“This is a nice room, isn’t it, dear?” he asked. “I think perhaps I’d better take the bed by the doorway, don’t you?”
It did not help his sense of uneasiness to find that she was laughing at him.
“And if you want to bathe or anything,” he said, “I’ll go out for a half an hour and stroll around. The hot water comes directly from a hot spring, I believe, in case you’d like to know.”
“Listen,” she said, “you’ve traveled around considerably, haven’t you? Haven’t you ever been alone in a hotel bedroom with a girl before?”
“Well, yes,” he said, “occasionally, now you ask me, but not exactly in this way, Ruth.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t see such a great difference and don’t take it so seriously, for heaven’s sake, even if your father was a missionary. I’m going to take a bath, and you’d better, too. Do you snore, darling?”
“No,” he told her, and he lowered his voice, “you ought to know I don’t; not in this business, Ruth.”
She tossed her suitcase on the bed next to the wall and snapped it open. The easy way that she moved her luggage showed that she was much stronger than she looked.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said, but she lowered her voice just as carefully as he had, “the more we forget the business while we’re in here, the better. Darling, aren’t you going to give me a kiss or anything, after you’ve brought me all this way?”
She raised her voice when she asked that last question and looked at him meaningly.
“Why, dear,” he said, “I’ve been waiting for this for hours.”
“Oh, darling,” she said, and then she whispered, “there’s someone in the hall outside. We have the privacy of goldfish in this room.”
His first instinct was to tiptoe to the door and snatch it open, but she held him and shook her head.
“No, no,” she whispered, “maybe it isn’t anything, but we’d better act damned silly. I think this place is spooky, Jack.”
She was right about the room. There was a transom above the door and he especially disliked transoms. Two windows at the foot of the twin beds, both of them open now, looked over the carefully tended grounds at the rear of the hotel. The third window in the bathroom with ground glass obviously opened on the corridor, and now that the bathroom door was open, a sound of footsteps made a rhythmic beat along the corridor’s jute carpet. They were the staccato steps of an Oriental, one of the hotel boys, he was very certain. Nevertheless, he quickly closed the bathroom door.
“Thanks,” he said. “I seem to be losing my grip, what with one thing and another.”
It was a mistake, he realized immediately, to have said such a thing out loud. He believed in holding a positive thought; as soon as one became overworried and overanxious, accidents frequently occurred. He stepped to the open window, examined the shades and curtains and then made a thorough inventory of the bedroom, which would have been unusually attractive under other circumstances. The Japanese prints on the wall seemed surprisingly good, although he was not a connoisseur of that sort of thing: pictures of strange bent-kneed men with staffs and heavy burdens on their backs, climbing mountains, crossing narrow-arched bridges, or laboring on farmsteads. The curtains that could be drawn before the windows were of heavy cotton, green and yellow with the bamboo motif so favored by Japanese textile designers. The twin beds with comfortable box-spring mattresses were in simple European taste, matching the large mirrored bureau and the taller dresser. Each was covered with a yellowish green spread of raw silk, and the walls had a matching greenish tint. Whoever had decorated the room had good taste. But there was one disturbing feature. The lock on the door was an old and clumsy contraption which any well trained operator could pick in a matter of seconds. The bathroom was commodious, and the tub, made out of marble slabs, gave it an old-fashioned charm.
Ruth Bogart had turned on the bathtub taps and the noise of the running water made a cheerful sound.
“I suppose we’ll have to look nice but informal,” she said, “if we’re going to that dance.” She was taking out clothing from her neatly packed bag. “I’ll wear my light green silk.”
“Better put on the dark green or a dark blue if you have it,” he told her. “Remember, we are going to go outside.”
“Right, I forgot,” she said. “I wonder whether Gibson’s got here yet.”
“That’s his problem,” he told her. “I’m going out to walk around while you take your bath.”
“You don’t have to, you know,” she said, “and I wish you’d put on something else besides that seersucker suit.”
“I’ll put on my blue one tonight,” he said, “but haven’t you noticed that everyone who does kind things for backward peoples customarily wears a seersucker suit?”
“Oh, dear,” she said, and she smiled at him. “I wish we were really staying here and that there could be just two people in this room instead of four. I’m sick of split personalities.”
She was still unpacking and hanging things in the bedroom closet as though they were going to stay there for an indefinite period. Her confident unpacking and the running water in the bath contrived to make a new bond in their relationship. The voices from the hotel guests came gaily through the open windows from the grounds outside. People were calling to each other at the swimming pool; army and navy mothers called to their children, and single men far away from home talked to their sweethearts. It was a tolerant hotel, a long way from anywhere, both moral and amoral, but agreeably enough the voices all sounded happy. Up by the swimming pool someone was singing, and then in the distance someone began whistling a tune that made Jack look at Ruth Bogart.
Both their faces had assumed their old watchful look because it was the tune they had last heard before the break of day at Wake Island.
You cannot see in gay Paree, in London or in Cork!
The queens you’ll meet on any street in old New York.
“Well, well,” he said softly, “our old favorite, isn’t it?”
There was no reason, his common sense told him, to be unduly startled. The melodies from The Red Mill were always cropping up on modern records, and they were good, despite the lapse of time.
“It’s no favorite of mine,” she said. “I told you this place was spooky.”
There was no one outside whom he recognized—only a stream of tennis players and of bathers coming down from the pool to dress for dinner.
“Well,” he said, “go ahead and take your bath. I’d better go down there and see what I can see.”
She shook her head emphatically.
“I’m not going to stay here alone,” she said. “I’ll go right down with you, and go dirty. That damn song. Frankly, it makes me frightened.”
They walked around the grounds for a while, arm in arm, hanging on each other’s words, laughing at each other’s jests. They walked up the hill to the swimming pool, which was almost deserted now that the sun was low. They observed the empty tennis courts and the hotel greenhouses with their potted azaleas and their cyclamen and fuchsias. They stood in the shade of a giant cryptomeria which must have been at least four hundred years old. They wandered heedlessly past Chrysanthemum Rest—a small cottage, which sure enough was not much more than a hundred and fifty feet away from the ballroom ell. Bill Gibson could not have picked a better place for a private conversation because, as he had said, the noise of the orchestra would drown out anything else. Then they stopped at the fish pond and watched children feeding bread crumbs to the giant goldfish.
“You know,” she said, “I wouldn’t mind being a fish myself, right now. No wonder they live a hundred years.”
“Don’t wish that, sweet,” he said loudly enough so that everyone could hear, because there was safety in sex. “Just compromise and be a mermaid.”
“All right, if you say so,” she answered, “you old seadog, you.”
He gave an involuntary shudder at her remark, but still, the cover was not so bad as he thought it was g
oing to be.
“Just don’t overplay,” he whispered to her amorously.
“All right,” she said, “you old seadog, you.” And then she laughed.
There was reassurance in her laughter; it meant that, like him, she had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. All they saw were happy people, young, carefree, many of them handsome, all concerned only with each other. It was very much like another musical comedy song—“Love is Sweeping the Country”—at that kindly hotel at sunset.
“Hold my hand,” she said. “It looks better, and now maybe we’d better go up and get ready for dinner.”
“Let’s go to that place called the Main Bar,” he said. “We haven’t seen it, and there may be something new there.”
The Main Bar was on the hotel’s lower level. The inspiration for its decoration must have been derived from foreign influence close to the turn of the century, because it had the earmarks of another happier age, and its spiritual quality, if such a thing could be attributed to a bar, was remarkable close to the music of Victor Herbert, Its dark woodwork was like the Old New York where the peach crop was always fine. Its comfortable chairs and tables were not crowded too closely together. The bar itself, with its magnificent array of glass, was almost as long and hospitable as the now mythical bar in Shanghai that was once believed to be the longest bar in the world. The only concession to a changing world lay in the new bar stools, those importations from the French bistro that had reached America at the end of Prohibition. A dozen happy couples, now that the dinner hour was approaching, were taking over the tables in groups of fours and twos, and several unaccompanied men were seated at the bar. Still, the room was large enough so that it gave a quiet, half-empty impression; the voices of its patrons were partially absorbed by its spaciousness.
“It’s awfully Gothic, isn’t it?” she said. “Like a church.”
“I’m not carried away by the resemblance,” he told her. He beckoned to a waiter. “Would you like a gin and tonic, dear?”
They had selected a table in a far corner from which the whole room was visible. He was already giving the people a mental screening even while he was thinking that he was tired of this sort of watchful analysis.
“Scotch and water,” she answered, “and I hope we can get bathed and ready for dinner pretty soon. Everybody here looks very cool and comfortable, and though you’re smarter than I am, I can’t locate any types.”
“Don’t try too hard. Don’t forget we’re in love,” he said. He leaned back and sipped his drink. She was right that there was no one who showed interesting signs. If it had not been for that tune, he would have believed that the place was wholly antiseptic, and of course Bill Gibson must have thought so, too, or he would not have named it as a contact point.
“That’s right,” she said. “I’ve got to keep remembering. You look handsomer tonight than you did yesterday, but you could do with a clean shirt, and I’d like it, at any rate, if you could get your seersucker suit pressed.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” he told her. “It makes me look informal, feeble and good-natured. Nobody cares what happens to a man in a seersucker suit.”
“I care at the moment,” she said, “if only because I don’t want to be left alone in this rat-race. Oh, Jack! Look across the room.”
His glance followed hers to the entrance by the bar.
“Well, well,” he said; “now things are looking up.”
He had to admit that he felt as Livingstone and Stanley must have when they encountered each other in the interior of Africa. At least things were moving according to plan, because Bill Gibson had entered the room, and there was no mistaking what Bill was. He was a tired, middle-aged American exporter from Tokyo out for a good time over the weekend. He was obviously having one, and he must have had a good time at the hotel on previous occasions because he waved to a group at one table and sat down with a couple at another, putting his arm playfully around the girl’s waist.
“Where’s Dorothy?” they heard him say. “Why didn’t you bring Dorothy?”
No one in the business was more consummate than Bill Gibson. In fact, his appearance gave Jack Rhyce a slight spasm of professional envy. Bill’s loud Aloha shirt was art. The paunchy roll of his walk and the slump of his shoulders were beautiful. He sauntered in an aimless way about the room, just as a lonely man with a few drinks should. He walked close by the table where Jack and Ruth Bogart sat, and Jack was exasperated by the obviousness of the contact. Bill was his senior in the business, but that was no reason to treat his junior like an amateur with such a clumsy check-in. For a second Jack thought he might be given some sort of signal, but nothing in Bill’s expression changed as he passed the table, no warning gesture, no signal of anxiety. The truth was that Bill Gibson could not have noticed anything off color either, or he would not have moved so carelessly. His face was flushed as though he had been in the sun by the swimming pool. His jowls had their old purplish tinge, his eyes their deceptive glazed expression. He passed their table and ambled to the bar, hoisted himself on one of the stools; Jack heard him calling happily:
“Another Scotch and soda, and make it a double this time, Boy-san.”
“Listen,” Ruth Bogart said, “school’s out now, isn’t it? Can’t we please go up and get a bath?”
“You go ahead,” Jack Rhyce said. “Maybe I ought to stick around here a few minutes.”
“No,” she answered. “All those corridors . . . I won’t go up there alone.”
“Now, listen,” he began, “I don’t think there’s a cough in a carload here.” And then he checked himself, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Fasten your seat belt,” he whispered, “and for God’s sake let’s be natural. Boy!” He raised his voice and waved to the bar waiter. “Two more, please. You’ll have another, won’t you, dear?”
“Oh,” she said, “yes, if you’d honestly like me to get tight, darling.”
11
SHE WAS a good girl, back in the act again. She had glanced for only a fraction of a second at the doorway to the bar, but the instant had been long enough for her to see what he had seen. There was no mistaking the sandy hair, the bushy eyebrows, the clear-eyed glance, the easy walk, the lazily swinging arms, and the characteristic half bend of the fingers of the man who had just entered. Once you had seen Big Ben, you could not miss him. He was wearing khaki trousers, army issue, and he, too, wore an Aloha shirt, and even in that moment of impact Jack Rhyce made a mental note that the shirt had a fish design similar to the shirt of Mr. Harry Pender at the Asia Friendship League.
“The fish,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he answered. “For God’s sake let’s be ‘natural.’ . . . You look awfully sweet tonight, honey.”
After all, there were plenty of fish designs on plenty of Aloha shirts, but still there was the coincidence. He saw Bill Gibson at the bar tossing off his double Scotch and soda. Bill had the description and Bill never missed anything. He must have seen, of course; he and Jack Rhyce must both have shared the same surprise and consternation, and also the same exalted sense you always had when the game was getting hot—because anything might happen now, anything, or nothing. It was unsafe to rely on intuition, and just as unsafe to discount it absolutely, but things had gone beyond the intuitive stage in Jack Rhyce’s reasoning. The coincidences had gone so far that there was scarcely a reasonable doubt any longer that the man was Big Ben. His appearance at the hotel at just this time confirmed the fact. Bill Gibson’s mind must have been moving in the same channels, but he continued drinking his whisky without a glance at the doorway. After all, there was nothing else to do. There was only one question hanging in the air, unanswered by the voices around them: How much did Big Ben know? Did he know who Bill Gibson was? Did he know who they were? There was no immediate answer to those questions, but very soon there was bound to be one.
There was bound to be because, as Big Ben stood by the door, their glances met, and Jack saw that he had recognized them. He could fee
l it in the nerves of his neck before his reason confirmed the fact. The light was on Big Ben and as far as Jack could see there was no blankness or surprise. The face was mobile. Honest pleasure rippled over it. The corners of the wide, expressive mouth turned upward, yet that was not all. Big Ben waved to them from across the room. Jack Rhyce waved back and beckoned, at the same time lifting his gin and tonic glass.
“Darling,” he said loudly, “just look who’s coming over! Ships that pass in the night, darling!” And then he lowered his voice, “Don’t forget, for God’s sake, that we’re in love.”
Big Ben sauntered toward them. Jack did not like to think that the physical sensation he experienced was one of fear; in fact, he was fairly convinced that it was not. It was rather a state of intense warning and watchfulness that set all his perceptions at concert pitch, with the result that he had seldom experienced such complete awareness. It might have been his mood, which Ruth Bogart had detected when she had told him once not to take it too big, but he was not unsure of himself. There was nothing easier to detect than overanxiety or overinquisitiveness, but he knew that he would not overplay. All that bothered him was the perennial pitfall of an unconsidered word or gesture; there was nothing which could prevent this contingency except hoping for the best. He pushed back his chair and stood up, smiling.
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