”

  “Can I give you a lift?” I asked. “Patrick is here.”

  “Thanks,” he said, “but I’d better go in their car as long as they sent it.”

  “I’ll be seeing you right away,” I said. “It’s great to see you, Joe.”

  “It’s great to see you, Harry,” he said. “I’ll see you on the beach.”

  I climbed in beside Patrick and he threw the car noisily into gear. The sun was high enough now so that the mist was rising over the scrubby woodland of spruces and pine and birch and poplar on either side of the road. It was always a dull drive until you saw the sea. I could remember all the landmarks, although they came and went more rapidly than they had in the horse and carriage days: the yellow house with its arched doorway, the abandoned farm with alders and birch creeping over its fields, the little bridge above the brook.

  “How’s everyone?” I asked.

  “Everyone is well,” Patrick said. “Praise be to God!”

  “How’s Mother?” I asked.

  “Your mother,” Patrick said, “ain’t what she used to be.”

  I asked him what he meant by that and he said that she was feebler, that the doctor had been coming more often, but she still liked to ride along the shore road in the Victo
ria, which was shipped from Westwood every summer. He said they had all been missing me, that nothing was the same with me away, but I did not want to go into that. I was beginning to realize, the nearer we came to North Harbor, how much I had been missing them all too, without really knowing it. They must have been in my mind all the time, secure in North Harbor, and I had thought of them that way for a long time—all through the war and ever since.

  “How’s Mary?” I asked.

  Patrick said that Miss Mary was handsome and that there were lots of girls and boys around the house. Then I saw the sea, smooth and blue and gold and misty, with Rocky Point stretching out into the middle of it.

  “There it is,” I said. We passed the Harbor Inn that still was dozing by the beach, and then turned toward the houses, built in the Eighties and Nineties with porte-cocheres and towers and bay windows, till we came to our own house which looked very much like the rest of them, with luxuriant nasturtiums and geraniums in the window boxes. As soon as we reached the turnabout the front door opened and Hugh came hurrying down the piazza steps and my father, in plus-four golf trousers, followed him.

  “Good morning, Master Harry,” Hugh said, and I shook hands with Father—not as though I were his son but as though I were somebody his own age.

  “Breakfast is ready,” he said. “Don’t talk too loudly in the hall. Your mother is still asleep. How are you?” The hall had a fresh, soapy smell. The coffee urn in the dining room was ready.

  “It’s nice of you to get up so early,” I said.

  “No trouble at all,” Father said. “You look a little white around the gills. You ought to get more exercise.” He closed the dining room door and Hugh came in with orange juice. “Mary was coming down,” Father said, “but she was up late last night. They all keep going to those damned movies.”

  “How’s everyone been?” I asked.

  “Your mother isn’t very well,” Father said. “And Frank Wilding says there’s going to be a slump.” He paused and drank some coffee. “I’m glad you came here this week end. There’s been a devil of a time at the Club.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “You can’t believe it,” Father said. “They’re going to straighten out the dog leg on the fourteenth hole. That’s one of the prettiest, trickiest drives in the country, and they’re going to straighten it out.”

  “Who is?” I asked.

  “The Greens Committee. It’s that man Field. They’ve put him on the Greens Committee.”

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “That’s it,” Father said. “Just who is he? God knows who, except that he owns a factory in Ohio, and now he thinks he can change the fourteenth hole, because he says it’s too hard for a normal player. There’s an entirely new element getting in here. You remember the fourteenth hole, don’t you? The one just after the water hazard, par five.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I remember. I made a four on it once.”

  “You did?” said Father. “You never told me about that.”

  “I got just up to the edge of the green with a brassie,” I said, “and then I chipped right up to the pin. They ought not to change that hole.”

  “Then you’ll come down to the meeting before the dance tonight and vote, won’t you?” Father said. “I tell you, Harry, this place isn’t what it used to be.” He looked out of the wide plateglass windows at the sea. “Nothing’s what it used to be. It’s the restlessness after the war. It’s going to take quite a while before we get over the dislocations. Take the income tax. I never imagined that I should live to see the day when some Government whippersnapper could walk into my office and pry into my private affairs. I never thought I should live to see the time when radicals were organizing labor or when a sentimentalist in the White House could almost get us into a League of Nations. I suppose war is disturbing.” His eyes were on me and he stroked his graying mustache. “It must be something like going camping. You get used to all sorts of simple things.”

  “Yes,” I said, “you see things differently, Father.”

  “I can understand that,” Father said, “but I’d like to know exactly how. Does it make you restless? Do you want excitement?”

  “It isn’t entirely that,” I told him. “I guess it may be that you get over the idea you’re going to live forever or that anything is going to last forever.”

  Father bit off the end of a cigar and Hugh came forward with a little alcohol burner on a silver tray.

  “That’s all for now, Hugh,” Father said. “You’d better go up and unpack Master Harry’s clothes.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hugh said. He closed the pantry door, and Father watched it for a moment.

  “That man’s always listening,” he said. “I can understand what you mean. When you get to be my age you’ll know you won’t live forever. I suppose it’s unsettling, though, to discover it when you’re young; but there are some things that I like to think are going to live for quite a while, such as common decency and civilization and human liberty.”

  Then he looked confused. He was never very good at talking.

  “But there’s no use in going on,” he said, “because you know what I mean: things we don’t talk about, but feel; what you feel in a really good book. You get it in Surtees. You get it in Scott and Thackeray, not very much in Dickens, but it’s in Charles Lever. It’s in what I can understand of Shakespeare. But I like Surtees best of all.”

  “I don’t exactly see what you’re getting at,” I said.

  Father pulled at his cigar.

  “It’s hard to put these things into words, Harry. It isn’t any news that any of us are going to die, but we like to think we’re going to be remembered. We don’t like to see everything we believe in changing. I should hate, for instance, to feel that the world is going to stay as topsy-turvy as it is. I know it isn’t going to. You and everybody else are going to settle down, because certain values can’t change.”

  I never understood what he meant until recently when I have seen a lot of my own beliefs and standards, too vague to specify, wash overboard.

  “Harry,” he said, “what the devil is it you do in New York?”

  He drummed his fingers on the table while I went into the details of the Coza soap campaign, which sounded out of place in the dining room.

  “Thunder!” Father said. “You can’t like anything like that!”

  “I like it,” I said, “because something’s happening all the time.”

  Father sighed.

  “I can’t follow you. I keep trying to think what I was like at your age. I believe I was much the same as I am now. I can’t recall ever wanting things to happen. I’ve spent all my life trying to fix it so that things wouldn’t happen. Well, what else do you do in New York?”

  “Nothing much,” I said. “We generally work late and I’m pretty tired in the evening.”

  “Don’t you ever see anyone?” Father asked.

  “Not very often,” I said.

  “Then you’d better make up for lost time,” Father told me. “You’d better see all your old friends, now you’re here. The Motfords have asked you to lunch and we’re having a big dinner tonight before the Club dance. What’s the matter, Harry?”

  “Nothing, sir,” I said.

  “Then, don’t look like that,” he told me. “I want people to know you’re alive. That’s all.”

  The dining room door opened and there was Mary in a blue dress with white dots. She also gave me a queer searching look before she kissed me.

  “You look awfully tired,” she said.

  “It’s the train,” I told her. “I could never sleep on a train.”

  She walked upstairs with me to my room with her arm linked through mine.

  “He wasn’t arguing with you, was he?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “just talking.”

  “Because no one’s going to argue with you. I’ve taken it up with all of them. You’re just going to have a good time. Everyone’s been asking fo
r you.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Oh, everyone,” she said. “I know a lot of your friends now.”

  All at once I felt like a stranger, or as though I had never really known my family. It must have been because their interests were no longer the same as mine. I did not even seem to care whether my friends were interested in me or not. In some way we were all like people speaking different languages.

  Hugh was waiting when Mary and I got up to my room, and Hugh himself was like a stranger—an oldish, flaccid, pompous parasite.

  “Well, well,” said Hugh, “so we’re working in the city, are we? Advertising! What a thing now for a gentleman to do.”

  “Shut up and get me out my golf clothes,” I said.

  “Well, well,” said Hugh, “listen to him, Miss Mary. And Mr. Harry used to be a little gentleman.”

  “You attend to your business,” I said. “You’re an old fake and you always were a fake.”

  We were talking as we had always talked, but somehow, though I tried to use the same old tone, my voice had an unfamiliar edge to it.

  “Such a thing to say,” Hugh said. “I’ve worked in houses where you would not be permitted to enter, Master Harry. I was in the household in Yarrell Manor in Dorset.”

  We had all heard about Yarrell Manor before.

  “What were you?” I asked. “The boots boy?”

  Even that old reply which I had used often enough before had a different ring to it. Instead of grinning back at me Hugh’s face grew red.

  “If you want anything more, Master Harry, you have only to ring,” he said, and he closed the door softly behind him.

  “Why, Harry,” Mary said, “you hurt Hugh’s feelings.”

  “I don’t see why,” I said. “It was the way we always used to talk.”

  Mary sat down in an armchair near the window and I found myself looking at her. She had Father’s dark hair and eyes and high color. She had a supple, sensuous sort of grace which I had never perceived before.

  “Give me a cigarette,” she said and held out a long delicate hand.

  “Are you allowed to smoke?” I asked, and she smiled at me.

  “What do you think I am?” she asked. “Fifteen? Everybody’s beginning to smoke.”