Chapter XIII

CHAPTER XIII "Russ had my key last night, and when he brought it back [ just snatched it and slammed the door," Pauline lamented. "M-mm," said Marta, "I know I mean, he said he had it. In the. hal!." She peered at her melon. "I might have asked him in for five minutes," said Pauline mournfully. "There'd have been no harm. ..." [f Marta said there wouldn't .•• "None whatever," Marta assured her. "Why didn't you?" Pauline said: "I thought it was you knocking. The instant I'm alone, I tear off all my clothes, so I slid into a kimono--and there was Russ." ... Marta could see him. She giggled. He'd be trying to figure it out. At least, Pauline had cleared herself, by the width of the door.•.. Marta thought, he can only assume that at intervals of eight years [ have a brain storm, with variations. "I couldn't sleep anyhow," said Pauline. "Marta, when Russ comes over to London," she rushed through her request, "couldn't I have one day?" Marta heard her with familiar astonishment. It's uncanny, Pa~line actually can read one's mind by flashes, whenever one IS8 N EVE R ASK THE END is off-guard. And instead of being any use, it confuses her. Because the mind is a deep pool, froth and rip ples and straws on the surface and God knows what down below, water-weeds and drowned things. All [ can do is watch and listen and piece together from the outside and then make my mistakes and let it go at that. But she can't help shifting and changing in re sponse.

"All right," said Marta, powerless in the tangle she had made. Russ would certainly catch her in the least attempt to manage him. Left to chance, the arrange ment might occur naturally, if Pauline were free to accept, assured that Marta didn't mind. Marta really didn't mind. Like that immortal featherbrain, Mrs. Bennet, she didn't mind anything .•••She felt, inex plicably, as she used to when she was eighteen, com paring notes-about men, of course-with Susie behind the screen at the Benton Hotel, as chaste and as un moral as children. W 8 were young, we were merry, 'We 'Were very, very wise, and the door stood open at the feast •••She had never recaptured the mood since she fell in love with Chris. Till this moment. She hadn't recognized it immediately •.• "You'll see Russ again in Paris, and next spring in New York," Pauline extenuated. She might, if he didn't have to go to Rome. "You're likely to see him in Seattle first," said Marta. She hoped sincerely that his Easter leave might not fail. The sea voyage was exactly what he needed; and why shouldn't Pauline N EVE R ASK THE END 159 have a few days? Pauline grew radiant, expanding -into plans. We're positively dithering, Marta thought, and didn't mind that either. Pauline has to keep a kind of game going constantly; whenever she stops she remembers the children. She uses -David and Clint Charles for it; even her indecision is part of it. And Russ is dependable, he won't let her down. . . • "Is that golf resort in the mountains?" Marta asked, with genuine concern. "Maybe altitude is bad for high blood pressure-or is it the opposite?" Pauline was stricken. "1 don't know, I'll consult my doctor; we could take a trip on the Sound instead, or to Victoria.» They were seriously engrossed, prescribing and con sulting-he did look better than in Paris two weeks ago, but then he had a cold-when Russ paused in the entrance of the coffee-room. He had changed to a summer tweed, his eyes were clear, his smooth face as fresh as his collar. They stared at him as he came toward their table; they stuttered over their good-mornings. "How are you?" he became conscious of the crossfire of. their scrutiny. "What is it-have I got egg on my tie?"

Pauline bit her lip; Marta hiccuped and smothered herself with her napkin. (COh, my goodness," she gurgled, "excuseitplease) we-" They broke down, giving a disjointed account of their solicitous conver sation. "We were taking the greatest care of you. We had practically tucked you into a wheel chair, and were bringing you soup and jelly, probably red flannel petti coats-and we looked around and there you were, 160 N EVE R ASK THE END blooming with health and growing younger before our very eyes, just out of a bandbox. Egg on your tie!" He couldn't pretend to scorn such honest flattery, but carried it off creditably. "Well, in Milan I dropped a forkful of noodles inside my waistcoat-those Italian noodles are about three inches long, and hot-I had the darned est struggle . • • No, thanks, 1 had breakfast sent up." They had only to register before leaving, a formality omitted the night before. Too late, Marta closed her passport; Russ was reading it over her shoulder. She glanced at Pauline's. "For heaven's sake," she ex claimed, "talk about growing younger-"

Pauline was unabashed. "What could I do? David offered to go with me to get my passport, and I've been lying to him about my age for years." "How you keep tab on what you've told that man I can't imagine," said Marta bitterly. "1t does require constant attention to detail," said Pauline, with modest pride.... Marta thought, I'm forty-one. The number prolonged itself in her mind like the muBled sound of an iron door closing slowly. Pauline was a few months older. Marta was charmed, she was exquisitely exasperated by Pauline's subter fuge and her own instinctive rise to it. As if they could, by turning a leaf or the stroke of a. pen, reverse the movement of the spheres. . . . Still, David believes Pauline. Because he wants to, on his own account . . . They emerged into the drowsy brightness of Sunday N EVE R A S I~ THE END 161 morning, fresh with the watery smell of washed pave ments and sprinkled bay-trees. A concierge had al ready fetched out a chair and settled himself for the day; a housewife in felt slippers crossed the street leisurely. You'd say, Marta reflected, that Liege is the sort of place where nothing ever happens . . . Albert was ready with the car. He drove with restored con fidence, naming villages to indicatethat he was familiar with his route. They thanked him while rejecting the information instinctively. Even in Paris, Marta realized, she had not wished she could speak French.

How restful not to understand, to remain ignorant of the griefs and anxieties which every mortal carries in his breast and betrays by the most casual word, by a gesture, an inflection. They would lunch at the Chateau. It had been built) or owned, Russ said, by King Leopold) the old king. Out of profits extracted bloodily from the Congo blacks, no doubt. He had yards of white whiskers, Marta contributed irrelevantly. And Cleo de Merode. . . • Wearing a tipsy crown and disreputable ermine robe, the old king existed, remote, unreal, and horrid as an ogre, in the Sunday newspaper supplements of her childhood. They blew across America like red and yellow leaves before a rising gale, filling a need for color and sensation in those pure, empty spaces. Her oldest sister's beau used to fetch them, with the weekly mail. In Arcady ... How Alma startled her once by 162 N EVE R ASK THE END saying that she did not desire perfection in human nature; it would be dull. Yet Alma is good, kind, unselfish, gentle. . . . Then virtue is not enough even for good people? Something in us craves danger and change and violence and the breaking of laws. Now may the devil take my soul, quoth King Henry, for God shall not have it. Not by compulsion.... Marta wished the child who was puzzled by Cleo's madonna face and ropes of pearls could have known that some day she would lunch at the ogre's castle. She would as soon have expected to By. Well, she had Bown, too.

With Lowrie Ives. At dusk, they were so far above earth that it dropped out of sight; they were alone in the ether, except for a single star. She could remember reading of the Wright's first Bight. So she could also remember before that. It left one gasping, to think of belonging to both ages-to have seen the world swing out in space, and nothing to steer by but one far-off nameless star . . . She had had enough. She wished, perfectly content, that there might be no tomorrow for her. The world is such a lovely place, she thought; and the two thoughts somehow did not seem to be contradictory. How fantastic that one can think in the same breath of God and the univ.erseand lunch and whether or not one would . . . She leaned back in her corner placidly, with her hands on her lap. Russ couldn't be expected to play up to both of them. He'd get his wires crossed. Pauline needed the assurance of contact. She was ready to fly to bits with nerves, N EVE R ASK THE END 163 after two bad nights. Marta knew the signs. She had been through it herself.

Pauline said, as if to a spoken cue, she had waked at four. There was a chime every hour. They, she surmised, didn't hear it. They wouldn't! Marta was sorry, she had not. Though she was craning her neck to observe a wayside tavern perched on a bridge, she caught the merest flash of Russ's glance toward her; he then gazed straight ahead. He had not heard the chime, he said. Or anything . . . He had hoped that maybe ... There he was, lonely off by himself. But nobody cared ... Slamming doors in his face.... Marta was drawn to attention as if by a spring. He was ragging her over Pauline's head! She had an im practicable impulse to box his ears. The motion of the car swayed her against his shoulder; she muttered, too low for Pauline to hear: "You son-of-a-gun-insulting a helpless woman!" She felt him laughing, though his features remained immobile; the contagion seized her. Oh, oh! .••Pauline regarded them injuriously: "Yes, you are the kind of people who drop off the.

moment they lay their heads on the pillow, and don't know a thing till they wake next morning. Let me tell you, you didn't know anything when you went to sleep, either." That finished them·; they uttered suf focated sounds of exceeding mirth. "Idiots," said Pauline, and immediately succumbed. "We got that," said Marta, drying her eyes, too demoralized to offer any defence. She was a woman 164 N EVE R ASK THE END scorned . • • Russ thought, then that wasn't what she meant last night, or it wouldn't strike her as funny. You can't tell ... Albert turned to assure them) by the landmarks, that they were nearing their destination. They said: "Yes, isn't it?" with half-witted intensity. The forest of Arden-it might well be. The stately conventional phrases of romantic literature became actual; dappled glades and velvet turf, shaded by mag nificent trees. The light grey stone fa~ade of the chateau was frivolously cheerful, innocent of history, swept and garnished. Tables were set on a terrace, under a vast orange-striped awning. The clean live sensation of the gravel lingered with Marta as she con sulted the menu. "I will have this." She was obliged to point to the item. "I can't pronounce it." Truite a la meuni8Ts, Russ told the waiter, with an accent that admitted no argument.

"Which?" Pauline enquired. Trout, Marta trans lated. Pauline wasn't listening; she repeated: ('What is it?" ((A trout," said Russ, "is a fish. About that long." "I thought it was a fish," said Pauline, and ordered chicken. In heaven, Marta thought, one doesn't need to be clever" It's a state of being. One contemplates-a rose, a cloud, a tree. Mostly trees. And one's friends are there. She shifted her feet, to di~;1odge a pebble from her shoe. It was like wading a brook • . • Of course ... That was it, precisely ... We've come N EVE R ASK THE END 165 so far, she thought. So far, it's no wonder we're tired. Starting in a prairie schooner and covering the last lap by aeroplane. There and back. Americans are adapt able; they have to be. But there is a limit to what any organization can assimilate. To experience all the stages of civilization in one lifetime, from the nomad to the machine age, demands the utmost . . .

In half a lifetime, actually. She was seven) the year the family moved West, part of the last great wave of emigration that overflowed the continent They had been drifting westward ever since she was born. She had no recollection of her birthplace; it was only a nam~) Sault Ste. Marie,' a pretty name. They had got to Utah, she hardly knew how or why, except that her father started with some vague intention, abandoned midway, of going to Oregon. Perhaps because it was the furthest possible destination. He seemed to cher ish a fretful, almost imbecile hope of reaching, at the world's end, a land of Cockaigne where one didn't have to accept responsibility, adjust oneself to necessity and one's neighbors. Marta was sorry yet that they hadn't reached Oregon. She had never seen it, and it was to her a lost inheritance. She knew she would have loved it; she loved all that northerly region of the Pacific a kind country, breathing odors of balsam, fruitful and serene, where air and water and sunlight are as soft as summer rain. She had not loved the prairie. . . .

But they had turned to the prairie instead. . . . Six children there must have been, the baby in her mother's 166 N EVE R ASK THE END arms. Her mother sat with her father in front; the children were stowed under the bowed grey canvas, on the bedding rolls. The pots and pans clinked in a box beneath the seat. When they were tired of the slow clumsy pitching motion of the wagon, going on and on, the horses halted and the children scrambled down to run awhile. It was her feet that remembered the slithery crisp ness of the grass and the little puffs of dust in the wheelruts. The dust came up softly between her toes) and cloud shadows moved along beside the wagon. Birds, too, ran ahead on the road, then rose and flew away. Prairie dogs stood upright beside their burrows, squeaked curiously, and vanished. In the Bad Lands there were long stretches rough with broken lava, and a horned toad under a sage-brush. It was delicious to splash through a creek; that was what the gravel of the restaurant terraces brought back, the feel of the pebbly fords, with the water rifHingby her ankles. The horses drank leisurely-she remembered the horses so well; they were almost members of the family. An un matched pair of geldings, very different in temper but with a dumb affection for each other, an equine friend ship. They were called Buck and Barney.. Buck was a deep-chested bay, lazy and strong and good-natured, but with a runaway streak. He wasn't fond of work, but in an emergency the wilfulness that made him bolt occasionally made him throw himself into the collar and fetch the load or break the traces. There was a N EVE R ASK THE END 167 sculptural quality, the very form of power, in the slow ripple of his shoulder muscles when he was doing his best. Barney was a bright sorrel, high-headed and nervous, with a free eager stride, but wanting weight for the heaviest business. He fretted and tossed his forelock and was always six inches in advance of Buck on the level, but when the pull came, he looked side ways at Buck with confident intelligence, as if to en quire: how do you do this? how do you set yourself so solidly? ... Now she thought of it, Pauline reminded Marta of Barney, and Russ of Buck •.. And it came back to her that her father had bought Buck and Barney from the Standard Oil Company; those were hard times, and the big corporations must have been reducing equipment, laying off men and teams. Very hard times, the Nineties, a depression that was like the trough of a wave; the temporary slackening or inter mission of energy which released a spume of unem ployed to spillover the remaining margin of the fron tier. There it spent itself and settled.

The next wave was to turn back eastward, the great industrial swell that caught Russ, with his first job, and landed him ultimately here in Europe •.. But the child who was herself, Marta, who watched the horses lifting their wet muzzles from the ford, resuming the weight of the harness, knew no more than Barney or Buck why they must plod ahead on that long road. The old Fort Benton trail, broken by the wagon trains of the fur-traders; did anyone but herself now 168 N EVE R ASK THE END know the name of the I. G. Baker Company, of St. Louis, whose sixteen-span bull-teams took all summer going from Benton to Edmonton, when St. Louis was a frontier outpost? She had heard it from the old-timers, from Bowie Hamilton, who was born in St. Louis and orphaned on the Oregon trail, his father and mother killed by Indians, himself, two years old, saved by a " squaw and rescued months later by Miles's troopers.

But that was history when she heard it, not quite real; it belonged to the day before yesterday. One day at a time ... If it was near sundown when they came to a stream, they camped. The campfire fluttered, beaten down by the enormous darkness; the children faced it in a solemn half-circle, holding their tin plates for flapjacks and bacon, blinking at the blown flame, and listening to the rhythmic tearing sound of the horses grazing. One always faces a campfire. Then oblivion descended; she had no memory of ever going to bed ... How little she remembered of her own life. No more, comparatively, than of the road from Antwerp to Liege and thence to this pleasant terrace. It was too far within the given time. People meant most to her, stayed in her mind. She would always remember being here with"Pauline and Russ. "You'll burst if you go on drinking that Vichy," said Pauline. "Look, I'm sure that's one of the men we met at Jane's party!" Taking the points in order, Marta replied: "Somebody has got to drink it. Do N EVE R ASK THE END 169 you mean your boy friend, who said you were a woman of experience? ... It can't be the Vichy; why do [ imagine the awning is descending on us?" Pauline shouted against a soughing of canvas and a small babel of surprised outcries: "No-not that crazy kid-"

because she couldn't stop herself quickly enough. They stood up, a general movement, distracted by reaching for purses and scarfs. It wasn't the Vichy. Lifted and dropped by a wan ton gust, the awning began to collapse slowly and por tentously, in orange-striped billows. Waiters sprang to the guyropes; the majority of the luncheon guests returned provisionally to their chairs. Pauline and Marta and Russ went across the sward toward the forest. "What about Jane and the boy friend?" Russ wanted to know.