Chapter V

CHAPTER V AND it's true, you can't, Marta meditated in her bath next morning, recovering the impressions of the previous day as if they had been held in solution in the warm water, ready to recrystallize. She woke clear-headed, in good humor and good appetite . . . I wouldn't have persuaded Pauline about the wine, she thought, only she does need, it) to break the tension. For two years she has thought of the children all day and dreamed of them at night. Everything crashed at once. I wonder she didn't go mad. Even if she had stopped caring for George, it was a frightful shock. But you can't love a man who weighs two hundred and twenty pounds. That's a plain fact. It's so elementary, it must have a moral value that we've burked somehow. So it queers every system of civilization. As if we'd left out a cornerstone. One of the natural bases of morals. Chastity may be a virtue, continence anyhow; it calls for will and intelli gence, the exercise of choice. Romance, poetry, senti ment depend on it. But they are just what that view N EVE R ASK THE END 53 of marriage destroys . . • Where have I read that there isn't any statute against murder? Only common law) precedent. Because you don't need to be told it's wrong. . . . Whether you call marriage a contract or a sacrament, if the-the fact makes your flesh creep • . .

I don't know what they mean by a sacrament.. If you can't tell the difference afterward. Of course they call in the mystical faculty. Then I haven't got it. NOT Pauline. So for us the sacrament is nonexistent. A sacrifice-they used to: As it would chance 0/ old in Babylon, }ill here, of the wotnen of Melitta, one, Spurning the proffered coin and strange embrace, Broke from the man and shrieking fled the place . •. The other sacraments, sacrifices, they've refined away into symbolism. Bread and wine for the body and blood. Impracticable in marriage. So they cover it with euphemisms, conjugal rights) duty, and what not. What was I trying to get at? Keith was perfectly worthless as a husband. But he was good-looking. Well, that's something. A natural virtue • • . In cultivating the social virtues we've lost sight of natural values. We don't seem to have decided posi tively what we are trying to be; whatever it is, you've got to have a physical form for it. The handsomest races are those that have fixed a type by thousands of years of subconscious intention. The Indians gave themselves splendid bodies; they left their·faces crude.

54-N EVE R ASK THE END The Chinese made their faces into smooth beautiful masks--so did the Greeks maybe-a veil for thought. Not blank but serene and withdrawn .•. Where was I? •.•It's fatuous to say it was Pauline's duty to love her husband. Much more his duty to be attractive. If he wouldn't, or even if he couldn't, neither could she. Not that kind of love. You cannot. That was what poor mother meant •.. A worn little old woman whose face for many years had held the strange sad peaceful expression of the dead. Only her grey eyes were lumi nous with affection. She said: I don't think I believe in marriage. But I don't know what else people can do.... And she had been married nearly fifty years. What monstrous effrontery, Marta thought, for a priest or a philosopher to lay down the law to her. God himself would hardly dare. And if He did, it would still be vile . . . Mother wouldn't be shocked even if she kne~" all about me. She'd believe it was the best I could ·do, and better than her life anyway. She hoped we wouldn't marry . . . Marta moved her head, a blind gesture, and stood up, reaching for a towel.

She went to Pauline's room for breakfast, and they played their morning game of trying to have the rolls sent up hot, with enough butter. It couldn't be done; the whole force of tradition was against them. I always supposed they were hot, Marta reflected, when I read in novels about coffee and rolls. Nearly every thing we think we know is wrong. Not a sustaining reflection for her, who had an innate, unquenchable N EVE R ASK THE END 55 desire to grasp the facts, the truth. Philosophers drew a distinction between facts and truth, which annoyed her vaguely; she suspected it to be a subterfuge. If you knew all the facts you'd know the truth. That being impossible, philosophers had to pretend that facts were unimportant, else they couldn't construct their neat theories. Presently a fact too solid to ignore , walked through the scheme and left it looking like a burst pap.er hoop. When she "vas a child Marta had lost the animal fear of death in the belief that when you died you'd know everything. It would be worth dying for; she was almost impatient to die. The be lief had vanished since; you might know nothing what ever; but the fear had never returned.

They shared the Paris Herald. Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Williams and Miss Gladys Williams of Mo line, [llinois, were registered at the Crillon. Mr. J. Armstrong Sinsabaugh., president of the Winnetka Rotary Club, had arrived in Paris after a tour of ltaly, and endorsed Mussolini.. Mrs. Mortimer Frame, of Harrisburg, Pa., had entertained the Countess de Rochefontaine at lunch. Marta and Pauline absorbed this information as if it were deeply significant. How ridiculous-But after all, Marta thought, it is sig nificant to us. All accustomed words are invocations.' Mrs. Mortimer Frame conjures up a whole continent) mountains, forests, prairies, small towns, skyscrapers, flivvers, bacon and eggs and toast. The Countess de Rochefontaine is merely an arrangement of the alpha56 N EVE R ASK TH E END bet. A Frenchwoman, on the contrary, would see all Paris and the provinces lunching with, an abstraction.

"Postcards!" said Pauline resolutely. "Then we'll go to the cathedral. I ought to send David a cable, here's his third. But listen!)) She spread them out, reading aloud; the phrasing was so nearly identical that it became a chant, her short upper lip prettily satirical. "Have a good time dull without you love David. If you knew how I've worked over that man! And the minute I'm gone he relapses into this. Dull without me, love-I'll say he is!" Marta commented: "Should you ever have dreamed that at our age we'd still be bothering about men? Or they about us. At twenty, I supposed thirty was the end of everything. Well, Alma's mother is seventy, and she was spoken to on the street. She's really a hand some old lady, though. I won't be; if I get thinner I'll look like a monkey, and if I get fat I'll look like a washerwoman. I haven't decided yet whether to be a holy terror of an antique in black silk and diamonds, with a wig ·and a passion for scandal; or go native, brown and battered, digging in my garden, in a print dress and fiat-heeled shoes.." Pauline said: "There will always be men. As I grow older, they grow older, that's all." Marta asked: "Howald is David?"

Pauline bit her pen, as an aid to arithmetic. (CFifty five or six maybe. Rather distinguished, tall and lean, nice blue eyesand a clippedgrey moustache,very neat." Marta suggested: "Matched socks and ties-that sort N EVE R ASK THE END 57 of thing?" "Gh, yes. And he lives at the club." Marta enquired: "Why don't you marry him? You're used to having a home and a husband, you made it your career, so to speak; not like me, I'm set, living alone. Couldn't you--of course, if you'd hate being married to him, that's different." Pauline said candidly: "No, it's not that. It's-I'm not sure." There were so many considerations, for and against, that she did not know where to begin. (CDo you think I could get him?" If that were settled, she could weigh the rest calmly, examine how much, and in what manner, she liked him. eel dare say a determined ·woman can get almost any man she goes after," said Marta. "But you and I aren't determined, about men.

Because we lost Chris and Keith. It's absurd, the same thing happened to both of us, and confirmed us in exactly opposite dispositions, so we'd repeat our mis takes to the" dot if we had a chance. I'd lose any man I wanted because I'd sit around as dumb as a fish, wait ing for him to speak to me, till he was bored and drifted away. You'd have your man dizzy trying to guess what you expected him to do. If you didn't want him at all, you could get him-that's consoling ... David has money, hasn't he? It would suit you to have heaps of money." ((1 must have money," said Pauline. "I've been through so much-" When the luck ran against George so persistently-there simply wasn't any money in the country-and she found herself in the 58 N EVE R ASK THE END trap so many millions of women have been caught in, and her children with her, growing up to go through the same struggle, she felt she had done them some inexpiable wrong. What was the use if no one ever got out? ((At the very worst," she said, ('it would have been worse if George hadn't left me enough to live on."

"David is a snob, isn't he?".Marta said thoughtfully. "The sort of old bachelor who prides himself on going about with the right people, prominent people?" Pauline said: "Yes, and they bore him frightfully; he goes to all the parties and then tells me how bored he was." And doesn't take you to the parties, Marta thought. "1 prefer him to be a snob," Pauline con tinued. "Sometimes I think I prefer to go on as we are; I've got over wanting anything settled. Possi bilities are more interesting than certainties. And then, I'd be more comfortable with someone like Clint Charles. Only that's out of the question; there's Vi." "Clint Charles!" Marta exclaimed. "Do you mean to say-" uN0, no," Pauline protested. "I play golf with him. He respects me!" "Speaking as one cat to another," said Marta, relieved, "he is exactly the kind of man who respects a woman for snubbing him consistently. I always liked Clint too, in a way. He's rather good company, if you bar ideas; an idea would strike him as obscene. But if Vi died, God forbid, and I heard you were going to marry Clint, I'd take the next train and part you at the altar. You'd get to N EVE R ASK THE END 59 loathe him, if he belonged [0 you. The poolroom lounger note. Shirtsleeves ~nd red guspenders. Vi suits him; she's common to the bone. It's what he married her for. Vi is a dead giveaway of Clint."

tty ou say the most terrible things," Pauline moaned. "Becausethey're true. Vi does suit Clint. And I shall never see him again without thinking of poolrooms and red suspenders. Jimmy hates him too. Mayn't I play golf with him?" Marta said: "Certainly; his place is on the golf-links. But you'd better marry David. It's his money puts you at a disadvantage, isn't it? And if he had no money you wouldn't be interested in him." "He wouldn't be himself if he had no money," Pauline explained. Marta saw the validity of this. If a man should·give th,e best part of his life to making money, and were then deprived of the money, not much of him .would be left. The idea of being loved for oneself alone is a sentimental fallacy; possessions may be adventitious, but not necessarily so, and accom plishments are certainly a part of personality. Never theless, the merely rich shall not enter the kingdom of heaven; they have their reward. ccyou're a snob, too, Pauline," said Marta judicially, ((or no, not really, but you value yourself too low. Herbs and apples ... " The allusion escaped Pauline ... And I, too late, under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. "You have a small-town streak," Marta continued. "And I'm a bit of a shrew, not enough discipline. We know better, but in our weak moments we revert. David's money 60 N EVE R ASK THE END impresses you. It wouldn't me, but I'd probably tell him where he could go, with aspersions on his ancestry.

'Still, if you want to marry him-" Between her lashes Pauline glanced sidelong at the mirror. She was resting her cheek on her palm, cur tained by her straight black hair; she was momentarily dimmed, under the sp.adow of a cloud, a faint virginal shame for the cruelty of time. Marta read it. "N0, yo~ are young to him. And like this, in your yellow kimono, you look nice." Pauline said: "How could you tell?" "Everyone looks in the mirror," Marta said. The Queen was in her chamber, and she was middling old; her petticoat was satin and her stomacher was gold. "The very first time I looked in the mirror, I was eight. I couldn't believe it was me." Perhaps that was when she lost Chris, ten years before she ever met him. . . . She had to climb upon a bench, to come level with the scrap of glass hung over the washstand. They had moved so much, in the shiftless way of the poor, that they had no more furniture than a troupe of gipsies.

The mirror was cheap and cracked, bad luck for Marta, since her sole beauty was the wildflower compleXionof a delicate child. She never tanned nor freckled; she grew pale. The girls in stories she read had golden curls and large blue eyes. Her straight cinnamon col ored hair, her grey eyes and wide mouth, and the mor bid greenish tinge imparted by the wavy glass, struck her with deep unchildish dismay. When she grew up N EVE R ASK THE END 61 she would have no beaux, no attention nor admiration. She thought of that at eight! And she armored her self quickly in a stoic pride, to confront her fate. She needed it again now.... And she faced the looking glass, and whatever else there was. ... Later in the morning they pursued the cathedral spire through a maze of narrow crooked streets, loitering by shopwindows filled with cheap lace, china dogs, imita tion jewelry and rayon undergarments. "These must be the Belgian atrocities," Marta conjectured. .eOr European culture; it's hard to tell them apart. I'm growing attached to Antwerp; I don't know why." Un like Paris, Antwerp made no demands; one did not have to live up to it. The wayfaring man, though a fool, might rest. The spirit of the place was bourgeois, ask ing only whether you could pay your modest bill. The outward aspect, the horizontal lines of the architecture, held to this middle way; the buildings appeared to be two stories in height, though actually they rose to five or six or seven, but they did not tower nor strive to over top one another, and they were unified by their irregu larities, blobs of carving, projecting window ledges and random cornices. In the eighteen eighties, when wood gave place to the proud permanence of stone, America burst into a similar style, in commodious mansions and Gothic courthouses, laden with applied ornament. It had its own charm.

"1 love it," said Pauline. ''Where is that damned cathedral?" The sacred edifice had escaped them ..

62 N EVE R ASK THE END BafBed but unvexed, they lapsed into a patisserie and solaced themselves with ices, before taking a cab back to the hotel for lunch. Russ sent the motor for the afternoon. The blond young Belgian chauffeur was charged to show them the town.. His name was Henri; he spoke almost intelligible English, and seemed singu larly pleased with his commission. At intervals he halted the car and directed their attention to points of interest, which. they examined with the rapt intensity of perfect ignorance. "Did he say it was the gasworks or the glue factory?" Pauline murmured. "Dh, the city hall, of course." They did the cathedral after all; Henri stole a march on it, and shepherded them through. Presently they were aware of the smell of the sea, and ships rose preposterously out of the solid earth; the flat marshmeadows were cut by narrow docks. Their sense of responsibility had vanished, dispelled by the temperate light and mild sunshine, the insidious de moralization of being carried about on a cushion.

((When I nagged you into coming out to the Coast the first time," Marta said, "and we drove out to Bremerton, do you remember? you stopped the car because there was a blackberry vine beside the road. And the bracken and fern, such lots and lots of it-I wanted to roll in it, like a cat in a catnip bed." For Marta, the Puget Sound region was Merlin's Forest. More deep asleep in green Broceliande . .. . "I couldn't exist anywhere else,') Pauline agreed, obediently inspecting the medieval N EVE R ASK THE END 63 fortress) guardian of the port for centuries.. The old Tacoma railway station was of the same genre. "You can't be entirely unhappy there; it's heaven." They hadn't been wholly unhappy even then. Temporarily they were not anything; they were emotionally out of breath, and glad of each other's company. Chris was gone. Keith was gone. That was final. He and Marta had discovered with astonishment that they were strangers; he could only carry her suitcase to the sta tion. They were already so. far apart, there was not even embarrassment in lying beside him for the last time. He was a quiet sleeper. When they woke, she a moment before him, dawn was in the room; and a fleeting speculative grin touched the corners of his mouth.... As soon as might be, Marta wrote to Pauline, who came; and they discussedwhether she should marry George. As they used to discuss whether she should marry Keith. As she asked now, should she marry David.... On, Marta thought suddenly. He didn't quite dare say it! After all these years, she guessed what it was Keith had thought: Hello, kid, what's your name? The pup! After all these years, in spite of herself, she grinned too.

"Which does he mean is the oldest house in Ant werp?" The small square dwellings in a row were so darkly weathered that one felt the grime had penetrated every particle; the very stones were shrunken with age. "I can't make out if he is telling us it's fourteen hun dred years old or was built in 1400. Good' heavens, it 64 NEVER ASK THE END must be the one in line with the Underwood typewriter sign! " Like the Ancient Mariner's albatross . . , Henri obviously took credit for the effect produced. They confirmed his belief by offering American cigarettes. As a return treat, he conjured up the Brabo foun tain; he had been saving it. There Pauline and Marta held to one another for moral support. ((Do you see what I seer" The composition, in perdurable bronze, consisted of a nude athlete poised tiptoe on the pros trate form of a decapitated giant, and holding aloft a gigantic hand detached from the vanquished foe..

Castles, ships and miscellaneous objects were involved in the affray, by way of foundation. The anatomical details fascinated them-water spurting from severed veins . . . Henri's manifest pride in this masterpiece subdued them. They listened respectfully to a legend which might have explained the group if they had been able to understand more than one word in three. But they knew a patriot when they saw him. ((Did you fight in the war, Henri? No, you would have been too young." Henri assented. "Myn vater-my fader, he did fight, four years." Marta said: "A country that could erect such a statue, that could even imagine such a statue, is invincible. Have another cigarette. . . , Isn't it about time to go back to the hotel?" Henri indicated that they might trust him to deliver them at the place appointed according to instructions received from a higher source; and drove on until he came to a stretch of waste land, on which piles of bricks and iron N EVE R ASK THE END 6S girders had been laid down. "Here," he said, "will be the-what do you callt-the site of the Gener-ral Motors." They presented him with the package of cigarettes.

Re-entering the city, the car turned into a broad avenue handsomelyset with trees. Pauline sat up: "Do you know where we are?" Obligingly Marta peered at the signs; before she could decipher one, Henri slowed sufficientlyto wave an arm toward the discreet fa~de of an apartment house otherwise indistinguishable in the ranks of new apartment houses. "And this is the residence of Meester Gir-rardl'" a:'1 told you so," said Pauline. "Isn't it lovely? Russ is one of the local landmarks." They gave Henri ten francs when he deposited them at the hotel. In the upper hall, Pauline asked, without prelude: "Where did you get the money you sent me to come to the coast on?" Marta was rummaging in her handbag. ((1 got it from Captain Matt Bradford." She fitted her key in the lock. "1 had to have it. . . . You'd have died if I hadn't got you away for a vacation." Pauline had wondered for eighteen years. On the other hand, she was not surprised.

"I'll be about fifteen minutes. You go down when you're ready; Russ might be waiting," Marta said; and Pauline said: "All right."