My American

by Stella Gibbons

  “That’s about all we can do, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And if you hear anything about him, or if he comes back, you’ll let me know at once, won’t you?”

  Lou glanced across at her, then nodded. The daylight had almost gone and there was not enough of it left to reveal the look on Amy’s face, but the sound of her voice was enough to give Lou her final shock for that day. Good grief, she’s in love with him, she thought, and feeling herself quite unable to deal with this extraordinary discovery while standing still in the twilight, she moved quickly to switch on the light and blundered noisily into the coffee trays which they had left on the floor, causing Amy to jump almost out of her skin.

  Of course, it’s only only a schoolgirl crush. She’s such a funny, lonely little number, just the kind to get romantic about a man she doesn’t know … the thoughts went vaguely through Lou’s mind as she stood staring down at the upset cups, blinking in the sudden glare of light.

  “I’ll get a cloth,” she said, and went out of the room.

  While they were on their knees clearing up the mess, Lou said:

  “How much longer are you staying over here?”

  “I’ve got two more lectures to do this week, one in Pennsylvania and one in Maryland, and then I’ve got to fill up a fortnight before I do the last two, in Illinois. So I’ll be here about another month.”

  But even as she spoke, she could not believe that she would ever really go home, back to London and her lonely luxurious flat. London seemed unreal as a dream. She could not believe that she might have to go back to England without any more news of Bob. She longed so strongly for the story to go on, to come to a middle and then to an end, that she could not face the idea that it might drag on drearily without either.

  “And where’re you going to stay for the fortnight?”

  “New York,” answered Amy at once. “I liked it. I want to start my new story.”

  “Have you got a place to stay?”

  “No, I’ll have to find somewhere. Why?”

  “Well, I was thinking … my other brother, Boone, and his wife have got an apartment in Greenwich Village that they want to let for the summer. If you stayed there, you’d feel in touch with us, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, I should! I’d love to!”

  “And my cousin Helen and I are going on a little trip to New York in a week or so and we could look you up.”

  “That would be lovely. Perhaps you could both come and stay there with me?”

  America had undoubtedly changed Amy’s habits; in London it had never occurred to her to invite anyone to spend so much as a single night in her flat, and here she was extending hospitality to two girls, one of whom she had never met. But then, she did not feel that Lou was a stranger, and any cousin of Lou’s must be nice.

  “Thanks a lot, but we couldn’t do that,” answered Lou firmly and promptly. “My brother’s wife would be mad. She doesn’t like his relations. We aren’t progressive enough for her.”

  “She sounds horrid.”

  “She is. But she can’t stop us coming in for a drink sometimes. Now how about it? I’ll write to Boone’s agent to-night, shall I?”

  “Oh, yes, please, if you would, and then he’ll know I’m all right.”

  “He’ll feel that instinctively when I tell him who you are,” said Lou dryly.

  “I wish you needn’t tell him. It is such a nuisance. People are sure to come bothering.”

  “Very well, if you’d rather not. I’ll just say you’re Miss Lee, a friend of mine from England. He’s sure to find out and never forgive me for not stinging you for treble rent, but never mind. I’ll write him to-night.”

  She glanced at her watch.

  “Mercy! If we’re going to make your connection we’ll have to hurry!”

  Dazed by the crowded events of the day and by the sudden need for haste, Amy put on her hat and jacket and went upstairs to fetch the small case containing her needs for a night on the train. When she came down again Lou was speaking to the handyman in the hall. He fiddled about with some letters on a table, apparently listening to what Lou was saying, but keeping a stare of sour, piercing curiosity fixed on Amy, who was too tired and agitated to notice it. She stood in a patient attitude, gazing dreamily up the shallow white staircase and wondering if she would ever see this house again, and meet the young man whose presence seemed to haunt its rooms? Sadness and tenderness crept over her, she did not know why, and made her want to weep.

  “Let’s go,” said Lou coming quickly over to her. “I certainly am sorry to hurry you off like this, but I was so taken up with what we were saying that I never noticed the time. I suppose you must make this connection?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s the only one that will get me to Bardsville in time for my lecture.”

  “I was wishing you could have stayed the night here,” said Lou, getting into the car.

  “Oh, I wish I could have; I do like your house so much,” and Amy turned, as the car passed between the two snowball bushes, to take a last look at the white columns glimmering through the dusk.

  “You must come and stay when you’ve finished your lectures.”

  Lou’s voice was not exactly absent; Amy could tell that she was not merely being polite; but it was plain that she was thinking of something else as she spoke. She went on: “I’m just wondering whether to tell Mother about all this. On the whole, I think I won’t. It would only worry her worse than ever.”

  Amy said nothing. She was suddenly wondering if there was someone else whom Lou ought to tell about “all this”—the girl Bob was engaged to. The thought was painful, so painful that she was alarmed. I simply must stop feeling like this about him, she thought. Why, I may never see him again! A person can’t be in love with a person they’ve only seen once, when they were twelve years old! It would be soppy. If only I didn’t feel that he’s my American, and nobody else’s! That’s what makes it so difficult to be sensible about him. Oh dear, it’s all so frightening and queer, I don’t know how I’m going to think about anything else for the next three weeks.

  They only just made the connection. Amy had to run, and was swung up on to the train by a grinning negro porter, with wonderful animal strength, as if she had had no weight. She turned back to wave to Lou, looking as if there were a thousand things she wanted to say, but the train moved off, faster and faster, into the darkness. Lou called “I’ll write to you,” and stood waving until its lights had vanished, then walked back to the car feeling as if she had had an unusually vivid dream.

  Myron came out to help her put the car away, and while they were doing so, she said:

  “Dan Carr hasn’t been around lately, has he?”

  “Well, fer cryin’ out loud! Wouldn’t I hev said so, if I’d heard anythin’?”

  “Yes, of course. I was only wondering. … Myron, you think Bob’ll come back, some time, don’t you?”

  “He’ll come back if that big-mouth don’t get him shot up.”

  “Do you think Dan’s all that dangerous? I thought you always said he was yellow.”

  “So he is, yeller. But that sort, yeller an’ always shootin’ off their mouths, they’re the sort that is dangerous. They talk so big, everybody believes ’em, an’ when the time comes, they ain’t no manner of use. He’s the kind that gits folks into trouble an’ then can’t git ’em out again. Dangerous! He’s dangerous like some yipping little dawg that runs under an auto an’ gets the driver killed. That’s all. No, he ain’t been around, Lou. I’d know, if he had. I know a place up in the mountains where he hides. I was there yesterday, but he ain’t been there for months.”

  “Do you, Myron! Where is it?”

  “Never you mind, Lou. I’m keepin’ a watch, that’s all. Now you go right in, I waunt to rest up fer a bit, I got to mow that lawn termorrer, and I got ter be up early.”

  He went off towards the kitchen and the radio, and Lou went in to write to Boone’s agent about the flat.

  CHAPTER XX
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br />   FOR THE NEXT three weeks Amy had to deliver her lectures, to chat pleasantly with the hundreds of people who were introduced to her and answer their questions politely and with intelligence, while it seemed to her that nothing was important except what had happened to her that afternoon at Vine Falls.

  While she was staying in Illinois for the two lectures she was giving there, she was delighted to get a telephone call from Lou, who wanted to tell her that all arrangements about the apartment were now completed and that she could move in whenever she liked.

  “Seen any more pictures?” inquired Lou, when they had finished talking about practical details.

  “No. I’ve been trying to, but they won’t come.”

  “How do you mean—trying to?”

  “Lying in the dark with my eyes shut. But it’s no use. I suppose you haven’t heard anything?”

  “Not a thing. If I do, I’ll call you up at once. There doesn’t seem anything more to say, does there? I’ll see you at the apartment, then, on the seventeenth. Take care of yourself, honey,” and she rang off.

  The affectionate little name cheered Amy, who was feeling lonelier than usual because she was bored with lecturing, with the crowds and long railway trips, and only wanted to get to New York and settle into the apartment and wait for Lou’s visit. She was also irritated because the unsettled life she was leading prevented her from starting her new story, which she could feel growing in her mind, and which was almost ready to be put into words. She promised herself that she would begin it on her first evening in the apartment, and in spite of her disturbed and unhappy state of mind she looked forward to doing so.

  The lectures, the parties, the long railway journeys, went on. She played her part in them docilely, like the good child she had promised her mother she would try to be, but she only longed for the times late at night when she was alone, and could lie awake in her Pullman sleeper and begin to dream. Outside, America went past in the darkness. Behind the train lay the cold hills of Vermont, and it was thundering towards the rich woods of the Carolinas. Amy played the old train-game of wondering how near, or how far, the train-traveller is from the person loved best in the world. Now the train descends a long curve; I am farther away from him. Now it is climbing a hill; perhaps I am half a mile nearer. But then she would suddenly remember in the middle of the game that she did not know where he was, and that he was in danger. He was in danger. The thought was always at the back of her mind, a warning whisper. Danger. The train thundered slowly through the night, and she fell asleep.

  The apartment was in a shabby brownstone house in a street that was quiet, for New York. Its windows looked across roofs to a wide avenue where traffic hummed and roared, and neon lights shone with their insanely steady glare. Amy liked to sit at the living-room window in the twilight and silence, watching the glow that came up from the avenue as if from a witch’s cauldron. When she sat there, listening and dreaming, she thought of her tower over Hyde Park in London and experienced the same feeling of loneliness and power. A picture-house on the avenue had revived The Soldier of Misfortune in the slack summer season, and her own name shone high above the dark roofs in scarlet fire. But it was not possible for her to believe that that was her name, the name of the girl who sat here in the dusk, reading it over and over again until her eyes were dazzled. It was the name of someone who did not seem real, and Amy could feel no excitement about it.

  She had started her new story, but it was not yet Beginning to Run. She was enjoying the writing of it, because she always enjoyed writing, but she could not lose herself in it as she usually lost herself in a story. For the first time since she had been a child writing The Wolf of Leningrad at Highbury Walk, she could not give her mind utterly to her writing. The deep current of her thoughts turned steadily and persistently to the young American who was in danger. Her thoughts of him were not ordinary thoughts, but resembled dreams or moods, influencing everything she did and colouring all her everyday thoughts as if with a strange dye. I am a different person, she thought, over and over again during her long, lonely day. It’s as if I were under a spell or something.

  She had plenty of time to write her new story, for her only daily visitor was a coloured girl named Myrtle, who cleaned the flat for Boone and his wife, and had been taken on by their tenant with the flat. Myrtle only came in for two hours in the morning and for an hour at night in order to prepare the supper. In her first week at the flat Amy had had one or two callers; people whom her American agent thought might amuse her or be useful to her. They were electrically lively New Yorkers, capable of amusing anyone who was not already dead on their feet, but it is well known that when someone is under a spell, nothing but the counter-spell will free them. These people did not happen to have the counter-spell; and therefore Amy had no use for them. They found her nice but dull, and having decided that she wanted to be left alone to work, they did not call or telephone again.

  “The States don’t seem to have stimulated the little Lee much,” said Christopher Humfriss discontentedly, handing Jeremy Aubrett a letter from their New York representative. “Apparently all she does is to sit in a room in the Village and write. That’s all she does in London.”

  “I think it was Montaigne (or was it Pascal?) who said that all man’s misfortunes arise from his inability to do just that one thing,” observed Mr. Aubrett. “How I wish some of our other writers would follow her example!”

  Sometimes Amy explored New York. She went to all the places that were utterly unlike London: walked down Fifth Avenue, went out to Coney Island (where the noise and glare and smells stunned her), or sat in Childs (the New York equivalent of Lyons) eating sundaes and watching the people. But even in Childs, where she felt more at home than in any other part of New York, she could not fall into that daydream, that fruitful trance, which comes to some writers when they sit silent and observant in a crowd, and which until now had never failed to come to her. When she awoke in the small hours, and lay staring into the dim summer dawn and breathing the cool wind sweeping through the city from the sea, she was still aware of anxiety at the back of her mind, a feeling of trouble and pain, like nothing so much as a motionless dark cloud. It was a dreary, heavy, waiting feeling. She explained it by admitting her impatience to see Lou again, and hear her talk about Bob.

  In this lonely dreamlike time, alone save for the haunting presence of a young man in danger, Amy thought more about her own feelings and character than she had ever done before, and came to the natural conclusion that she was a very queer person indeed. One night she made a list of the ordinary things she did not like, and also a list of the things she had never done, and to her amazement it covered two sheets of notepaper. She sat staring at it for a long time, feeling rather frightened, and her dismay increased when, her thoughts turning to Bob as an escape from their own uneasiness, she suddenly realized how very unusual were her feelings about him. I’m very queer, there’s no doubt about that, she decided, standing up at last and crumpling the paper with a sigh. Perhaps I’m going mad? Thank goodness Lou will be here the day after to-morrow, and then I can talk to her about Bob and she’ll make me feel he’s a real person again, not a kind of dream. But I must be a very strange person, to feel like this about someone I’ve only seen once when they were a little boy.

  That night was hot, and she slept badly because she was disturbed by the crying of some children in a tenement house across the road who could not rest for the heat. She awoke at six o’clock from a troubled slumber and after lying for a little while listening to the morning noises in the street, she got out of bed and went across to the window and leaned out into the air of early day.

  At once she knew that it was going to be very hot. Heat came up from the sidewalks and off the roofs as if the stone and metal were burning, and the sky was already white, as if the cool blue of the night had all been scorched away. She stared down dazedly into the street, yawning and closing her heavy eyes for a moment. She felt as if she had not been to sleep at
all. In the very hot weather, day and night seem to be one, undivided by the beautiful coolness of dawn and evening. Heat binds them helpless in a long period of time for which no name had yet been found, and everyone who works and suffers in the heat feels this mysterious suspension of ordinary hours. To-day, Amy knew, was going to be one of these unnamed, weary spells. She yawned again and drew in her head.

  It was too hot to go out. She had a shower, and settled down after breakfast to write, while Myrtle moved about the flat, cleaning and tidying and sometimes glancing at Amy, sitting at the table, writing. Amy found Myrtle romantic, for was not Myrtle black? and the very tones of her voice were unfamiliar, as if a glossy cat should begin to talk. Just because she found Myrtle so romantic, she found it even more difficult to talk to her than she did to most people, and so she kept up a grave polite way with her which impressed Myrtle but also rather awed her. She saw Amy as a tiny scribbling witch with never a dark hair out of place on the hottest day, who moved lightly about in Mexican sandals small as a child’s and owned a cupboardful of wonderful clothes at which she seldom troubled to look. But she liked the way Amy spoke to her; the natural graces and good manners of the negro, which spring from a poet’s heart, found their echo in Amy’s frequent “pleases” and “would you minds,” and Myrtle told the sister with whom she roomed in Harlem that Miss Lee surely had lovely English manners.

  Myrtle walked about in white shoes with high heels and a white skirt and frilled pale pink blouse, washing the dishes and sometimes humming to herself, and Amy sat writing away for dear life, never lifting her head, sometimes stretching out her aching wrist to rest it, in her old childish habit, sometimes groping for the glass of ice water that always stood beside her on the table and taking a sip at it while she read through a few lines, then settling to write again.

  Two hours passed. Then Myrtle, pausing at the door with her white straw hat swinging in her dark hand, said softly:

  “Miss Lee, it’s all cleaned up now. Ah’m gwine.”