My American

by Stella Gibbons

  “Hullo, Mrs. Boadman,” she said in a high, soft voice, holding out her hand.

  “Why, Lou, dear,” replied Mrs. Boadman absently, taking the hand for a moment and continuing to give most of her attention to the elderly man. “So glad you could make it. I’m sure you’re just crazy to meet Miss Lee. Miss Lee, this is Lou Vorst, she’s just crazy to meet you, she’s a clever girl, too, she was going to do dress-designing in New York, weren’t you, Lou, only——”

  Amy held out her hand. She heard nothing of Mrs. Boadman’s speech except the name. Lou Vorst. VORST. She must be his sister, she thought, beginning to tremble. It’s the same name. It sounds just the same as when he said it that time; and then her hand was taken in a cool clasp for a second, and the girl said:

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Lee.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, too, Miss Vorst,” said Amy faintly, and perhaps that sentence had never before been said in Mrs. Boadman’s drawing-room with such complete truth.

  “You weren’t at the lecture, you bad thing!” continued Mrs. Boadman, pulling Lou’s slender arm within her fat one. Her tone made the words offensive. “Miss Lee told us all about her methods of work. So original. You missed quite a treat.”

  “I couldn’t make it. I’m sorry,” lied Lou, gently withdrawing her arm from Mrs. Boadman’s and reaching out to take a canapé from a tray which was being carried past. She addressed Amy, looking at her with interest. She’s a funny little number but there’s something cute about her, decided Lou. She certainly does stare. I wonder if maybe my hat is on crooked? Amy smiled vaguely, but did not reply and continued to stare.

  At this moment Mrs. Boadman was called away by her daughter Elenor to greet some important new arrival. Amy, Lou and the elderly man were left alone, and he was just opening his mouth to continue his lecture on American literature when he was hailed by an acquaintance and, excusing himself with a smile, turned away. Amy and Lou were now, by one of those chances which sometimes occur at crowded receptions, left facing one another in a corner which was sufficiently apart from the rest of the room for them to feel themselves alone, and to carry on a conversation in comparative comfort.

  They looked at one another in silence for a moment. Then Amy began to say something but Lou began to speak at the same instant, and they both laughed.

  “I’m so sorry—you were going to say something.”

  “No, do go on.”

  “It wasn’t anything original,” said Lou. “I was only going to ask you the usual question about this being your first visit to Vine Falls?”

  “Yes, it is, but I was so looking forward to coming here,” replied Amy, so earnestly that Lou was surprised.

  “Mighty nice of you,” she said a little drily; she had taken a fancy to Amy, and it was disappointing to hear her making the type of remark usually made by visiting celebrities.

  “You think I don’t mean it, don’t you?” Amy had gone pink with distress, but for once she did not take refuge in silence when confronted by a suspicious, yet amused glance. She was so anxious to talk to Lou, and to find out if she had a brother!

  “Why, Miss Lee—surely—I didn’t mean——” Lou felt that she had been rude, and was embarrassed.

  “No, I’m sure you didn’t, it’s only that people don’t always believe I mean what I say. I don’t know why. I suppose they think a person can’t write books and be sincere at the same time. I really did mean it. I did want to come to Vine Falls. I—I had a special reason,” ended Amy, suddenly feeling so desolate that tears came to her eyes, and she turned away to hide them, putting her glass beside Lou’s on the piano.

  “Why, I’m so sorry, Miss Lee,” said Lou gently, not knowing quite what to say but feeling more interested in Amy every moment. “It’s just that Vine Falls is a small town, you know, and we live in it all the year round, and I guess it seems strange to us that a writer like yourself, who goes places and gets around, should want to come to a place like this. But maybe if you had a special reason——”

  Lou was as sophisticated as a small town society girl could be, but she had never lost one of her childhood weaknesses: she liked to find out. The little girl who had gossiped with Myron was now grown up, but she still enjoyed hearing secrets and getting sidelights on the odd corners in human nature. She was longing to know Amy Lee’s “special reason” for wanting to visit Vine Falls.

  “Well, I had. Only when I come to—to tell somebody (you see, I’ve never told anybody before) it seems—soppy,” said Amy, staring at Lou desperately. “Crazy, you’d say, if I told you.”

  “Oh, do tell me!” coaxed Lou, lowering her voice a little and moving her charming face, so like Bob’s with its faintly Indian look and thick fair eyelashes, a little nearer to Amy’s own.

  But at that moment——

  “Miss Lee, here’s Miss Cordell just crazy to meet you,” announced Mrs. Boadman, coming up with a small old woman. “Miss Cordell’s a great reader, she read Gone with the Wind three times. Miss Lee, Miss Cordell.” And Mrs. Boadman, waving to someone, rushed away.

  Amy held out her hand, but Miss Cordell did not take it. Instead, she gave a stiff little bow and folded both her own tiny gloved hands upon the tall ivory handle of an antique sunshade. She was nearly seventy, and very ancient indeed by American standards. She wore the dim nondescript clothes worn by unfashionable old women all over the Western world and a hat with squashed tremulous roses on it, but her back was straight and her eyes were sharp and her voice was firm.

  “Well, Miss Lee (no, Lou Vorst, don’t you try to get away from me, you stay right here until I’m ready to talk to you about that brother of yours, I want to know all about it and I want the truth, this time) I liked your lecture, Miss Lee, but I don’t like your books.”

  And Miss Cordell, settling her hands more firmly upon the handle of her sunshade, unhurriedly surveyed Amy from head to foot, at the same time moving across the corner so that Lou could not escape.

  “Don’t you?” said Amy faintly. What was that remark to Lou about that brother of yours? She looked steadily at the old woman, but her thoughts were not on what she was hearing.

  “No, I don’t, and what’s to stop me saying so in spite of Nell Boadman pulling my jacket” (here Miss Cordell twitched herself free from Mrs. Boadman, who had grasped the situation in passing, seized the old lady’s tail, and was agitatedly jerking at it), “No, my dear, I don’t like your books. You write about people on the wrong side of the law, and we’ve still got quite enough of that right here in New Leicester without the children reading about it in books.”

  “Oh, come now, Lucy, you’ll have Miss Lee thinking we’re overrun with gangsters right here in Vine Falls,” protested another lady pleasantly; she had already been introduced to Amy as Mrs. Jonas Frankwood Senior. “Why, I think it’s wonderful the way the G-men have cleared things up.” She was about to join their group, which she had paused to address on her way to some friends at the other end of the room, but at that moment she caught sight of Lou, and looked a little embarrassed. “Why hullo, Lou dear, I didn’t see you there,” she murmured, and continued on her way.

  “Still plenty of rats about, and we don’t want ’em glorified in our books,” persisted Miss Cordell with a sharp glance at Lou, “The business of literature is to elevate and improve, not to make bad men and bad ways fascinating to our boys and girls. You’re a young girl, Miss Lee, and I can see you don’t know much about life and you don’t mean any harm, but one day you’ll learn that evil can’t be played with.”

  She paused, putting a tiny hand in a grey glove gently on Lou’s arm, but continued to address Amy, looking severely yet sorrowfully into her eyes:

  “Why, haven’t I seen one of the dearest boys in the world, this girl’s own brother … my cousin Amalie and I have known him since he was born and she taught him to play the piano … a fine young man, going to be a doctor. Now he’s got into bad ways, running around with gangsters. …”

  She
suddenly turned on Lou, who was watching her with a pale but composed face.

  “Isn’t that so, Lou?” she said sharply. “Doesn’t everybody know it?”

  Lou said nothing, and Miss Cordell went on.

  “And now his own mother doesn’t know where he is. Your books won’t help him to come to his senses, nor help people like me to pray for him … as I do every night of my life. He comes of a fine old family, too. One of the oldest families in New Leicester.’ She drew Lou a little closer, and her expression softened. “Been settled here since the War.”

  “The War?” To Amy, the Englishwoman, there was only one War. But Lou explained, her face a study in amusement and resentment and another feeling that Amy, with a shock, recognized as grief:

  “Our War, Miss Lee. The one between the North and the South.”

  “You’re one of the forces, Miss Lee, that’s helping to break up civilization,” concluded Miss Cordell firmly. “Anyway, your books are, and it comes to the same thing. You think it over. Try and write something sweet and homey that the women’ll like. Good-day to you,” and she gave Amy another stiff little nod and turned towards Lou. But the expression on Lou’s face, and the sudden recollection that they were not alone, and that Mrs. Boadman and her daughter were gossips—seemed to change her mind. All she did was to take Lou’s hand again, give it an affectionate squeeze, and look at her for a moment. Then she smiled painfully and turned away.

  Lou took a glass from a passing tray and held it out to Amy, but Amy shook her head.

  “Well, I will. I need it.” Lou drank half the contents, and set it down beside the other on the piano. She looked as if she were trying to put something out of her mind.

  “Miss Lee,” she said, “you’ve got me all worked up about your special reason for wanting to come to my home town. Are you in a hurry to get away after this show? If you could spare the time I’d just love to drive you round and show you places. And then,” she smiled charmingly, “maybe you could tell me what the special reason is?”

  “I should love to come,” stammered Amy, more confused and excited every moment. “My train doesn’t go till nine o’clock, so I should have time. The only thing is, I’m afraid someone on the Committee, Mrs. Frankwood, I think, was going to drive me to the station.”

  “Tell them you’d rather go with me,” said Lou coolly. “What’s the use of being famous if you can’t throw a temperament?”

  “But wouldn’t that seem rather——” Amy was beginning doubtfully, when there occurred another interruption.

  “Miss Lee,” announced Mrs. Boadman, bustling up, “I’m so sorry. It really is too bad, but our Committee member who was going to drive you to the depot, Mrs. Frankwood, has just been called up to say she must go into Morgan, her daughter’s sick.”

  “I’m so sorry,” murmured Amy.

  “Isn’t it just too bad? I’ll find someone else, of course. I’d have been honoured if I or my daughter could have driven you down. We have two cars. But unfortunately we’ve both got engagements for later this evening (you know what girls are for going places evenings! and I’m nearly as bad!) Now I wonder who would——”

  “I’ll be glad to drive Miss Lee to the depot,” said Lou quickly. “She wants to see something of the town, too. We can take a little run around.”

  “Why, that’s sweet of you, Lou. I’m so pleased. You two girls have got quite a crush on each other, isn’t that nice.” And Mrs. Boadman glanced from Amy’s face to Lou’s. Her own expression was not made less acid by the conspiratorial solemnity of theirs. After exchanging one lightning glance on her approach which said Oh Lord Here Comes The Old Trout Again, they had composed their faces, but unfortunately they had composed them so well that Mrs. Boadman was quite sure they had been tearing her apartment and her character to shreds.

  “Well, that’s fine. Now, Miss Lee, Lou has had you quite long enough. I’ve got two perfectly lovely people here I’d love to have you meet.” And Mrs. Boadman hurried away to get the two perfectly lovely people.

  “All right, then,” said Lou. “As soon as the party breaks up, we’ll go. It won’t be long now. How about eating somewhere? Or would you sooner eat on the train?”

  “I’d sooner eat with you, if you’d like to?”

  “Fine. We’ll go to Roselands. That’s a place where two females can eat alone. They’ve got a terrace over the lake there, where my brother used to take his dates.”

  Amy nodded. She could hardly speak. The American boy was coming nearer every moment. His presence (an unknown personality, but the eyes were like this girl’s eyes and the mouth smiled in the same way) filled the room. That old woman had spoken of him, and Lou had looked so sad, and now she had spoken of him herself. So he used to take girls to dine on a terrace above the lake! Amy saw a fair head and wide shoulders leaning towards a dark head and a white frock, and the sheen of moonlight on water, and suddenly experienced a novel and disagreeable emotion. It was her first attack of jealousy, and none the easier to bear because she was jealous of a kind of ghost! I must be going mad, she thought wildly.

  “I’ll come and fetch you a bit later on,” smiled Lou, and moved away across the room, which was already growing less crowded.

  Left alone for a moment, Amy looked about her in search of a chair, and when she discovered one, close to her, she sat down, suddenly feeling so tired that she could not stand up a moment longer. The large room with its modern wallpaper in a design of blue and grey tulips on a red ground, the late afternoon sunlight pouring through the open windows, the blue haze of the cigarette smoke, the chairs covered in red, blue and grey striped satin, the laughing faces and the sound of the shrill voices, all became dim and faraway. She shut her eyes.

  At once she saw a picture.

  But it was not a coloured and moving copy of an actual scene. It was a blurred photograph in a newspaper, and she was looking down at it as it lay on the floor at her feet. She could make out a kind of cabin made from rough-hewn logs, and some trees with pointed tips that looked like pines, and there was a group of men standing round something—it looked like a heap of dark clothes—lying on the ground. She gradually made out a streak of white between some dark shapes in one corner, and somehow she knew that it must be a swift mountain river rushing between large boulders. And as she looked, a horror of the scene came over her; the dark pines, the blurred group of men looking down at the motionless object on the ground, and the half-ruined cabin in the back-ground were horrible; they were wicked, and they terrified her.

  “Miss Lee! Here are two lovely people who are crazy to meet you!”

  She opened her eyes, and looked dazedly into Mrs. Boadman’s smiling face. Only the picture and that sense of wickedness were real, and she could not realize where she was. Then, as Mrs. Boadman stared at her curiously and the man and woman standing just behind her began to look surprised, she collected herself and stood up hastily, murmuring polite phrases. Her agitation and inexplicable alarm were by now so acute that she hardly knew how to reply to the friendly questions of her two new acquaintances, and the party suddenly became unendurable to her. The loud voices of the few people left in the room, the smell of smoke, the strong taste of alcohol in her mouth, all increased her nervous distress, and she longed for fresh air and silence and an opportunity to confide her recent extraordinary experience to Lou.

  The liking which Lou had at once felt for her had been mutual; it was more than a fanciful wish to spend an hour with a girl who looked like her American that made Amy wish Lou would hurry up and get them both away from the party. I’ll tell her all about it, she thought. I’ll tell her how he gave me the coin, and how I’ve always remembered him, and how I saw the picture of that young man with his head on a cushion, looking so like my American grown up. I’ll tell her everything queer that’s ever happened to me about the American boy, and then I’ll ask her if she thinks he’s her brother and if I’m going crazy. I shan’t mind telling her, because I like her. She reminds me of Dora (only she�
�s younger, of course, and smarter) and I’m sure she’ll be sensible about it all.

  Amy had fastened upon the quality of Lou which, next to her haunting likeness to a memory, was the one most likely to attract her. Amy herself was the least sensible of girls, ridden by a violent imagination and made unhappy by strong and unexpressed feelings whose existence she only half-suspected and for which she had no outlet. It was inevitable that the good sense in Lou’s manner should charm her as much as the cool friendliness. Lou, on her side, was equally charmed by the child-like earnestness and strength of emotion which she divined in Amy. These qualities, so different from her own, were not common in the girls of Vine Falls, and for Lou they had all the attraction of novelty.

  Therefore, when the two girls drove away half an hour later with Lou at the wheel, both were pleased at having escaped together and at the prospect of enjoying an hour or so’s companionship, which might develop into a friendship. Amy’s spirits rose a little as they moved off down the wide pleasant road bordered with shady trees through which the sunlight came with tempered heat in long evening rays. There was a spirit of energy mingled with one of tranquillity in the air of this little town which she had encountered nowhere else in America, and it was impossible not to feel happier under its influence. But even her pleasure at being in Vine Falls, even the fairytale delight of driving down Sycamore Avenue with a girl who looked just like Robert Somebody himself, could not completely banish Amy’s agitation. She was unpleasantly, deeply disturbed, and afraid.

  Presently Lou gave a little laugh.

  “What is it?” asked Amy, smiling too.

  “Oh, I was just thinking I have a nerve, carrying off a visiting celebrity like this. Mrs. Boadman didn’t like it at all.”

  “I didn’t like her. She’s got a beastly face,” said Amy.

  Lou blinked, then glanced at her.

  “Yes, it’s downright mean, but we don’t usually say so. Miss Lee, do you always speak your mind right out like that?”

  “Well——” Amy considered. “I don’t say much, because (since I got famous, you know) people sort of—pay too much attention to what I say. They won’t believe I mean just what I say and nothing else. I used to get awfully miserable about it at parties in London.”