Chapter XIV

CHAPTER XIV lCYou know ]ane-" Marta paused; Russ did not know Jane. Marta realized the peculiarity of Ameri cans, that they are indescribable. There are no cate gories, neat tickets of caste or type. By a dozen handy generalizations the European can be sketched, and the outline filled in with idiosyncrasies to make a recog nizable portrait. Not an American. Obviously then, Marta perceived, no European can understand a word that an American says. Not even the English, espe cially not the English, since we draw from the same vocabulary with wholly different associations. TIte Hippopotamus reminded the .A.ncient Greeks of a Horse, so they called him the River-H orsc. W hat a Horse reminded them of IS unknown. Possibly the Ancient Greeks were really talking about crocodiles. Americans understand one another, over extraordi nary reaches of diverse experience, because the angle of incidence is similar; or perhaps because they have learned to expect the unexpected, the unpredictable.

After years of intimacy) her friends could still surprise N EVE R ASK THE END 17] her by an allusion to places they had been, occupations they had gone through, their family origins. But the surprise was superficial, as when one meets a friend in a new hat, or on a train. .. .. .. She recalled an English man in Silverton, who came early to tea and caught her on her knees scrubbing the floor, her arms dripping with soapsuds. The cleaning woman was incompetent; Marta hadn't the heart to discharge the poor old slat tern, and used to do the work over after her. As she made herself presentable, removing her overall apron and the stains of toil in the bathroom, Marta had smoothed out a grin also. What distressed Captain Lowndes was not the sight of a woman scrubbing a floor, but that he should, incredibly, be paying a social call upon a scrubwoman. He had been an officer in the British Army, the regulars, and resigned his commis sion after losing his private income; with what re mained he had tried ranching, not very successfully.

By assumed naivety, Marta had maliciously extracted from him the admission that he considered himself de classed, no longer a gentleman, since he had to groom his own horse. Obviously then he depended upon ex ternals for his self-respect. An American feels him self essentially the same person through all vicissitudes, and is broken only if he feels he is unequal to the occasion. It was Captain Lowndes who had said to Trix O'Neill: The only thing you and I have in com mon, Mrs. O'Neill, is that we live in different houses. Mana and Trix had speculated in vain what he was 172 N EVE R ASK THE END endeavoring to express; but it might be the nearest he could come to epitomizing America. Well, she could say that Jane was a small-town girl, from Huntsville, Tennessee, where Jane's father owned and ran a garage or filling station. Jane was very fond of her father. She had no Southern accent, though she did have a magnolia complexion, and an enchant ing little pug face, lips slightly curled and the bridge of the nose flat, gold-brown eyes, dusty-gold hair coiled in two snailshells over her ears, and a figure like an etherealized broomstick, a straight line perfectly bal anced. She was a stylist, an arbitress of elegance in the capital of fashion. Duchesses, if they wished to be smart, must wear what Jane approved. The men who laid ambiguous siege to her usually ended by proposing honorable matrimony, unaware that it was a tribute to her invincible schoolgirl innocence. They fancied they had surrendered to her chic. They knew too much of the world to know anything else. No woman who wore her clothes, such clothes, with such an air) could be other than mondaine. They were reduced to bewildered and sometimes mean resentment when she wouldn't marry them either.

1£ Russ met Jane, he would recognize in five minutes what she was: unsophisticated, honest, and chaste, a nice girl by homely small-town standards. Her clothes were her job, and she was competent at it. She would have scrubbed a floor thoroughly, if she set about it. ((Well) anyhow, Jane threw a party to welcome us N E. V ERA S K THE END 173 to Paris. Didn't occur to her, the dear, to give us time to shop_ Did I tell you what the milliner said about my hat? Madame, that is not a hat, it is a calamity. I nearly perished under it) being introduced to Jane's best assortment of vicomtes. I'd be glad to have the beaux Jane sweeps out. They couldn't be lieve their eyes. The lad who got stuck with me just drank morosely. But Pauline's young man, driving back from dinner at the Moulin Bicherel-all I know is that she didn't turn up at our hotel till an hour after me. I gathered that he was quite violent-" Mildly embarrassed, Pauline murmured that he was ridiculous.

She made an unconscious gesture of appeal for discre tion. He had been outrageous. Without the slightest provocation ... Alone at last! And in Paris! Young girls, he rejected her polite evasion, bore me. Now a woman of experience like yourself • • . How do you know I am a woman of experience, she protested, with what breath remained to her. She had, actually kicked him on the shins; and he lost his hat. Rough-house. She would have been more angry if he had been less persevering. He insisted they should go on to Henry's Bar, or to supper; that she should see him off for Havre in the morning. He argued with her, ha.tless, on the steps of the hotel. • . . But she thought, he couldn't have played it through if she had seemed to him too old. . . . She did not want men younger than herself. That would be the last indignity. No begging for mercy, kneel down with composure, lay your head on 174 N EVE R ASK THE END the block. It's soon over . . . She wondered whence that image had come to her. Out of a picture, or a book ...

Now a young girl really would bore Russ, Pauline hoped. A whole day of her, anyhow. With us he doesn't have to make an effort; he can say nothing, or anything, whatever comes into his head. What was he thinking? About Marta and herself . . . Pauline wished, with an intensity that startled her, that· Marta would go away. Marta was too strong. Even when she was indifferent, when she was abstracted, she exerted some force.... Marta said: "I'll come back and report if that hill is worth climbing." Give Pauline a break; why shouldn't people have what they want? She had got her wish.... You asked for it and you got it! ... Her mouth turned up at the corners with appreciation. No embarrassment or constraint could survive the awful candor of Russ's tacit accusation. What's the seventh commandment between friends? ... The circle of shadow cast by a lofty oak gave an illu sion of privacy and privilege. Russ crossed his hands under his head, resting his eyes in the impenetrable greenness of the foliage, fold upon fold of green. With out looking after her, somehow he could see Marta walking away, her low-heeled white sandals seeming to choose their own way over the turf. Alone and self sufficient as a cat. She put it over on you just the same, he thought, with a queer personal satisfaction.

N EVE R ASK THE END 175 Well, you've been razzed by an expert. She's kept you guessing nine years . . . Pauline, too, sitting with one hand spread on the grass, had an air of readiness for instant departure. Her brows were arched into faint crescents; she held her head like a deer. He perceived for the first time that Pauline had been a beauty, had still the quality of beauty. Why, she was like Nonie, really like her, not in any physical aspect, but herself. ...~d Marta was likeHe smiled sleepily at Pauline. Oh, my God, she thought, dazed for a moment. Life is not-not tolerable. One ought to die, or have no memory. Per haps Keith is dead. I hope so. But there is no proportion in it, she thought, with the lucidity that follows the cessation of violent shock. No measure between the object and the emotion. What have our souls to do with it-if we have souls? With being in love . . . Keith never pretended to be anything but what he was ... Two or three evenings a week he used to come up to the apartment, bringing Joe Warner.

Joe was the sort of amiable boy who comes second, makes one of a crowd. He played the piano. They all talked through the music, or didn't bother to.. Marta often took up a book. Keith lounged on the red cor duroy chesterfield, with his eyes half shut so that Pau line couldn't be sure he was watching Marta across the room.· The first time she noticed it, she knew that she had known it for a long while. Joe was holding down a closing note as it sang into silence; Marta 176 N EVE R ASK THE END looked up, leaving her book open. What was that? Play it again. It was new then, catchy. When Marta moved, Keith's e~ression changed. He had the same trick as Russ of smiling with his lips closed and full, almost sulky, asking •.. Then it was for that, for his eyelashes, she had wasted her youth .... Hush -up, baby, stop your cryin', for you got another papa on the Louey,;illc line • • . Marta went on reading. She hadn't seen. And it made no difference. She didn't have to do anything. She could walk away, and make them think about her because she was gone . • • Russ said: "Those Minerva cars are pretty stiff in the springs. The company has to buy them because they're Belgian manufacture." Sheer muscular fatigue was rather pleasant, and the fresh air was tonic.

He was grateful to Pauline and Marta that they didn't fuss, ask sympathetic questions or offer advice. In the past) he had seldom been seriously ill, and he was never interested in it. He was impatient of pain; it had no mystical compensation or virtue for him. It was a fact, but accidental and material. His mind dealt with it as with any other inconvenience or interruption. To get through the day's business he shoved it aside by sheer will. He thought, scientists say we are nothing but machines; but when the machinery goes back on you, why do you still feel essentially completer He had used and been used by his senses, yet he had never experienced that sickness of the spirit in antagonism to the flesh of which he had read. There was no division; N EVE R ASK THE END 177 that made it the more strange that the emotions which were most intimately bound up with the senses proved not to be dependent on them. The senses were a means . . . He liked women, Pauline and Marta for instance, no less and no otherwise. He had never been able to do without women. Often he had thought it was a weakness, a failing; but why? Women had had him, no doubt of it. But it wasn't the most beautiful women had moved him most. When desire failed, the attraction remained. After all, you couldn't have anything without being had. All living was possessive: friendship, work, the delight of a summer day-the sky was wonderfully blue against the solid green of the leafy canopy ... No, he wasn't sorry. Not, at least, for his sins . . .

"Jimmy," said Pauline, at once relieved and re morseful about Marta, "has bought a second hand fliv ver. For twenty-five dollars. I had a letter from him yesterday. Can you imagine? I'm afraid he'll meet me with it at the station when I get home. It must resemble the taxicab of the Marne. I must buy a real car." ... She would learn to drive. So when Russ arrived, she could take him about. She knew the roads; David had an expensive car and a serious chauf feur. She described aloud where they might go, and Russ listened receptively. ((You really are coming, aren't you?" she asked suddenly, with charming anxiety. "Sure I am," he said.. "I wish I didnJt have this Ro man job on hand; I'd take a week off right now." To 178 N EVE R ASK THE END be with us, Pauline thought. "There's a summer hotel on the Sound," she said, "where they have a pear tree beside the porch, and one can dine outside and see the water. It's almost lovelier than this." ... At home, Russ thought, each spring the apple blossoms fell like snow in the unpruned orchard, the back lot. He used to lie with his hands under his head looking up through the foamy branches, planning how when he grew up he would travel like his father. The old apple trees must have been cut down long ago. He did not know if the house was still standing. Probably not. A dismal, shabby house. It was sold, when his mother went to live with his brother. Twenty years ago-not so long actually, but it seemed so. Yes, two years before he and Harriet were married. Harriet wore a blue tailored suit and a hat with a sweeping feather.

Looking back, he was puzzled by an invariable ele ment of surprise, astonishment. Why surprise, in merely remembering? Because of the completeness of the change. In twenty years the visible aspect of things had been absolutely transformed, not overlaid, as here in Europe, where the structure of the past could still be discerned beneath the surface of novelty, century upon century, on the foundations of a thousand years. Two thousand) in Rome ... Not in America. That which had been was not. Mysteriously, those things which had belonged together ceased together. Scroll work verandas, lace curtains, bicycles, willow plumes, composed into a background, clear and remote, for N EVE R ASK THE END 179 Harriet. Whether or not it was because women had meantso much to him, it was in the figure of a girl that he discerned the keynote of that style, that genre. Just the gesture of picking up her skirt at a muddy crossing, the tilt of her chin, implied all the rest. It conjured up the street: overhead wires strung above the traffic, drawing thin lines along the four-storey grey stone fronts of the business blocks, spinning out like a web past the smug' avenues of bow-windowed mansions, toward the edge of town, where vacant lots spaced the small wooden houses, with unmown front yards, and pickets missing from the fences, and children loitering through sagging gates. • . . Though he hadn't been back for twenty years, he knew as certainly as by visual evidence that no trace of this period remained. Even if a few of the actual houses had been spared, they would be effaced by what had happened around them.

Queer that the memory of his home town should tie up with Harriet. She had never been there. The}' met and were married in Pittsburgh. Harriet Gwynn, a Welsh name; so many of the coal-miners had come over from Wales. She got her musical aptitude with her Welsh blood, and her first training with the Bach choir at Bethlehem. . • . Pittsburgh was all the small towns grown bigger, identical if one allowed for the enlarged scale. Even New York was, then. It wasn't now. It was like nothing that had ever been in the world before. • • . Beyond the hill, Marta sat upon a mossy root pro180 N EVE R ASK THE END jecting from the bank of a ravine that was also a birch grove. She occupied herself by observing a family party of tourists filing through the woods on the next hill. They were nicelygraded in stair-step sizes, father, mother and five offspring, uniformly well-fed and very solemn. She decided they were not Belgians. The father)s proud stomach and cropped square blond cra nium seemed Teutonic. Would Germans come to Belgium for a holiday? It seemed unlikely. Yet there were Germans in· Paris. They could be Swiss.

Of course, the Swiss Family Robinson. Searching for turtle eggs and cocoanuts. . . . She smoked another cigarette. Half an hour would be a reasonable) un noticeable length of time. Then in London she had to look up somebody J she forgot who, but any excuse would serve for an afternoon and dinner, leaving Russ ~o Pauline. Filled with benevolent intentions, she saun tered back, making a circuit. As she approached slowly, two or .three words of Pauline's became audible) gave Marta the drift of their conversation. She joined in: ('That was Alexander the Great)s idea." (CHow do you mean, Alexander the Great?" Pauline took her up, rather coldly. "1£ he ever had an idea, which I doubt." "He had one," said Marta. "He was loafing in the sacred grove of his native town with the local philoso phers; and he gave them a brief outline of his plan to unite Greece, subdue Persia, loot lndia, and march on Rome like Mussolini. Oh, yeah, they said, and then N EVE R ASK THE END 181 what? Then, Alexander said, he'd come home and repose in the shade for a nice long chat with his pet philosophers. And they said, isn't that what you're doing now? Why exert yourselfso much to get back where you started?"

Nevertheless, Marta thought, Alexander went: ... And Pauline and Russ, under the oaks of the Ardennes, must circle the globe to meet again under a pear-tree by the Pacific. It seemed both inevitable and worth while ... "Did he do it?" Pauline asked absently. Marta said: "Yes." Russ gave her a sidelong glance. . . . Alexander never came back. But he might have, Marta insisted to herself. . • . "There is a grass-road over the hill," she said, ((a pretty walk; I wonder where it goes. I followed it for about half a mile." 'Why didn't you keep on?" said Pauline. And she meant it. Don't, don't, Marta thought sharply ... When she was startled, Marta reverted to the habit of her childhood, of all young wild creatures. They do not flutter nor make a sound; they become still ... . My daughter hath II devil . .. She had a little jack-in the-box devil. It sprang out when anyone "jumped" her; it would rush every barrier. Over, under, around or through, whatever was forbidden. It wanted to know. Only if she caught it quick, in that instinctive pause, she was safe.... Once is enough, she thought, to put your life on the toss of a penny. A dollar, to be exact. That happened to be the only coin Keith 182 N EVE R ASK THE END had in his pocket. Did I do that? she echoed Russ silently. She had never told a soul of that bet. It was worse than wicked. Light-minded.. It would not send you to hell, but to limbo.

She sat down tranquilly. "Where IS your farm?" she asked Russ. "Near New York?" Quite near, he said; about two hours upstate. So he could have his friends visit him, herself, and Alma, the old crowd. . . . "Like Gen ji?" she suggested slyly. She suspected the truth, that in his mind he had both his wife and Nonie-and heaven knows whom else-down in the guestbook. "I'd be the Lady From the Village of Falling Flowers; you remember she wasn't important) you can't even make out how she got into the story, she was merely among those present. Listen, Pauline, why can't you get leave next Easter and visit me, and we'll both visit Russ?" "That's a date," said Russ. "Oh) maybe I could," Pauline glowed again.. Safe now, Marta thought. Falling flowers . • • The image of happiness was to her a bowl of roses set on a table of polished wood. She did not know if it was an actual memory or a symbolic fancy. Two or three petals had fallen; they were white, crisp, unfaded. Another detached itself and floated down, an accomplished perfection, and in its noiseless motion the only measure of time. What we want, she thought, is to fix forever that moment of completion; we have created the arts to circumvent N EVE R ASK THE END 183 change. Thaes what Russ's farm means to him, a repository for what he values out of the past. Even though change is a necessity of the spirit-no matter) the truth is made up of contradictions. . . . And this, she thought, is the moment. Today ... You couldn't have anything more. . . • CHAPTER XV IT lasted out the afternoon, and through the return journey. They went direct, a much shorter distance; twilight overtook them. A disk of thin silver became visible in· the moth-colored sky . . . A silver dollar spun in the air...• A white rose petal floating down.