My American

by Stella Gibbons

  The room was perfectly quiet, with that padded, luxurious quietness that only money can buy in a modern city. However noisy the streets below may be, noises falter, discouraged, before they can climb to the top flats in such buildings as Hyde House; like those bees which never discover the luckless virgin flowers in the penthouse gardens of New York. It is not a peaceful silence. There is something drugged and enchanted about it. Conditioned air, central heating, and sound-proof walls are the only magicians employed to produce this hush, yet it gives a strange feeling to a visitor of being cut off from the living world.

  A faint smell of Turkish cigarettes lingered in the room and two empty glasses stood on a mirror-glass tray on the table, by a decanter decorated with silver stars. Amy had been entertaining Mr. Humfriss, her agent.

  Mr. Humfriss was a pink young man under thirty, with a classic profile and cold blue eyes, who was most efficient in helping Amy to earn and manage her handsome income. They did not like one another. Mr. Humfriss liked young men better than he liked young women, and he liked music better than either; and Amy simply disliked him without knowing why, but their business relations were completely satisfactory because Mr. Humfriss could be as impersonal as he pleased with Amy and she never seemed to notice or mind, and Amy could leave her affairs to him with perfect confidence without feeling that she must be nice to him. As she was finding it increasingly difficult lately to be nice to people she did like, let alone those she did not, the services of Mr. Humfriss suited her perfectly.

  This evening, however, their conversation had not been so completely impersonal as usual. Mr. Humfriss, whose standard of good manners was unusually high in a lax age, felt that politeness demanded he should remark upon Miss Lee’s extreme pallor. Every now and again, too, as she sat opposite to him at the round Victorian table with contracts and letters and cheques spread between them, she had opened her eyes wide in a strange, strained way and her temples had given a little twitch as though trying to shake off pain. It was evident that her head ached.

  “You look excessively tired,” at last observed Mr. Humfriss, putting a contract into an envelope and not looking at her and speaking without a shred of sympathy or warmth in his well-bred young voice. “Are you going to spend the summer in London, as usual?”

  “Spend the summer?”

  “Stay here, I meant, throughout the summer months.”

  “Yes, of course. Why?”

  “A great many people,” explained Mr. Humfriss carefully, as though enlightening a weak-headed child of six, “go away in the summer.”

  “Yes, I know. The Beedings do.”

  “Summer in London is excessively trying,” he went on. “So cold and wet. A good many people go abroad in August, when all hope of fine weather had been abandoned.” He smiled chillily.

  “Yes, I know. I’ve seen pictures of them in Vogue.”

  Mr. Humfriss ignored this, though he approved of the fact that she had taken to reading Vogue. Perhaps that was why she was better dressed than formerly. Or perhaps old Lady Welwoodham had been taking her shopping? Old Lady Welwoodham herself dressed very well (Mr. Humfriss was a critic of female dress) originally yet not artily; and Heaven knew that the little Lee, when he first met her three years ago, could have done with as much help about her clothes both from Lady Welwoodham and from Vogue as she could get. However.

  “It hasn’t occurred to you that you might go abroad, too?”

  “No, I can’t say it has,” she retorted, with one of those commonish turns of speech that jarred upon Mr. Humfriss. “I never thought about it.”

  “Well, it is an idea,” he commented. “All writers” (Mr. Humfriss never called them authors) “travel sooner or later, of course, to get new ideas, and if you are feeling a little tired and even perhaps a little stale in your work——”

  “Do you mean my last book was stale?”

  “——it might do you good to get away from it all, as they say,” tranquilly concluded Mr. Humfriss. “Have you thought any more about the American lecture tour?”

  She shook her head, and her temples, now swept clear of hair so that their tender youthful modelling was revealed, twitched once more as though to throw off a burden.

  “I shouldn’t know what to say. I told you that before,” she said—helpfully.

  “If you decided to go, there would be no difficulty about finding subjects for you to talk about,” pursued Mr. Humfriss, who knew from experience that Amy was not cooperative unless matters were made as easy for her as he could possibly make them. “We are used to arranging tours for our writers, of course, and Mr. Aubrett could find you as much material as you would want. I hesitated to trouble you with this letter from our New York agent” (he handed it to her) “because you were so sure that you did not want to go to the States, but if you are thinking about going abroad, the States would make” (he smiled faintly) “a nice change for you. There are some dozens of women’s clubs that are anxious to hear you.”

  Amy took the letter, and shut her eyes as a wave of pain went through her head. Then she opened them again and stared wearily at the list of Clubs and Societies “in the following towns.”

  She had read half-way down the list when she came to a name that she knew.

  Vine Falls, Paul County, New Leicester.

  She stared dreamily at the name for a moment. Vine Falls—such a pretty name, making her see a picture of a waterfall dashing down through veils of red autumn leaves. Her head ached so badly that she could not think properly. Vine Falls. Where have I heard that name before?

  Of course. That’s where my American lived.

  She sat quite still, staring at the name on the letter. The dim room was quiet, filled with slowly-wreathing smoke from their cigarettes, and Mr. Humfriss sat patiently waiting for her to make up her mind, leaning back in his chair in a reposeful attitude. The pain in her head was so intense that she could not think clearly, and she shut her eyes for a moment.

  And suddenly she saw in the darkness the face of a young man. He was very pale, and looked ill, and had fair longish hair disordered on his forehead. He was so deeply asleep with his head against a red cushion that he might have been dead. Yet somehow she knew that he was not dead. And his face was older, but it was the face of the little boy she had seen in the courtyard of Kenwood House ten years ago.

  The picture only lasted for a flash of time—a long, slow, dreamlike flash. Then she opened her eyes again and found that she was in the living-room of her flat in Hyde House. And she was saying eagerly to Mr. Humfriss:

  “I’ll go to America, Mr. Humfriss. It’s a real place, you see, and I would so love to see it——” and he was looking at her curiously as he stubbed out his cigarette.

  She was trembling with a strange excitement that was touched with fear, and did not want to meet his chill, intelligent eyes, so she got up, muttering, “I’m cold. I’ll just get a jacket,” and went into her room, coming back a minute later pulling on a coat.

  “When would you like to go?” he asked.

  His tone was not eager, for he did not much care whether the little Lee went to the States or not. But it was always useful for an English writer to make personal contacts in America; and he and his partner, Jeremy Aubrett, did sometimes wonder how long it would be before the deep subconscious conflicts in the little Lee’s nature (upon which, they had decided, her talent was nourished) sent her into a mental home. The more holidays, the more changes of scene, she had, the better in health she would be and the less likely to go into a mental home, thereby cutting off a profitable source of income to Mr. Aubrett and Mr. Humfriss.

  “It is now the end of April,” he went on to say patiently, as she did not answer his question, which she did not seem to have heard. “Would you like to go in about three weeks?”

  She nodded, staring at him with a frightened expression. She had suddenly realized that she had never been further out of London than to Bracing Bay, in Essex.

  “That will give us plenty of time to
make all the arrangements,” he remarked, putting together his papers.

  “Yes. Thank you, Mr. Humfriss,” she answered in a low tone, holding out her hand. “Good-night.”

  “Good-night, Miss Lee. I will telephone you tomorrow afternoon and let you know what subjects Mr. Aubrett has in mind for you to talk about.”

  He shook hands with her and went away, a young man pink and cold as a strawberry ice, to snatch a sandwich and a drink before going to the Queen’s Hall to hear Schnabel play Brahms’s Thirty-Four Variations on a Theme by Handel, and to forget for some blessed hours about women and writing.

  And then Amy went over and stood at the window to watch the soft colours of the sunset disappear, and to think with strange excitement and anxiety of the face she had seen when she closed her eyes, and of her trip to America, and of how lonely she was on this exquisite evening of late spring.

  The sky was watery blue, with grey clouds above the yellow clouds shaped like a fan. Down in the Park daffodils glimmered between the dark trunks of the trees. People were hurrying homewards from work, just as Amy used to hurry four years ago. She leaned her head on the cold window pane, kneeling in the windowseat of her tower, high, high above London, and stared dreamily down on the little dark scurrying dolls. Behind her the room settled into darkness.

  She was hardly recognizable as the dowdy of four years ago, for Lady Welwoodham had indeed been taking her shopping. Her dress of so dark a red as to be almost black, adorned by a necklace of Indian jewelled work, did credit to Lady Welwoodham’s taste. Her hair was pulled back from her brow and dressed high, a style which displayed its slight wave (Lady Welwoodham detested what she called The Arty Bun). On the tops of her ears Amy wore small earrings matching her necklace; this fashion had only just come in among the fashionables of Rio de Janeiro, where Lady Welwoodham had a correspondent.

  All this elegance of person, and the smart flat, and the services of Mr. Humfriss, were paid for by Amy’s books. She had written seven books in the last three years, and showed no signs, so far, of having begun to outwrite herself. She had a very large public for her stories, and as the latter were also first-rate plots for filming she had added another public ten times as large from cinema audiences all over the world.

  Lord Welwoodham, who took the credit for introducing Amy Lee to the world and who followed her literary career with as much friendly and amused interest as his wife took in her sartorial one, said that she was one of those writers who fly full-fledged from the nest, and whose first book is as good as their last. The famous River Boy, the film rights of which were bought by London Films for a handsome sum a few weeks after its publication in The Prize, was as good as By Night, Amy’s first full-length novel, and By Night was no better than The Desperate Gentlemen. The rich yet quickly-moving style, the simple and vivid characters, the sense of danger and the nearness of death which haunted her books were Amy’s special gifts and could not be confused with the gifts of any other living writer, but they were gifts that had been marked as hers from the opening sentences of The River Boy, and the books which followed on her first story showed no deepening or broadening of her talent. It was the talent of a wonderfully gifted and ageless child, who could neither grow up nor lose its powers.

  Her stories spoke with one of the voices of the modern world, and thousands of readers were quick to hear. The modern world is becoming used to images of danger and death, and to desire the excruciating thrill which only fear can give; it is as if the readers and cinemagoers “escape,” not into dreamland, but into the heart of horror itself and there find what they want. They are less and less able to look at the images of peace and beauty because there is no peace and little beauty in the real world. Beauty and peace have become unbearable because they are unattainable. Amy’s stories fed the craving for excitement that is felt by most readers under forty; and the films made from her books, which heightened their tension and sense of danger, fed the same appetite in millions of cinemagoers from London to Buenos Ayres. The desire to watch excitement rising, to admire an outlaw who defies the massed forces of Danger, is one that an unemployed cabinet-maker in Wolverhampton can share with a half-breed in Mexico City. Amy’s talent was fed by, it pandered to, the oldest of the passions: Fear. It was no wonder that she made a lot of money; the panders to lust and greed are equally prosperous.

  But the great difference between Amy and the writers who consciously pander to the destructive passions in humanity was that she did not know she was doing it. Her stories were natural flowers growing from the soil of her mind, which had been saturated with fear since her childhood. She had always been afraid of size, afraid of noise, afraid of people shattering her secret world, and she could only get rid of this fear by pouring it out on paper, and unconsciously identifying herself with the brave and honourable hero who was not afraid of anything.

  In all her books the pattern, if not the actual plot, was the same. It was disguised with different settings for the action of the story, which took place in Stalin’s Russia or in Nazi Germany or in the underworld of London, but the same design always emerged. A hero, embittered by injustice, defied the forces of Law and proved himself a better fighter and man than the Law’s supporters. He was a modern Raffles, harder and more bitter and ruthless than the amiable gentleman cracksman of pre-War fancy. He took what he wanted. He knew no laws but the two which he imposed on his own nature: he never betrayed a friend, he never gave in to his enemies. He was, of course, Amy herself; the child alone in the world, defiant yet secretly desperately afraid.

  But her books were not gloomy or sadistic. If they had been, they would never have secured their great success, for though the contemporary world craves its danger-thrill it has not yet sunk so far that it can take it absolutely neat (when that happens, readers will go to watch parachute descents and dirt-track racing instead of sitting at home reading) and the popularity of Amy’s stories was due largely to the glamour that they cast over violence and horror. She had the gift that makes a writer popular: a clear picture of a world, and although it was a picture seen by someone who was unhappy and afraid, it was as unmistakably an Amy Lee picture as the stories of Edgar Allan Poe are pictures of his world. She also had the gift of making the reader feel that life in her world was more exciting and desirable than life in the actual world. She was a natural writer, expressing herself in words as inevitably as an actor does in gesture or a composer in music, and even the intelligent literary critics admitted as much. Jeremy Aubrett and Giles Humfriss sometimes thought that her books might change in theme if she became a happily married mother, but they never imagined that she would cease to write. A natural writer stops writing only when dead.

  As for the girl inside the elegant shell of clothes that Lady Welwoodham’s taste had suggested and Amy’s money had bought, she was not so much altered by money and fame as might have been expected.

  It is commonly admitted that money is delightful: but it must also be admitted that money is not much use if you happen to want things which money cannot buy. There is no extraordinary merit in wanting such things; to want them does not give you the right to despise other people who want the things that money can buy; it only means that your money, though useful, will not be more important to you than anything else in the world. Amy did not know what she wanted; but she was already sure that money could not buy it. She was deeply unhappy, and her unhappiness grew deeper every week. Her luxurious home, her lovely clothes, the charming and intelligent people to whom Lady Welwoodham had introduced her, did not make her one atom less unhappy.

  Her experiences in the world in which Lady Welwoodham moved had been such as to drive her back, bewildered and unhappy, into her own secret world. She had begun by despising her new acquaintances as Sops and Chin-Waggers, Mind-Pokers and Bossers who could not write stories. She had gone forth to their dinners and parties feeling defiant yet wary, like Buck Finch, that oldest of her friends, among the cannibals. But everyone was so kind to her that she soon stopped fee
ling like Buck Finch, and as the little door in her mind refused to open and let her escape through it, she found herself only a nervous girl without social background and without anything to say to some of the most intelligent and charming people in London. Her fourth book, The Soldier of Misfortune, had pleased a more varied public than any of the others, and all that world which is known to the irreverent as Arty-Smarty, from alarming old judges to delicious silly debutantes, wanted to meet the writer who had created Ted Cassiter, the limping ex-service man who died so gallantly in the end of the book.

  Lady Welwoodham arranged for any number of people to meet her. But after Amy had been to two or three grand parties at which she never opened her mouth except to mutter, “No, thank you,” or “Yes, please,” in an accent not ripe enough to be interesting; and had once or twice broken amused silences by such observations as, “It must be awful in Russia now, I think,” or “There was an exciting bit in the Daily Express this morning from India about a postman who was a dwarf, an Indian postman,” at the same time fixing her companion with a stare in which alarm and suspicion were hardly concealed by a glazed, polite smile—the fashionable world which had been so eager to meet Amy Lee decided, though reluctantly, that she really was very dull, poor little thing. Clearly, It All Went Into The Books, and there was nothing left over with which to entertain the Nobility and Gentry, the Screen and the Stage (for The Soldier of Misfortune had been dramatized with Ralph Richardson as Ted Cassiter and the Stage was also eager, in its rich warm way, to slap Miss Lee on the back).