Chapter III

CHAPTER III THE wallpaper alone, they agreed, was worth the money_ It was fabulous, a cheerful nightmare. Each room exhibited a different and more terrible design, of purple cabbages peering through blue lattice-work, pretzels in mustard growing on tropical crimson vines, and Euclidean explosions in the most bilious hues known to chemistry. The hall was utilized to full advantage: two unrelated patterns were narrowly separated by a wainscot strip. There was something engaging about such industrious whole-hearted bad taste. The parlor on the ground floor, in the rear of the lobby, admirably served its only conceivable purpose as a reliquary of the eighteen-eighties. Completely enclosed against any destructive incursion of light and air, it contained antimacassars and chenille table covers and a mumme fied palm in a fluted majolica jar resting upon a spiral pedestal of varnished oak. Pauline and Marta waited for Russ in the lobby, in plush armchairs adorned with fringe.

Marta's store of useless knowledge yielded unbidden the item that Van Dyck was born in Antwerp. Van 30 N EVE R ASK THE END Dyck) the painter of supreme elegance, almost the inventor of elegance. Then there was no reason why another Van Dyck should not be born in Brooklyn. Placidly unaware, Brooklyn would outlast him. Van Dyck was nothing to these honest Belgians now en quiring for friends or buying cigars at th~ desk. Marta supposed they were Belgians. Like the landscape, like the hotel, they were baRlingly familiar) yet she couldn't place them by any individual features. Just men in soft hats and sack suits, youngish men barbered into an unobjectionable uniformity. The sort of men to be seen in commercial hotels anywhere . . . But that was it! Anywhere in the West or the Middle West. This was a middle class country, a commercial country. She had failed to place them precisely because they were so familiar. Add the personal note, and there was Perry Wells, except for his bright gold hair, and Wes Romike and Walter Burrows and Rich Anderson, though he ought to have a white bull-terrier at his heels, and Bert Champion and Stanley Simmons . . .

Real estate, banking, brokerage and insurance . . . All the young men about town • • • All but Keith Brown and Chris Jackling • . • Marta nudged Pauline, demanding confirmation .. "So it is-they· are--even if he is talking Dutch, that's Perry Wells selling somebody a corner lot in the East Antwerp Addition," Pauline agreed. (CHow weirdl" The perspective of the past is a misleading metaphor.

N EVE R ASK THE END 31 As experience the past is incorporate in personality; regarded by the participant, it is circumambient,equi distant, a cloudy sphere peopled by impalpable forms, to whom one's thoughts are addressed. And the self is not single; Marta was aware of three selves. There was herself now; there was the girl who had been herself; and there was the child she had been. She could see the child with objective distinctness; she had left the child behind when she left· home. She could see the girl) though the point of discontinuity was not so definite. But the girl existed only in that forsaken prairie town; the woman who went away from there was her present self. "What became of Chris ]ackling?" Pauline asked; though Marta knew, by the inflection) that Pauline was not thinking of Chris, but of Keith Brown. Be cause he meant the same thing to her. Marta pursued her own thoughts aloud.

"I heard he'd gone down to Mexico." He was field inspeetorfor one of the big oil companies) investigating "prospects"; his roving commission had brought him to the northwest. "1 met him once, you know, after ward. In the lobby of the Multnomah Hotel." First and last she had seen him in a hotel. Flowered wall paper in the first one and potted palms in the last; so it came back: to her. "I recognized the back of his neck, clear across the room." That somehow was all that was left of her image of him, of his specialcharm -the inclination of his head when he spoke to any32 N EVE R ASK THE END one, deferential and intimate. Ul went over and touched his sleeve; he turned around and almost jumped out of his shoes. He was scared." Of the attraction that had once existed between them, that used to terrify her, reduce her to helpless despair. He was afraid of letting the djinn out of the bottle again.

"I made him take me to tea. He hated it. Really, the whole thing was hard on him." She perceived now that while in love with him she had assumed that she was not responsible for her own emotions, and that he was. F or both his and hers. A large order! "He was married again." The girl who had been herself, Marta Cooke, be longed to Chris Jackling. She had surrendered at a glance, clear across the long dining-room. It was full of men she never really saw at all. She used to look over their heads. She was eighteen, a shy, bold, moon-faced minx with a flyaway pompadour dipping over one eyebrow, pointed upward with a bow of black ribbon. Her black uniform frock was as simple and severe as a calyx, except for a slight fullness at wrist and blouse, until it flared about the hem; and the continuous .line gave meaning to her least gesture, bringing her whole body into complicity. Leaning backward and sidewise, with the same motion she kicked open the swing-door, her skirt swirling about her ankles, and swam down the room with her chin lifted, swavine-on the slender stem of her waist to balance the heavy tray held N EVE R ASK THE END 33 shoulder high. Against my will I am sent to bid you come &0 dinner.

He had stopped by the furthest table to exchange a casual word with an acquaintance; he bent his head slightly and smiled. He would have addressed an aged squaw just so, as if he had happily come upon the one person he sought. Marta was hard put to describe him in terms that might not have applied to 'any other presentable young man, except that he was somehow all of a piece, well-made and harmonious, so that his even tan went with his brown hair and eyes, and his gestures had a natural grace. She had always preferred brown men; or was it because of him? Could it be so simple, so silly, so shockingly a matter of chance, like the turn of a card at the moment in the game when it would take the trick? Why should she remember forever that he stood just there, smiling with his eyes, a complete' stranger? In a sense, she was never to know any more of him than she knew then; the effect he produced upon her, fixing her attention, was to be intensified, that was all; the situation existed complete from the beginning. She knew his name as soon as he took his place at the next table. Because of the tall beautiful red-haired woman, with the little girl, who had been in the hotel for a week, waiting for her husband. Mrs. Jackling. The child used to roam about looking for amusement, a pert, precocious yet somehow engaging infant, seven or eight years old; she followed Marta at her work 34 N EVE R ASK THE END distributing fresh linen in the mornings, asking aimless questions or showing off a new frock. If it hadn't been for the child Marta might never have met Chris at all.

He was at the hotel only two or three days, never any nearer than the width of the room; she had no reason to suppose he ever noticed her existence. A year later, the child recognized her. Chris said he did, too; Marta did not know whether or not it was true, another un solved fragment of the riddle. The second encounter, the acquaintance, occurred after she had gone to another town, and to other work; but it was merely the next town, of the same type though somewhat larger; and she was still the same girl. Nothing had touched her; the year she spent in the hotel was wholly an adventure of the mind. But a great adventure, which she would not will ingly have foregone. It was unique and incommunica ble, her discovery of the world. She had not been mistaken in believingso; it was the world. As when Columbus set foot on a savage island so small and poor that its identity is uncertain; nonetheless, he was taking possession of the New World. So Marta took possession of unknown potentialities, by the act of earning her living. Her own money, her own room, her own life entirely at her own disposal.

Toward the end of the year she was half asleep on her feet, drunk with fatigue. She was on duty never less than "ten hours a day, and after hours she studied. She didn't complain. It was a reasonable down payN EVE R ASK. THE END 3S ment for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The 'extent of her ignorance was the measure of her interest. Of men she knew nothing at all. She wished she could take one to pieces, to get at his motives and impulses. Sometimes she tried, to the discomfiture and amusement of the subject of experiment. They were 'unable to inform her. For they never thought about it; they had been trained not to think about it. And men and women spoke a different language, the more confusing because they did not recognize the fact; so it was transvalued without translation. There was an insane discrepancy, an absence of any measure . . . . To desire anything so much, and to hold it so cheap ... The other girls were two or three years older than Marta, and had acquired a degree ofprac tical, pragmatical wisdom. They imparted it behind the big screen by the swing doors, whispering and laughing; they shielded one another in minor escapades of evenings, playing tag with the rules, but keeping within boundaries fixed by themselves. They were good girls; it was a respectable, dingy hotel. She was a nice kid herself, Marta thought.

She wouldn't say as much now. Whatever the gain, there was a loss; it hurt to take stock. The Everlasting Wrong ..• For in any case you couldn't go on being a nice kid. Susie, the head waitress) was as good as bread. A thin, dark, gentle girl, showing her mixed blood in her stately carriage-French, Scotch,'and a dash of Indian--she was pious, too, a 36 N EVE R AS K THE END good Catholic. Marta went to vespers with her some times. Tower of ivory, Rose of Sharon . .. Susie was going to marry the porter, an honest hardworking youth. She would certainly be fat and frowsy now, or haggard with childbearing, submerged in a kitchen in that dusty town. No, no, no) thought Marta, I don't like myself, and I've had a hell of a time getting to wherever I am, nowhere; but I'd rather be me, be here. Pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death . .. It has nearly killed us, Pauline and Russ, too . . . We're survivors from a wreck. Cast up on the beach in Paris hats and marcel waves, movie style ...

Russ entered, searching for them with his eyes; and she and Pauline rose, beaming at him. Exactly as they used to when they sat an,d waited for Keith, for Chris.•••When Russ was undoubtedly meeting Nonie, or the girl he was to marry, or maybe some girl whose name he had since forgotten utterly .... All of them eager for the encounter, expecting an ulti mate event of enormous, undefined importance, that was to make all the difference. And all the meetings leading up to this chance conjuncture of the three of them, which meant nothing whatever) would lead to nothing. And they were glad of it, preferred it should be so; therein lay its special value. For the sword out wears the sheath, and the heart wears out the breast. "Sorry to be late; some of the men from the Vienna office are here," Russ explained. "I had to ditch them.

N EVE R ASK THE END 37 And I wanted to take you home for dinner, but Ernest will be there." A summer shower was threading the air with silver. They stood under the awning, waiting for a taxi. The restaurant, Russ mentioned, was less than a block away. "Oh, let's go," said Marta, and they ran for it, through the lovely slanting crystal streaks that splashed into little stars on their lashes. "There's always Ernest," she added, breathlessly irrelevant, as they crowded into a booth. There used to be a lump of a girl named Cora Drinnan, who shared her apartment before Pauline; and hadn't sense or manners enough to keep out of the way when Chris came. Marta invariably vanished when Keith called on Pauline, if there were no fourth. And much good it did. Nothing else would have fixed his interest on her so surely. For once, her conscience acquitted her; she had foreseen no such result. She was "out," a remote spectator, dimly surprised to perceive Pauline inviting a similar disaster, but aware of the futility of advice.

"Does Ernest sit up for you?" Pauline enquired. "My son invariably wakes and demands: 'What time is it?J and I have to lie by the clock. Last winter he rigged a burglar alarm, while I was out dining with the boy friend. Just as we were saying goodnight David has that old-world courtesy, holding his hat and making his best bow-the contraption burst into the most frightful racket. David almost fell downstairs; and Jimmy called out: 'Step on it again, mother.' I 38 N EVE R ASK THE END simply had hysterics. You can imagine how difficult it is to manage what you might call any private life in the circumstances." ((Maybe he disapproves of mothers having private lives?" "Quite the contrary. He asked me awhile ago, 'Do you suppose you could get married again, mother?' Not might-eould." She wondered herself if she could. Bring David to the scratch. And bring herself to it. She changed her mind on both points at five minute intervals. She'd been married, and David hadn't, an obstacle on each side. He thought it would be absurd at his age. "Jimmy is worried about leaving me alone when he grows ·up. Aged parent abandoned on doorstep. Or else having me on his hands. Though of course he feels it won't be long; he told me to have. a good time on this trip, not to hesitate about spending my capital, because it would last my time, and he could make his own way, he didn't need my money. A touching scene. I made him promise that when I become completely impossible he'll put me in an old ladies' home, by force if necessary. Nobody shall ever say ['ve been a good mother,' devoted to my son." She speculated why she had felt no affec tion for her own mother. Such a wonderful old lady, people said, so charitable and neighborly, especially if there were sickness or trouble, never thinking of her self. She never missed a funeral ... What are· we here for, if not to help others, was her maxim · . · N EVE R ASK THE END 39 It's my father, thought Marta. Russ smothered an inarticulatesound, and shrugged. My mother ...

He picked up the wine card. Lanson?-I921 was recommended as a vintage year. And the dinner order; what would Marta have-lobster Stephanie, romaine ... Ice cream? "No ice cream," Marta interposed. "I'm on a diet." Russ said, stupefied: "Lobster and champagne-that's a hell of a diet." They broke into giggles. "I'm sure Ernest would consider it immoral," said Marta. ((Doesn't he eat cornflakes for breakfast?" Russ admitted: "He does. How did you know?" They had Ernest as a relish, with pepper sauce. Then, having lingered sociably till the Lanson was finished, they decided to go over to the apartment anyhow.