My American

by Stella Gibbons

  He had been fretting over this money question ever since he left New York, but now he suddenly ceased to worry. Unconsciously, under the spell of Amy’s presence, he applied to the question the wisdom he had learned on the other side of the fence, the touchstone of reality. Money was useful, whoever it belonged to, and if two people loved each other it did not matter whose the money was.

  Besides, he thought, I’ll be working in a year, and earning some myself. I guess she’d live in a shack in the Polak quarter if she feels like me. Anyway, I’m going to ask her. After all that’s happened I’m not going to let her go.

  Amy suddenly took off her hat and put it on her lap, and he started, realizing that they had not exchanged a word for a long time.

  “Headache?” he inquired anxiously.

  “Oh no, I just like being without a hat. You can see better, I always think.”

  Her eyes, brilliant as topazes, looked up at him from under eyebrows which had not been plucked and had the dusty winglike look which nowadays only children’s eyebrows have. He said—

  “Yes——” but did not realize that he had said it, for they continued to look at one another, and he saw Amy’s expression slowly change to one of intent, wondering happiness. Her gaze slowly moved over his face, until at last she came back to rest in his eyes, and stayed there lost in their clear grey, with a gaze naked in its unconscious avowal of love. Then the blood came up quickly into his face and he saw it come as quickly into her own.

  “Of course, in London you have to wear a hat,” she said quickly, looking away.

  “Yes, I suppose you do.” He could not look away just yet; for he had never seen anything so delicate as the line of hair on her high forehead, and the curve of her cheek.

  “I’m a swell guide to New Leicester,” he said presently, “but this part isn’t very interesting—there’s the farm I had my first pony from when I was a kid.”

  “Oh, where?” she said eagerly, and kept her gaze steadily fixed on the low wooden buildings, yellow as cream against the deeper yellow of maize fields in stook, until the dark elms that overhung the farm, the golden pumpkin heap beside the stream, were lost to sight.

  “We’re just getting into Alva,” he said as the bus went round a clump of trees and they came on the big highway sign—

  WELCOME TO ALVA

  “That’s so nice and polite, you know,” observed Amy.

  “Don’t you have them in England?”

  “Oh, goodness, no! We just have a notice, all black and yellow like a wasp, with the name of the village on it. Nothing like ‘Welcome’.”

  “Nobody but a sucker would come to live here, though,” said Bob, as the bus drew up in Main Street opposite a movie house. “The branch line closed down two years ago because of competition from these cross-country buses, and that half-killed the place. Alva was put up in the real-estate boom ten years ago but it isn’t a real town.”

  “How long has Vine Falls been there?” asked Amy, thinking dreamily how strange, how frighteningly strange, it was to be sitting here beside my American, asking him a question about the town whose name had been a charm to her imagination for eleven years. She waited happily for the sound of his voice in answer. It was a voice with some of his mother’s Southern softness, unaffected, warmer than most American voices, with the unfamiliar burr of the New World muted by education and tradition.

  “Oh, we’ve got roots!” he said with a touch of pride. “Vine Falls is a real town; we’ve been there nearly eighty years. My great-grandfather, Boone Vorst, helped to build Vine Falls.”

  “Oh, do tell me about him!” cried Amy, turning on him the face of a child asking for a story.

  “Well, he must have been as crazy as a coot, but he was a grand old boy, too. He’d read a lot of European writers and he had some notion of building a city in the West and spreading culture among the Redskins. He owned a printing business and a small newspaper in New York and he was doing well there, but he got together a bunch as crazy as himself and they collected tools and corn-seed and all the things you want to start a city with, and he piled Great-Grandmother and the eight kids and the printing presses on a covered waggon, and off they went.”

  “Brave,” said Amy softly.

  “It certainly was, especially Great Grandmama, with a new baby every year! But they never got to the Golden West, because they found Vine Falls and settled there and Great-Grandfather helped build the town. He founded the first newspapers in the State, too. He left them to grandfather, and he left them to my Dad. But they’re all gone now. We were never sorrier about anything than when Dad had to let those three old papers go to a syndicate.”

  “Don’t you think he might ever be able to buy them back?” she asked, thinking affectionately of The Prize and hoping Lord Welwoodham would never have to sell that.

  “No. Not now. You see, he lost a pile when the market crashed in ’29.”

  “Tell me some more about your great-grandfather.”

  “Oh—well, there’s one story that always thrilled Helen and me when we were kids. When he was a young man, before he had his own press and paper, he worked on a little weekly in New York. There were dozens of them, round about that time (somewhere in the early eighteen-thirties, it would be), little rags full of dirty politics and local scandal. This particular little one-horse affair was got out by the editor and Great-Grandfather and a boy in two dirty rooms at the top of a crazy old building, and the editor drank like a fish, especially on press nights, so Great-Grandpa was often left to put the paper to bed with only the boy to help, because the editor had passed out in the inner office. He used to say he learned everything there was to know about running a newspaper that way.”

  “What was the paper called?”

  “The New York Watcher. We’ve got some copies of it at home; I’ll show you. Well, one bitter night in the middle of winter the paper was due to go to press in a couple of hours when the editor suddenly passed out. He’d been drinking hard all day and cussing and swearing at Great-Grandpa and the boy, so they weren’t sorry when he collapsed. They hauled him into the next room and pitched his tall hat in after him (everybody wore tall hats to work in those days) and shut the door. Then Great-Grandpa sent the boy out for some coffee and sandwiches and settled down to wait for the last bit of copy they were holding the paper back for; something about a local meeting.”

  “How do you know about the coffee and the tall hat?”

  “Great-Grandma. She wrote it down, years afterwards, just as he told her. Well, after the boy had gone (he used to say) it was so quiet you could hear the snow brushing against the windows. The room was warm and Great-Grandpa was beginning to feel sleepy when suddenly he heard the front door slam, and then someone began coming up the stairs. At first he thought it was the boy back again, but then he listened, and he knew it wasn’t the boy’s step. It was a kind of a proud step, he used to say, slow and proud, like as if some Southern gentleman was condescending to climb our stairs and not thinking much of ’em while he climbed. Great-Grandpa didn’t move, he just sat listening, and the steps reached the landing, and came across it, and suddenly the door was flung open. It went right back on its hinges, and there was a young man standing there, looking in at Great-Grandfather.”

  “Oh, who——?” she cried.

  “All right, all right,” smiling down at her. “Don’t spoil the story! Well, he was very pale and dressed all in black with an old cloak with capes on it and a shabby tall hat and black gloves. That’s what Great-Grandpa noticed most of all, somehow, his small thin hands in black skin gloves with the fingertips worn white. His coat was all plastered up with snow and he was breathing quickly as if he’d been running.

  “They stared at each other for a minute, and then Great-Grandpa said:

  “‘Well, and what do you want?’ He didn’t like the way the stranger was looking him up and down so he didn’t trouble to be polite. The young man said haughtily:

  “‘Good evening, suh. Is your editor at li
berty?’ (Bob’s voice turned to a Southern drawl.)

  “My great-grandfather jerked his head at the door of the inner office and said, ‘He’s in there. What do you want?’ and the young man answered: ‘I hesitate to intrude upon him in the midst of what, I was informed below, is the busiest evening of the week, but I have here——’ and he began fumbling in his pocket. ‘He’s drunk. Mostly is on press nights,’ said Great-Grandpa. ‘And I’m in charge here. If it’s copy, you’re too late for this week.’ And then the stranger drew himself up in a high and mighty style and said: ‘I regret, suh, that I cannot submit my contribution (it is a poem) to the consideration of anyone but your editor, presumably a man of culture and sensibility. I thank you, suh, and I wish you good-night.’ And he turned and stalked out of the room like a great black bird, Great-Grandfather used to say. He had half a mind to run after him and kick him in the pants. But just as the stranger was crossing the landing the boy came up with the coffee and sandwiches, and the young man stood aside to let him pass, and my great-grandfather saw him fix such an awful look on the food, kind of scornful and starved, both at once, that he never forgot it. Then he went slowly downstairs pulling his cloak round him, and presently the front door slammed.”

  “So what happened?” asked Amy breathlessly.

  “Nothing. They never saw him again. But eighteen years later when Great-Grandpa was settled in Vine Falls and running his three newspapers, he opened a bundle of papers from New York one morning, brought in by the Wells and Fargo messenger, and stared for a long time at a picture on the front page, and at last he said to Great-Grandma: I never forget a face. That’s the fellow who came into the offices of The Watcher that night in the winter of ’31 and wouldn’t show me his poem. And Great-Grandmother looked, and under the picture it said that Edgar Allan Poe had died that week in the Washington University Hospital at Baltimore. Peach of a story, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, for the moment too entranced to speak. The story had revived all the spell that Poe’s tales and poems had exercised upon her childhood.

  “I love his stories,” she said at last. “Do you like them?”

  “Used to when I was a kid. Not so much now.”

  She did not ask him why. She felt he was trying to tell her that Poe’s beautiful trances of horror were as nothing beside the body of a dead child, limp in the arms of the man who had killed it. There was nothing more to be said.

  The effort of telling the story had tired Bob, who was not yet completely restored to health, and he said no more for a long time. The silence between them gradually grew more intimate and tender.

  Presently, by the sleepy hush which seemed to flow in from the quiet, almost uninhabited landscape going past the windows and creep over the few passengers, Amy became aware that they were passing through a region of uncultivated fields and isolated patches of woodland. Lonely, unfenced, a-nod with golden rod and tall sprays of coarse flowers, the neglected fields rolled away on either side to the horizon where the hills began, blue-grey with distance, and on them the sunlight blazed. A shabby, unimpressive land overgrown with the commoner wild blossoms, where Nature seemed in undress, not troubling to compress her powers into anything strikingly beautiful, and even the trees, which will appear beautiful in the most unpromising landscape, had a raggedy look. A shirt-sleeved, reach-me-down, cornstalk-in-mouth, apple-barrel-seat country—but over it sailed the enormous bright white clouds, the primitive sky-scrapers “that are said to be seen nowhere but in the skies of America,” glorifying the scattered, untidy, shiftless-looking wooden houses as they slowly towered above them and sailed away under pressure of the wind towards the South.

  “Can you remember the English country?” she asked suddenly after a long stare through the window.

  “Very green. Small fields like they have in New England,” he said at once. “Very tidy. Brick farmhouses looking kind of sunk in deep grass. Little hedges. Red apples on the trees.”

  She nodded.

  “This is so absolutely different, so wild and lonely. I can imagine Indians here.”

  “There were Indians in the hills, years and years ago. We’ve got some houses in Vine Falls with holes in the walls for the men to fire at the Indians when they raided the village. But maybe Lou showed you.”

  “I was only there a day and there wasn’t time to see anything. I’d have liked to get up into the woods; they looked lovely.”

  “I’ll take you,” he promised, feeling relieved that she liked that kind of thing, which cost nothing, and which he liked too. He would be spared the shame of telling her that he could not afford to take her into Morgan to dance. “We’ll make a fire.”

  “But won’t you have to work?”

  “Not all the time,” smiling. “I don’t go back to the Owen Vallance for another two weeks; there are all kinds of things to fix up first.”

  Then they both thought: what will have happened in another two weeks? but neither spoke, until Amy said:

  “I brought my book. I thought your mother wouldn’t mind? I’m so used to doing a bit every day.”

  “She’ll be mighty proud—a book being written under our roof. It’ll be the first ever.”

  It was then that Amy summoned all her courage and asked the question she had been longing to ask ever since they left Marydale.

  “Bob?”

  “What?” bending a little towards her. “I like to hear you say my name, your accent’s so pretty. What did you want me to tell you?”

  “Have you read any of my books?” and Amy nearly shut her eyes with anxiety while she awaited the answer.

  He nodded. “Oh, yes. The first thing I did after I got home was to get China Walk.”

  “And—did you like it?”

  After a lengthy pause, in which her apprehensions increased and she clenched her hands so tightly that they ached, he said reluctantly—

  “I thought it was wonderful that someone like you should turn out such a swell thriller. No-one would think you could do it.”

  “But did you like it?” she persisted, increasingly troubled. He shook his head, looking as distressed as she was.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, why not?” and her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

  “Well, you see, fighting and death aren’t like that and criminals aren’t. You don’t tell the truth about them.”

  “It isn’t meant to be true, it’s a story!” she cried.

  “I know. But it’s a story glorifying criminals. Perhaps people who don’t know what criminals are like might like it. But it just seemed silly to me.”

  Amy was silent. It seemed the sun had gone in and she was sitting in a dreary vehicle going through drab country beside a stranger.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “But you wouldn’t want me to say I liked it if I didn’t, would you?”

  “No, I suppose not. But I can’t help wishing you did like it.”

  “I’m sorry. I was hoping you wouldn’t ask. Maybe I’ll like some of the others better. But it doesn’t make any difference to—to—how we feel, does it?”

  She shook her head. She was bitterly disappointed, but she was quite sure that it did not make any difference.

  “Tell me about when you were a little girl,” he said suddenly. “That first time we met, when you had the white beret. You said you were miserable.”

  So for the remainder of the journey she talked to him about the Beedings and her mother and father and London. The picture she painted was without self-pity, but even so it showed a childhood so different from his own that he found himself in the unexpected position of being sorry for her. It was plain that in spite of her success as a writer she had not shaken off the memories of ten lonely and frightened years and that she badly needed someone to take care of her. The realization brought him as near happiness as he could get, in his present shaken and embittered state of mind. She was not a wealthy and condescending angel; she was a little girl with no father and mother and no. …

  �
��Have you ever been engaged to be married?” he asked suddenly. He blurted out the question because he could not keep it back.

  “Oh, no!” She turned right round and looked at him, startled out of her thoughts of far-away London. “No-one ever—until the other day——” She broke off, but continued to look at him, confused, but so anxious to reassure him that she could ignore her confusion.

  “You didn’t mind my asking?”

  “Oh, no. Have you?”

  “I’ve never been engaged to be married. I was—with Dan’s sister, some of the time I was away.”

  “You don’t love her, do you?” she whispered, looking down at her hat.

  “No, of course not—it’s quite different—I’m sorry about it now——”

  “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “Truly. Please don’t mind about it.”

  A few contemptuous sentences of Lady Welwoodham’s about “men being different” now returned to her; she remembered Mrs. Beeding saying more than once of some murder in the papers: No Doubt She Led Him On. That was what Dan’s sister had done to Bob; and Amy immediately hated her with all the jealousy in a passionate nature. But she said no more on the matter, and her hatred did not spoil the happiness of being with Bob, for, after all, he had said that he did not love Dan’s sister, and she believed him.

  The bus was now entering a more prosperous-looking country with big farms and orchards, and the distant blue-grey hills had come near, revealing themselves as thickly covered with maple. “WELCOME TO VINE FALLS, FRIEND,” said the sign some way outside the town, “YOU ARE NOW APPROACHING THE BIRTHPLACE OF JABEZ ELDOR, NOTED ABOLITIONIST AND FRIEND OF LINCOLN.” Presently they passed the beautiful campus of Eldor College, whose white buildings gleamed among shady trees with an Athenian dignity hardly sustained by its standards of learning; and then the bus went through some attractive new suburbs and stopped at last in the Square, still after eighty years the centre of life in Vine Falls.