The tea party was in what was known as a Common Room in one of the Houses—buildings they did not have when I was in college. When Kay and I came in, all sorts of men I should have known and could not remember came trooping in too, with women and children.
“Harry,” Kay asked, “how long do we have to stay here?”
I did not blame her much for asking, for we did not seem to know anybody. A long table at one end of the room was covered with tea cups and cakes. Through the clatter of voices the women and children were pushing near the table while the men all moved in another direction.
“I’m going to get a drink,” I told her. “There must be some over in that corner.”
“No, you’re not,” Kay said. “You’re not going to leave me here alone.”
“All right,” I said, and we stood there, while I kept trying to change the faces back into faces of boys I had known in their teens.
“Oh,” Kay said, “there’s Bill!” And then I saw Bill edging his way toward us across the room.
“Hello, boy,” he said. “How do you like the classmates and the kiddies?”
“I’m going to get a drink,” I said.
Kay put her hand on my arm and stopped me.
“Before you go, give me the keys to the car,” she said. “Bill can take me home.”
“Now, Kay,” I told her, “you’re on the Committee. You ought to go and speak to the others.”
Kay looked across the room at the tea tables. I knew from her expression that there was not much use arguing. Nevertheless, it did not seem fair.
“I’ll just speak to them,” she said, “but I have a headache, Harry. Just give me the keys, and you can stay.”
“Why, of course, I’ll go too,” I said, “if you have a headache,” but I did not believe for a minute that she had one.
“No,” she said, “you stay.”
“Kay,” I asked, “can’t you just wait for half an hour?”
“Let’s not argue,” Kay answered. “Just give me the keys. Bill will take me home.”
I gave her the keys, because I did not want to have an argument in front of Bill.
“I don’t ask you to do much, Kay,” I said. “I really think you might—”
The room was getting crowded. We had to raise our voices to make ourselves heard.
“Oh, Harry!” Kay said. “Don’t be so tiresome. Just come when you get ready. Come on, Bill,” and she took Bill’s arm.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll come when I get good and ready.”
It did seem to me that the least she might have done was to stay a little while. It was not fair of Kay. She was simply taking out some irritation she had with me on the Class. She wanted to have a good time with Bill and so did I, but that was no reason why she and Bill should have left me flat. It took away all my enthusiasm and all my interest.
Everyone looked tired and unattractive and lost and bewildered. I ran into someone’s daughter who was carrying a cup of tea; part of it spilled on the floor and I said, “Excuse me.” Then I ran into someone’s son who had pimples like George, and I realized that we were all in the same boat together and that I ought to be nice to my classmate’s son.
“It’s quite a crowd, isn’t it?” I said.
The boy gulped and said yes. I never did know what to say to anyone else’s son. I had seen plenty of them at friends’ houses and only a little while ago they had been in rompers.
“It was a great game, wasn’t it?” I said.
“Yes, sir,” he said and looked around him wildly. He wanted to get away and so did I, but there we were.
“Where do you go to school?” I asked.
“Exeter, sir,” he said.
Someone else bumped into him and he got his feet twisted just the way George did. He was bored to death and so was I. I could put myself right in his place.
“Well,” I said, “have a good time,” and I began pushing myself toward a corner near the piano where most of the men were going. I was halfway there when someone stopped me—my classmate Bob Ridge. I never could understand why it was that I always found myself thrown with Bob Ridge in any sort of a crowd.
“Harry,” Bob said, “I didn’t know he was as big as that.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Your boy,” Bob said. “He looks just like you, too. Harry, have you ever thought it’s about time—”
“Time for what?” I asked.
“Time for you to take out something on him at the low rates!” Bob said.
“He isn’t my boy,” I said, “and I want a drink.”
Then I saw Bo-jo Brown in the corner near the piano. Sam Green was near him and Bo-jo had his arm around the shoulders of a pale thin man, who looked confused.
“Well, there you are,” Bo-jo called. “Get a drink into Harry, Sam. All the old crowd’s getting together.”
Bo-jo slapped the pale man on the back and pushed him toward me so hard that we nearly collided.
“Isn’t this a swell party?” Bo-jo shouted above the noise. “Say, Johnny, you remember Harry, don’t you? This is Johnny Ransome, Harry Pulham,” and then I realized that I was looking at the man whom Marvin Myles had married.
He had never seemed real to me before, but there he was, being pushed right at me, and I remembered that Bill had said he was like me. I only hoped I was not like him physically. He had a long nose and pale gray eyes and thin lips. He made me think, I don’t know why, that he must have been the sort of boy who would have been educated by tutors, the sort of boy whose father would have owned a private car. His clothes were quiet and inconspicuous, but they were beautifully cut. He looked at me as though I were the first comprehensible person he had seen for a long while. He was grasping my hand like a man on a turbulent sea grasping at a plank.
“Marvin’s told me a lot about you,” he said.
I wondered just what it was that Marvin had told him and for a moment I forgot about the noise.
“I’m awfully glad to meet you,” I told him. “Marvin—Marvin used to be quite a friend of mine.” I was wondering what there was in him that Marvin liked. Then I thought he was probably wondering what she had seen in me. I raised my glass and took a few quick swallows.
“I wish we could all have a talk sometime,” he said. “You’ve got to look us up. I never knew anyone much in college. I—you see, I wasn’t very well.”
I did not know what to say to that. It would sound a little queer to say that I was sorry. Bo-jo had been listening to us and perhaps he thought things were slowing up a bit, because he thumped John Ransome on the back again.
“Well, you know the whole crowd now, don’t you, Johnny? All the best boys in the Class and it’s the best damned Class that ever came out of Harvard. Come on, Sam, and give Johnny a drink.”
“I’ve had plenty, really,” Ransome said.
“Come on,” Bo-jo called. “Come on.”
I told myself that it was just as well we didn’t get together often, but we all were trying hard.
“It was a great game, wasn’t it, Bo-jo?” I said.
Bo-jo scowled at me and then he put his arm back around Ransome’s shoulders.
“Now, what do you know about that, Johnny?” he said. “He says it was a great game. Now, you and I know it was lousy.”
A number of people around us stopped talking. Everyone always wanted to hear what Bo-jo said about a game and Bo-jo began to tell us. The Harvard team was shot in the pants with luck, he said; the trouble was that all the boys were suffering from mental hebetude. I finished my drink and took another. Everything was getting easier, coming back into something like old times.
“They haven’t got any guts now,” Bo-jo said. “Now, I don’t want to boast about ourselves, but we definitely had. Now, take that time when we were out there on the five-yard line. Yale’s ball, first down, and it came to Dunbar and Dunbar fumbled. That was quite a game. You were there, Sam. You remember.”
“Yes,” Sam said, “I remember.”
“Well, let’s tell Johnny about it,” Bo-jo said. “Do you remember, Johnny? Third quarter, Yale’s ball on the five-yard line, first down, and that Eli, Dunbar, he was going to take it around end, don’t you remember?”
“No,” Ransome said, “I don’t think I do, Brown.”
“Now, listen,” Bo-jo said, “how do you get that way? My name’s Bo-jo. It was this way—if you boys aren’t bored.”
Of course no one was bored.
“All right. It was this way. Sam was over there and I was over there and you’re the Eli center, Johnny, and Dunbar’s right back of you, there, and you snap the ball back and Dunbar drops it.”
I felt rather sorry for Ransome. He was trying his best to follow it, but he looked blank.
“That was all there was,” Bo-jo said. “I came through that hole over there and picked it up. If it hadn’t been me you’d have had it, Sam. You were over there, over by the piano, and I was over here.”
“As a matter of fact,” Sam said, “you were a little more to the left, Bo-jo, going at a diagonal. If we had a pencil and paper—who’s got a pencil?”
Then I saw Bob Carroll. He walked over to the piano and sat down and began to play. It made everything better as soon as the piano was going. First he played “Hit the Line for Harvard” and everybody began to sing.
“Sing ‘I Want to be a Yale Boy,’” someone said.
It occurred to me it was not exactly a proper song with all the wives and children present, but nevertheless I found myself shouting at the top of my lungs, “Mother, if I can, I want to be a man, but I want to be a Yale boy, too.”
Then Bob began to play “Old New York” and then someone asked for “The Girl on the Magazine Cover,” and then they were singing the caisson song, but I never did think much of the caisson song, having been in the infantry myself. It was singular, once you started, the songs you could remember.
“Come on, boys,” Bo-jo shouted. “‘Good-by, Girls, I’m Through.’”
“Wait a minute,” Bob said. “How does that go?”
There was a pause as we all tried to remember, and then Ransome spoke diffidently, “‘I’m done with all temptation, you’ve no more fascination; good-by, girls; good-by, girls; good-by, girls, I’m through.’”
“Attaboy, Johnny,” Bo-jo called. “You tell ’em.”
XXXVII
Home from the Hill
It was getting late, time to be going home, and I edged my way out of the crowd by the piano. Then suddenly I saw her. It had never occurred to me that she had come with her husband. I was face to face with Marvin Myles, and all the noise and all the other people seemed to have dropped away from us. I could hear them in the distance shouting out that song again—“Good-by, Girls, I’m Through.” I don’t know how long we stood there looking at each other, but I remember that I felt cold for a moment and not at all like myself. She was standing there, aloof and puzzled. Her face was just as I remembered it and so was her hair. She was carrying a mink coat over her arm. She had on a pearl necklace and a diamond bracelet and a diamond ring on her engagement finger, and she looked awfully trim and awfully well.
Then I heard her speak to me, just as she had in my thoughts, when I had met her in my thoughts.
“Harry,” she said, “why, Harry, darling!”
“Why, hello, Marvin,” I said.
And then she kissed me. I had not expected that at all and it startled me. It was the first thing that made me remember where I was—her kissing me—and I wondered if anyone had noticed and would tell Kay about it. Nevertheless, I was awfully pleased she had, because it was just like her.
“Why, darling,” she said, “you’re just the same!” And I saw that she was laughing at me.
“It’s awfully nice to see you, Marvin,” I said.
The voices around us were growing louder. We seemed to have been away somewhere, just she and I all alone, and now we were back. I must have always known that we would meet sometime, and there we were. She and I had snatched an instant out of time. We had snatched it out of all the noise of that steamy, stuffy room. For an instant we had belonged to each other again.
Her eyes, when they met mine, were trying to see what had happened to me, not inquisitively but kindly.
“Is Kay here?” she asked.
She must have seen that I looked surprised, because she spoke quickly before I could answer.
“I knew her, don’t you remember?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “No, Kay’s gone home. She had a headache. Bill King took her home.”
“Oh,” Marvin said, “Bill.” I could see that she was thinking, remembering all sorts of things. “Bill and I have always talked about you.”
Her eyes had grown narrow. Her forehead puckered into a little frown, just the way it used to.
“This is all so peculiar,” she said. “I still don’t know how to act. It reminds me of when you took me to that football game. I was awfully puzzled then. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” I said, “of course.”
“It’s really funny. It’s just as though—”
“Just as though what?” I asked.
“Oh, never mind,” she said. “Have you seen John?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “He’s over by the piano with Bo-jo Brown.”
“Bo-jo?” she said. “He’s the one you used to talk about, and who was that other one, who had dinner with us once? He was out there with us in the snow.”
“Oh,” I said, “Joe Bingham. Joe’s in Chicago now.”
It made me a little sad to think of it. Somehow I wanted to think of something else.
“All of that—” Marvin said, “that’s why I married John.”
I could not understand why she wanted to explain to me why she had married John.
“When I first saw him he looked like you. He had that worried look. Tonight he’s going out to a men’s dinner.”
“Yes, I know,” I said.
She frowned again, just the way she used to, and she looked around the room just the way Kay had. I could see that she did not like any of it, that she wanted to get away.
“Harry,” she said, “why don’t you and I have dinner—up in our room?”
“What room?” I asked, and Marvin laughed.
“Our parlor,” she said, “at the Sulgrave.”
At first I thought of a lot of reasons why I ought not. For one thing, I ought to be back entertaining Bill, and for another I should probably be expected to call somewhere for Gladys, but then again I did not see any valid reason why I shouldn’t, and besides I wanted to.
“Why, yes,” I said, “I’d love to—that is, if it’s all right.”
I had never imagined myself dining alone with someone else’s wife and I wondered just what I would say to Kay about it, and then it occurred to me that I might not have to refer to it at all.
“I knew you’d say that,” Marvin said. “Of course it’s all right, darling. Let’s get out of here,” and she put her arm through mine. If she had been Kay she would have told me not to be silly, but Marvin had never been like that.
“We can get a taxi somewhere,” I told her.
“We don’t need a taxi,” Marvin said. “Adolph’s right here outside. John had the car sent up.”
Then I was sitting beside her in the car with a robe thrown over our knees and Marvin took off her hat.
“God,” she said, “I’m glad to get out of that! Darling, do you remember when you met me with your car?”
“With Patrick? Yes,” I said.
I wished that she had not brought it up. It still hurt me to think of the time when I met her. We did not speak for a while, but simply sat there in the darkness of the car, watching the lights go past. I was thinking of how she called me “darling.” It had sounded differently the first time she said it—just when we saw each other. Now it sounded the way Mary might have said it—sweet but different.
“Do you remember when I used to read poetry to you?” Marvin asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You always liked Tennyson,” she said. “I never could get you to like real poetry.”
“I still like Tennyson,” I said.
“‘Blow, bugle, blow,’” Marvin said. “Do you remember? ‘Set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer echoes, dying, dying, dying.’”
Her voice was the same, musical and clear.
“That’s awfully sad,” I said. “I wish you’d quote something that isn’t sad.”
“Why,” Marvin said, “it isn’t sad, really. Darling, I wish you’d hold my hand.”
I took her hand under the robe. It was not the right thing to do, but I held it tight.
“Isn’t it queer?” Marvin said.
“Yes,” I said, “it is.”
“And we’ve got such a lot to talk about,” Marvin said. “Like the hunter ‘home from the hill.’”
“Yes,” I said, but we just sat there, holding hands. I knew the poem she meant. I had not done much about poetry since I had last seen Marvin Myles, and now it made me sad, quiet and sad, and I did not want to be, because I was awfully glad to see her.
But there was nothing sad about the Sulgrave. The lobby was full of the Yale crowd, all milling around the palm trees, and I saw a good many people looking at us. It made me wish I had on something better than my raccoon-skin coat, and then something else began to bother me. I did not want John Ransome to pay for the dinner and I told Marvin so, but Marvin only laughed. It all gave me an excited, guilty feeling, going up with her in the elevator to the fifth floor, and waiting while she looked for her key and unlocked the door. I was hoping that no one I knew would see us or misinterpret my being up there with Marvin. I recalled stories I had heard about house detectives, the truth of which I could not vouch for, since I had never seen a house detective. Yet, though I was partly worried, I partly did not mind at all.
“Come on in,” she said, and she closed the door.
We were in one of those ornate hotel sitting rooms. Its sofas and chairs and tables were in a decorative style which had been popular about twenty years before. It seemed as though I had been in just such a room once, and then I remembered. It was just like the hotel room that Kay and I had taken on our wedding night.
H. M. Pulham, Esquire Page 43