Chapter X

CHAPTER X BUT this, thought Marta, can't be Liege. Not this grassy hill, rising from flat meadowland a~d tillage,•all open to the sky, where anyone might walk freely. It was a profoundlypeacefulspot.•.. Only to get to it they had to go down into the fosse and up again. . . . The fosse makes it a fortress, Marta thought, or is it a fort? Yes, a fortress, feminine, within its maiden girdle. A dry moat, cut down so cleanly that they came on it as a surprise, though it was full ten yards wide and deep, ringing the hill, and' cool as a cellar. The concrete facing was honeycombed with dungeon barracks behind iron gratings, dark and empty now. Alder shoots grew from the broken pavement, and grass feathered the upper edge against the blue. In the stillness, a grasshopper chirred. Marta's thin silk jacket felt cold and smooth across her shoulders. They climbed the jagged steps into the sun. It must be that she had expected turrets and battle ments. There were none. Worthy citizens, followed by their young, strolled sedately among the scattered clumps of willows. A decorous couple might be sweetN EVE R ASK THE END 119 hearts. The low-built little. city drowsed on the horizon amileor so away. In everyaspect,Belgiumwas utterly peaceful. They've had to fight so much, Marta thought, they do want peace, from the bottom of their souls.•.•"But where were the big guns?" ..• ((Right there," Russ pointed. She might have stubbed her toe on the muzzle of a great gun. Thrust up through a tangle of blackberry vines, it looked like the end of a mislaid culvert. Beyond it was an enor mous iron dishpan upside down, cracked in two, sunk even with the sad. The bushes leaned over it, receiving it back into the order of nature. One of the masked batteries, Russ said. In action, it had been designed to rise for a volley and drop again into its pit for safety.

The utmost precaution of defense. • . • The concrete base was heaved and split beneath it. At the first assault the German field batteries had shattered it to this wreckage of dead metal and stone. • . • After the war the Belgians made no attempt to repair the fortress, Russ said; it wasn't any use. They found two or three other guns jammed in the rubble, and speculated idly on the means of loading and sighting. Yet it did not seem real, not Liege ... Not here, Marta thought, where she was walking on grass, and willows grew densely green. It couldn't be ... Because for her the bombardment of Liege had occurred in New York ••.Where you could never walk on grass . . . At Fortieth Street, when she emerged from the sub120 N EVE R ASK THE END way every morning, she used to stop to buy the latest extra. Every morning, during those August weeks, she stood in the hot street, by the corner of Bryant Park, walled in by the tall grey towers, and it seemed as if they were rocking and falling) falling, falling.

The headlines in the newspapers brought them down. Black streamers across the page: Liege Under Fire, Liege Surrenders, Fall of Liege. The guns of Europe thundered in her shaken mind. There was nothing secure, nowhere to run to any more . • . She had been sick and sad and alone and penniless; she had given up her youthful hope of happiness, and was starting over again, with new work, on pure cour age; and then Liege fell. •.• It wasn't any use ... Folly. Like an ant in an earthquake. I mean, she ex plained to herself, for she always thought lucidly, the ant would say that the earthquake happened to him! In spite of reason, the pinnacled city crumbled in her soul, the towers bowed and fell. Because it answered to her own infinitesimal griefs, came precisely then, when she perceived her girlhood was over, spent for nothing .... Because, she thought, I could not hold Chris, and mar ried Keith for pique, and found Lowrie Ives was dis honest; and I caught the flu-but you can die of the fiu, Lowrie did, at Camp Meade, and I never heard till four years afterward . . . Well, what else are all the songs and stories about? Experience is personal, everything happens to the individual. Troy was sacked for a runaway wife. Or say it was for the odd bushel N EVE R ASK THE END 121 of tribute corn, a trifle anyhow, objectively ... LaurQ, to his lady, was but a kitchenwench . .• Marry,she htJd a better love to berhyme her .•• So it was my city that fell, she thought .... We begin with an enormous faith, so absolute that we are unaware of it, that tomorrow will bring some unimaginable com pletion and delight, for which we were born. And when it comes, we shall be happy ever after. We don't believe that the old were young in their time, or that we· shall grow old. If we did, how could we set out so bravely? But then I knew. •.• Lost, lost, all lost ... I've never since been sure of anything for an hour.

And yet the grass is growing again over Liege. And I went on, I've lived another life, clean separate from what went before; Pauline is the only link, and for years I didn't even hear from her. And I'm happy now, this hour. In a different way, aware that it won't last either. Only the grass will always grow again, over everything. Whether this was sad or comforting she could not tell; it was both. She had always loved the grass. Having run barefoot every summer of her childhood, she still had a sense of its kindness to the tread, even through her sandals. Without grass the earth is life less and inhospitable. Its simplicity is infinitely com plex, the fine shoots mingled with innumerable herbs and flowerets too small and common to have a name, each minutely exquisite and humbly sweet. As inde .. scribable as happiness, in which all the emotions are 122 N EVE R ASK THE END blended, even the ghosts of old sorrows, like last year's grass sheltering the new growth ...

She had never felt she belonged to New York; one couldn't take root in granitep It was temporary, a pen ance, a strange doom. When it was worked out she would go away and sit down to rest in the grass. She would be glad she had seen it and glad it was over. That's what Russ has reached, she thought. . . • They had moved away from him unnoticeably. She received a definite impression of him, standing with his hands in his pockets, on a hill-top, looking after them with the shadow of a smile. The attitude was significant. He used to pull against the tether, she thought; but he doesn't any more. Whether it is his promotion, or just being tired) he's peaceful, too. Pauline and I haven't come to it yet, we still want something to happen.. . . She wondered what she looked like to others, what image they retained of her; the equivalent of Russ's hard-schooled quiet, or Paul ine's glimmering gaiety, which grazed the surface of things like a swallow dipping and rising over water.

What was her own quality, or had she none? You couldn't know yourself. I'm obtuse, she thought, I blunder, I'm so stupid . •••"Have you got a pin?" Pauline whispered, though they were well out of hear ing, out of sight. "A pin-what for?" Marta made a sketchyuseless motion of searching. "The elastic of my knickers is done bust," Pauline muttered tragically. "Wouldn't N EVE R ASK THE END 123 it-" Marta had no ·pin. There was a historic transformation; she had not even a button about her, everything she wore pulled on, wisps of silk tied with a bit of ribbon. Women used to be clamped with whalebone and triple brass, bristling with pins. Our moral support, Marta thought; if it hadn't been for that ..• It was a state of mind.... So I lost Chris ... How many angels can dance on the point of a pin damn them! Picknickersinfested the thickets. Marta and Pauline slid halfway down a steep bank overgrown with sapling birches, and Pauline nervously contrived a knot. Then they rested awhile, seated on a convenient ledge, while Pauline regained composure. The fosse was below them, and a road beyond that, where people passed at intervals, obscurely visible through the branches. "The wretched thing went just as I stepped out of the car,"

Pauline said. "But you're never safe. Our house in Seattle was on a boulevard of lovely big trees; nobody could see into the upstairs windows from across the street. One morning I was in my bedroom, about to get dressed. It was a nice warm day. I had a nervous feeling suddenly, and I looked out. There was a man sitting on a branch with a saw in his hand. He'd gone up to trim the tree. He wasn't doing any sawing right then . . . All the time you were poking about those accursed guns, I was calling on providence ..•. I sup pose Russ would have picked them up politely_" While I meditated on the fate of nations, Marta thought, 124 N EVE R ASK THE END Pauline was worrying about her knickers. Well, so would I if they'd been mine. Abstract ideas come last in the order of the day. If Archimedes had stepped on the soap at the critical moment, he wouldn't have dis covered the Eureka, or whatever it was.

Pauline said wistfully: "When Russ comes over to England I'll keep out of the way. It's awful of me not to give you a moment to yourselves." Marta said, with unwilling honesty: ((Russ isn't pin ing to see me by myself." She would rather not have considered it at the moment, but she couldn't deliber ately deceive herself. Often she examined her soul, under no compulsion but the desire for truth, and a dim hope of amendment, for the appraisal left her aghast. It wouldn't be so bad to be downright bad, she thought ruefully, and there must be an austere satis faction in being lofty and disinterested; but I'm always trying to acquire merit at bargain rates. . . • Vanity, curiosity, a discountenanced coquetry, and something else, she found ..... Something that eluded definition . . • •You're pretty low, she summed up.... Only there is something else, that's what makes it so difficult. Im possible even to be comfortably low. Pauline and Russ aren't clear in their minds either. Maybe not so low.

Russ wouldn't have another man in the party either. He wants our undivided attention and admiration . • • If Pauline will leave it alone...• A breath might dis solve the bubble. Out of their weariness, their dis enchantment, their defeat, they had together created N EVE R ASK THE END 125 this fragile happiness, by asking no more. That was the condition of it, as the magicians~tipulated drawing a circle, saying only certain words, not looking over your shoulder. "You wouldn't," Pauline urged touchingly, "have had as good a time without me." The Bash came to Marta; this is important to Pauline, symbolically. Playing over again the hand she lost once. She needs to win against me. She imagines-she ought to know better, but it's because of Keith-that I can have any man I choose, with hardly an effort. And do anything I please, scot-free. And don't I wish she was right! My highest ambition is to be the heroine of a trashy novelette. • . • If Pauline believed she could, .if she had confidence, she might go back and marry David.

Drag him to the altar, and serve him right; I mean, for his own good.•.. Now will you leave it alone? Try to act like a lady, even if you aren't ... Besides, Russ isn't . . . She met herself slipping around the corner, and suppressed a moan of comic dismay as her stricken conscienceconfronted her unregenerate instinct. There)s the lowdown on you, she told herself. He isn't. If this be virtue, make the most of it. Why don't you eat cake? "No, we wouldn't-I wouldn't," serenity returned to her. The pattern of leaves against the light, a bee rocking tipsily on a Hower, gave her a double pleasure because Pauline was there. I am stupid, she thought; Pauline wants to see Russ by himself, once at least; of 126 N EVE R ASK THE END course she does. It is a necessity of friendship. An infinite variety of relations exist, each unique, with its special qualities. They seem to conflict because we are subject to time and space; we cannot do two things at once nor be in two places simultaneously, but that is a limitation of expression, not of feeling. Yau can't have all of anyone. All would mean nothing, a blank page) an echo. Why are we friends? Because he was himself, becauseI am I. The years between, Pauline's husband, her children, her work and her other friends, have not changed us to each other. Russ has been married, has had I don't know how many women, loved three or four. That is himself, the person I like. And we have each our own understanding with one another, a particular equation. When a group of friends meet, as each one enters not only the sum but the nature of the total is altered, a new equation is arrived at; but the several relations remain, to be resumed again . . . She remembered meeting Alma for tea, having snatched the time out of a crowded day. I haven't seen you fora week, Alma said; I've got to be home in ten minutes.· The simple phrase gave Marta an extraordinary lift.

They sat for ten minutes, and talked inconsequently, with pauses and random answers, of an Ibsen revival, and whether skirts would be longer, and if it would rain over Sunday. What they meant was: You are there, it is you, I had to be sure. You know my mistakes, my faults, my failures, and you accept them as inconse quential, inseparable from me.

N EVE R ASK THE END 127 "Come to that," Marta added in fairness, "Russ might prefer that I kept out of the way." Pauline brightened, but said doubtfully: l'The way I've been draping myself around his neck, he must think I'm-" Marta consoled her: "He seems to like it. Don't worry; he's been ruined before. Russ ain't got any morals, but he's decent. It would be all right, no matter what. You know..... " She trailed off vaguely, unable to formulate a dis tinction she felt clearly, which traversed the usual cate gories. A question of integrity, perhaps. In the Church, an odd heresy recurrently gave trouble: that if you were in a state of grace, you could not sin. Per haps it sprang from the observedfact that an actionde rives its quality from the person who commits it.. Bar ring, of course, meanness and cruelty .... The grace of sinners was upon Aucassin when he chose to go to hell with the companions he preferred on earth) the goodly clerks and knights and stout men-at-arms, the sweet ladies that have two lovers or three, the harpers and poets. They that go into Paradise, with them I have naught to make . .. Yet it didn't do to reverse the rule arbitrarily; nothing so obvious. This natural sweetness might subsist with the strictest conduct. And it brought together the very extremes.... My mother, Marta thought, was fond of Mrs. Hamilton, and wouldn't speak ill of her even after she found out .•.

Having lost sight of her starting point, Marta co"n eluded: "1 wouldn't care what you did .... "

128 N EVE R ASK THE END '(1 wouldn't care if you committed murder," Pauline exclaimed, with the vivacity of relief. If Marta said it was all right . • . Like all gifts, Pauline's fine social sense carried its own penalty. Her will was quicksilver, in its delicate response to the pressure of immediate opinion. "Well, I haven't-yet. As the man said when he read the Ten Commandments," Marta exculpated her self.. They rose and gravitated back toward Russ. "1 came near it once," Pauline said surprisingly. Marta enquired interestedly: "Where was the body discovered?" She couldn't imagine Pauline harming anyone. In the midst of their one incredible quarrel, distracted, astonished and helpless as they were before the treachery of events, Marta had been none the less conscious, as an isolated impression, that Pauline struck the classic note even in her grief and anger; it illumined her beauty like sheet lightning; she arraigned the gods for her mortal plight.

Pauline said: "In the Commercial Hotel in Silverton. When I went back from visiting you at the Coast, [ stayed there a few days. Lucien Hubert came to see me. We left the door open and talked for awhile. Soon after Lucien left, the shrimp of a night clerk rapped on my door. I had no idea-when I opened it that creature said: You have a man in your room; and he snooped around. I said, you had better make a thorough search; and I took him by the coat-collar and shoved his head under the bed; and then I hustled him N EVE R ASK THE END 129 out along the hall, it was only a few steps, and threw him downstairs.I hoped he'd break his neck. He didn't; but I telephoned instantly to the manager and made everybody on the place apologize." "Mojee!» said Marta, restrospeetively stunned. Pauline said: "Lucien was such a dear. He had the most perfect manners. And clothes!" "1 see what you mean," Marta agreed. She had been very slightly acquainted with Lucien. Yet she recalled him dis tinctly, a tall young man, rather thin, with aquiline fea tures and an air not so much of being somebody as of belonging somewhere. Like one of those anonymous "period" portraits of which it is impossible to say whether it is the artist, the subject or the style that pleases. . . . And Pauline used to mention him in her letters. "You and Lucien.... " Marta thought aloud.

Pauline said: "Oh, he was a Catholic." French Canadian, that was it. More French than the French, in a sense, having preserved, in their cultural isolation, the pure seventeenth century type, both peasant and aristocrat. La Salle, Frontenac, Du Lhut, adventurers who carried the tone of the Court into the wilderness, might have looked like Lucien. They probably didn't, but they might have. Pauline continued: "His family had sent him West because he had a touch of t. b. It didn't stop him from racketing around; I suppose he thought he might as well have some fun while it lasted. He went back home next year. I heard later ..." She let it go, preferring to recall how much alive he was, 130 N EVE R ASK THE END seeing again the bare white-walled hotel room, so tran sient, so impersonal, and the two of them sitting casually on the edge of the bed, a thin kind of bed with a white cotton honeycomb coverlet. Lucien held his motoring cap and gloves rolled together, his hands locked about his knee; he was telling her some ridiculous anecdote of Rich Anderson and his bull-terrier ..• The reason Lucien had come to her room was too subtle and too simple for explanation. She'd been away a month; Lucien happened to see her at the sta tion when she returned; he was taking the same train out of town for the day, and could only say so hur riedly as he swung up the steps. He found her in her office next day; she didn't hear him enter; he startled her out of a mood of lucid desperation. She had stopped in the middle of typing a bill of costs, staring at vacancy, at the chill knowledge that Keith didn't matter any more and she might as well marry George Gardiner. Lucien's greeting brought her back; they hadn't exchanged two words when J. K. Hayden called to her resonantly from the inner office,requiring a mis laid document-mislaid by himself-and following the request with a personal appearance. He took for granted that Lucien's errand was to himself; the oc casion was lost. Pauline could only breathe an unpre meditated: damn, and Lucien managed to answer~ The same for me, as he was taken in charge. So, that evening, Lucien came. He didn't offer any pre text, and everything they said might have been overN EVE R ASK THE END 131 heard by the whole world without embarrassment.

Lucien must have known about Keith) maybe about George, too. And they were both quite aware that the hotel regulations didn't allow his presence. They had at least a right to speak to each other. In spite of holy church, the shades of their ancestors, sentence of death, her own disastrous folly, and the fact that she was going to marry George. The night clerk had grossly miscal culated his own importance ••• "We were friendsJ" Pauline said, her light sweet voicegiving the phrase a specialvalue, so that it seemed to linger on the summer air. I suppose, Marta thought, that's what 1 want to know •••Whether she and Russ were friends. Not lovers, that wasn't on the cards, in this life. But whether it was herself Russ had told his soul to, or if it might have been any woman easy enough to respond to his momentary need and nearness, spinning over Brooklyn Bridge, at three o'clock of a New Year's morning.•.. But it's nonsense)she thought, impossible to be sure. It won't work out; I can be sure of Alma, of Pauline, because it's either one thing or the other.

Between a man and a woman there's an unknown quan tity that not only varies continually but can't be sep arated from the other factors and alters their nature. We're a little in love with all the men we like, she thought. It doesn't take much to tip the scales. Only it was weighted dead against us. As it was with Pauline and Lucien. Pauline is a little in love with Russ now.

132 N EVE R ASK THE END As she was with Lucien . . . Friendship is personal. Love, passion, don't seem to be. We recognize our friends, we fall in love with strangers; they remain strangers. Where did we get the idea that there is one right person? Or say there were more than one, but a right combination? It might be true, and we make mistakes because of the incalculable odds; everything is against us, time and tide, the stars in their courses. We can't afford to wait for either ripe judgment or luck. Youth's a stuff -will not endure. There are so many barriers of circumstance, money, race, religion, family .... As if it were a bad joke on us, setting us to hunt for the needle in the haystack, the point of the joke being that the needle is actually somewhere in the haystack. Poor old Dizzy said seventy was the age of passion! He could have been right; at seventy, you ought to know your own if you find it. And then it's too late....

Now she considered it, she couldn't think of any man Pauline should have married, unless it was Lucien Hubert. They were essentially suited, she could see them together; they had the same kind of distinction, sensibility, charm. And they did meet, and still they hadn't a chance..•. Perhaps I'm making it up, Marta conceded, making up Lucien; he may have been quite different from my notion of him. Of those I do know best, I can't think who anyone should have mar ried. If I'd married Chris ... She couldn't imagine it; she had never been able to imagine it. As for Keith ...

N EVE R ASK THE END 133 well, she had proved that there at least are some people you can't marry. Proved it by marrying him.••, She shook herself imperceptibly, pouting her Wlderlip) pff! as if blowing away a dandelion globe .•. Russ was waiting for them, coming to meet them. Pauline put her hand to her waist, and she and Marta began to laugh. Russ said, with amiable mistrust: "I suppose I'm not in on this?" "Qh, you might be," Marta assured him mysteriously. "Destiny often hangs ~y a single thread." Pauline gave her a glance of out rage and appeal, and turned deep pink.