Chapter XIX

CHAPTER. XIX MARTA said hello into the wrong end of the tele phone as usual, and reversed it after a peculiar mental operation, an impulse to correct the error by standing on her head. "Hello," she repeated, "yes, it's me; come on up." Pauline's voice rejoined breathlessly: "Well, I had to be sure; I went to the other hotel first-" "I'm sorry," said Marta. "I've got a reser vation for you here; ask at the desk.." "That's good, but-" Pauline cut off. Marta stretched luxuriously, rose, turned on the bath, and leaned out of the open casement window, which gave upon a prospect of roofs that suggested security, comfort and peace. Delicate grey feathers of smoke floated straight upward into the soft clarity of the morning sky . . • A hotel room is an emotional hospital, sterilized of associations. No sig nificance beyond their present use attached to the neces sary objects of furniture: the blue damask bed-spread and curtains, padded chair and tidy dresser .... Pauline entered, with a startled air. "How come?" she asked.

Marta said: "They moved me to another room, while I was at lunch. I met the floor valet carrying down an 236 N EVE R ASK THE END armful of my things, and almost slew him on the spot. I was perfectly furious, and packed instantly, your be longings, too-flocks and herds of luggage, bulging out of a taxi. ,But I left a message for you." Pauline ex plained: "1 went straight up to our room and knocked. A man opened the door, in a nightshirt. With droop ing moustaches. Utterly revolting. Oh!" She sat down. "This hotel is much nicer." "Much," said Marta. "Better food, and the waiters are French. The other was as dismal as a cold muffin. Did you like Cornwall?" "What?" said Pauline. '(No, yes, it's rather--sad. High round headlands ris ing out of the sea, and scarcely any trees. It reminds me of those dreams where you try to find someone and can't." Searching and searching, without direction.

Sometimes she seemed to hear the echo of the chil dren's voices, just beyond.... She shook herself. ':(What have you been doing?" Nothing, Marta re plied truthfully. London was the very place to do nothing. Only on Pauline's account she wished Lon don were not so deserted in August. Pauline must have people about her. The dead were too near her. The ~irtuous and beloved dead need neither cassia huds nor myrrh. Their power is that they are unchanging, and the heart goes after them, pleading to be allowed to do them one kindness, to be remembered by. But they have had the last word..•. Pauline said: "Have you heard from Russ?" Not yet) Marta replied. ('He'll wire at the last N EVE R ASK THE END 237 moment. Shall we breakfast downstairs?" . . . In the grill, five waiters converged upon them and escorted them solicitously to a table. This cloud of witnesses dispersed, reassembled, and surged to meet the next guest. "Look at that one," said Pauline; "he was galloping down the room, waving a rack of toast, and the headwaiter tapped him on the shoulder. He leaped about and flew back." Still bearing aloft the excelsior toast. ('The English and the French," Marta heard herself saying profoundly, "are different." Fortunately Pauline ignored this contribution to world thought.

She was submerged in the Times. "Queen Mary visited the Zoo this morning," she read. "TNT is eleven and six. Here's a stock called United l\tlolasses; will you have some?" ((Molasses?" an unexpected waiter seemed eager to oblige. "Melon, coffee and toast," said Pauline distantly. "Without marmalade." The waiter was obviously baffled, how not to serve marmalade. He caught Marta's grin and light dawned on him. Americans ... "Do we polish off the Tower or the Museum today?" Pauline asked. They chose the Tower. Then they were to return for tea with people Marta knew: Donna Kessler and the Jermyns. She had made the engagement for want of anything better. She explained Gerald Jermyn to Pauline. One of those well-bred ineffective English men such as used to be shipped to America, usually out West, the limbo of younger sons. Though it happened Marta had known him in New York, through Alma, 238 N EVE R A S 'K THE END w~o was kind to strays. He had a hopeless "case" on Alma, and called on Marta to give himself the pleasure of speaking Alma's name. A small legacy recalled him to England; and Alma had suggested Marta should drop him a note. He had acquired a wife. "] hate wives," said Pauline gloomily. She wasn't interested in New York either. Or she resented it.... Donna could safely be left to explain herself. Perhaps not safely ...

First, Marta said, they must walk across the Green Park. For a surprise.... The sheep grazing in the heart of the city were surprising enough. Pauline ob served that dry-cleaning wouldn't hurt them. Wait, said Marta. Now... The unicorns. Over the gate. Pauline made a Buttering gesture with her hands. Buckingham Palace, she murmured uncertainly. She was certain of the fact, butThey couldn't, Marta realized, find a place for ,it in their minds. They were not awed nor impressed. They were at a loss. Coming upon it as if it were-oh, a department store. A going concern. It belonged in history, with George the Third. Or in fairytales, with the unicorns.... The unicornssneeredenchantinglyat the solid bulk of the Palace, the huge vacuous Jubilee Fountain; the loitering nursemaids and the red-coated sentry. The sentry's black bearskin busby, obscuring his face with its furry fringe, impelled Marta to a sym pathetic sneeze. She was slightly horrified to perceive that at regular intervals his eyes moved from side to side, with clockwork precision. Obviously he saw N EVE R ASK THE END 239 nothing. Pauline started, clutching Marta's arm: ('He's alive.n He crowhopped out of his comical box and performed the march of the wooden soldier. Plumed riders filed through the Horse Guards Gate, across the street, into the Palace Yard. Blinkered by the vizors of their silver helmets, they too looked down their noses, haughtily blind. A policeman halted the motors for them. Another guarded the guard. • . • Who Was the last Roman Emperor? The last Doge of Venice?

Hush, said Lord Chesterfield, Selwyn and I have been dead for two years, but 'We don't want it known . .. The Jewel Room of the Tower reduced Marta's in telligence to an absolute blank. She was dazzled, but literally, as by a mirror flashed in her eyes. The mound of gold and gems did not excite envy, being non-nego tiable, fit for no use, except to be heaped up in a stone walled cell, behind an iron picket fence, for the aston ishment of the lower classes. Fame is a vulgar affair at best. It's very like being caught in the subway crowd, Marta thought, as she was forced about in a circle. At once bored and fascinated, she counted the crowns and forgot the number. Half a dozen crowns! To stir the imagination, a crown should be unique. And these were so new, so unworn and unwearable. Not as if one beheld the veritable emblems of Great Eliza or William the Conqueror. Or Napoleon's cocked hat, at Fontainebleau, where Pauline had commented: What Napoleon needed was a good milliner. It was too big for the Little Corporal; he had overdone his strut ....

240 N EVE R ASK THE END Marta's distraction increased at tea. They met in the hotel lounge. She had expected the occasion to be dull. It was, and yet preposterous. The things every one said, which she anticipated, and to which there was no possible rejoinder .... She had once been informed, by an eccentric enthusiast, that the British were the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. She did not argue the point since for her there was none. Besides, they might as well be.... Pauline was brightly polite to lVlrs. Jermyn, a thin woman with rabbit teeth, in atweed suit which sagged at the back. It was carried unanimously that London did not resemble New York. Mrs. Jermyn then informed them that they admired the London police. Marta was powerless to prevent herself saying that she preferred the New York variety, as handsomer and more efficient. Mrs. Jermyn was equally unable to hear this irregular statement. Marta conceded the London parks. Pauline thereupon lost control and said she hoped to see Queen Mary going to the Zoo. Marta became acutely conscious of Gerald saying nothing, stroking his melancholy fair moustache. She gulped a fragment of cinnamon toast. Nobodycould help being married. But it wasn't Marta's fault either if Mrs.

Jermyn replied, yes, she often saw the King and Queen driving out. So democratic. And the darling little Princess. CCLilybet, she calls herself. And kisses her hand to people." As a corollary, Mrs. Jermyn affirmed that Americans had a higher reeard for rovalty than the English. By main force, Marta refrained from N EVER ASK THE END 24-1 pointing out that they might easily indulge any such sentiment, at bargain rates, as it.... If only they could keep off the war debts. No hope. Supposing she offered Mrs. Jermyn five dollars to call it square be tween themselves . . . But the personal feeling was shoddy, inadmissible. Her mistake, forgetting that in New York one met all sorts of people as under a flag of truce, or of distress. New York was-what was it? ... Donna created a heavensent diversion, arriving late. She had been sightseeing with fellow-passengers from the boat. She had worked part of her passage, as an entertainer) or ganizing games, playing and singing. Donna usually worked her way. "That was how I escaped from South Dakota-as accompanist to a Chautauqua ballad singer,"

she talked in an endless series of tangents. Marta had not known that Donna was born in South Dakota. '(Wasn't," said Donna. "When I was six, mother went out to Sioux City to get a divorce. Father was a min ister, and mother quit when the congregation objected to her wearing a red silk: petticoat. So she married an Indian agent. The Indians thought she ought to wear the petticoat outside." Marta had a sudden hunch that Mrs. Jermyn was a daughter of the vicarage, to whom the conjunction of the clergy and divorce was a mis-statement in bad taste. Donna rattled on, uttering what must have been pure Choctaw to Mrs. Jermyn. Tumbleweeds and buffalo skulls. Curious, Marta hadn't thought of them for years. The prairie used to 242 N EVE R ASK THE END be dotted with those skulls, bleached dazzling white by weather. Wild flowers grew up through the eyesockets. During her childhood, they disappeared. What be came of themr ... Donna paused to renew the vermeil of her lips) her chestnut bob tipped to one side. The lounge was filled with well-dressed people, engaged with tea-cups and small glasses ... Great heaps of clean dry bones used to be gathered temporarily beside rail way sidings, and freight cars filled with them. Marta had been told they were shipped away to be used in refining sugar. Out of the strong came forth sweet ness • .. The Indians, Donna was saying, sometimes peered in the lighted windows of the agency at night.

Marta doubted it; Donna possessed a constructive mem ory; she was dramatizing a child's fears. Marta re called rare occasions, in bitter winter weather, when Indians ventured to the house to ask for food. They sat by the stove, gaunt and mute, devouring oatmeal porridge; presently they went away without thanks or farewell, except a guttural How! It was long before Marta understood that they were not devoid of man ners. Among themselves, food was shared. Mostly, the Indians existed in her consciousnessas vanishing sil houettes against the skyline, a draggled distant pro cession on lean piebald ponies with travoix trailing at their heels. The Indian ponies, dainty fine-limbed creatures, spirited in spite of their hard usage, were descended from the steeds of the conquistadors, the Arabian strain ..• N EVE R ASK THE END 24-3 The reason why Americans and English could never understand one a.nother was that they were separated, as from the Indians, by a gulf of time. In the Ameri can consciousness the' whole of Europe, excepting France, was a hundred years removed. There it was fixed in their history, ended, done with. Impossible to conceive it in terms of the present, resume it as a mental habit. It had the impracticability of discarded fashions in garments, brought down from the attic, provocative of mirth, sentiment or wonder, but abso lutely unwearable. They are too short, too long, too tight, too stiff; they trip and suffocate one with odd superfluities and constrictions. One l.."annot squeeze into them. Whether or not America has .progressed is immaterial. It is another cycle, another dimension if one accepts the mathematical-metaphysical definition of time as a dimension of space. Though the lines extended to infinity they would never meet ...

,cHello, Brownie, what are you doing here?" Her Paris hat, the brim dipping unevenly over one eye, forced her to twist her neck like a robin for an upward view. Identification became certain at the waistcoat. Freddy Riggs wore the last surviving fancy waistcoats; on him they seemed eminently correct. He had not changed in the least particular during the fifteen years of her acquaintance with him. As elegant as a young string bean) he had that durable blond slimness which defies age.•.. She thought: this caps it; why didn't I guess it's the Mad Hatter)s Tea Party; while she said 244-N EVE R ASK THE END feebly: "Freddy! The last time I saw you-" ((At that big binge of Ryland Drucker's, wasn't it?" Freddy picked up the thread easily while he acknowl edged introductions, conjured an additional chair, ar rested a roving waiter, and ordered a round of cock tails. "Haven't seen Drucker since, have you?" Marta had not. Nor Freddy. One didn't, in New York. The curtain fell, indicating a lapse of years. Five, it must be. (CRegular Babylonian blow-out," Freddy recalled.

Marta glanced at her shoulder involuntarily. Why? The reason came with the action; she said to Pauline: "One of those enormous private· madhouse affairs, where you step on celebrities, laid end to end. In a roof apartment, with entertainers. Boxing bouts, that night. I got blood spattered on my arms, sitting almost under the ropes." ('Blood on your arms," Mrs. Jer myn repeated blankly. "Evening, dress," Marta said, as if that accounted for it. 'lAnd one of the boxers got cut across the eyebrow; he kept shaking his head to clear his eyes." "How barbarous," Mrs. Jermyn said, between bewilderment and horror. "He wasn't really hurt," said Marta. Out of the ring, the com batants were of a singularly mild aspect. Having done their turn, they returned from a dressing-room in neat sack suits, hair sleeked down damply, and became spec tators. She noticed that they did not cheer, nor yell with the crowd: Sock him! They'd been socked..•.

"No·, it was a costume party," she corrected herself. Making it entirely clear and rational!

N EVE R ASK THE END 245 The rest would sound even more delirious. Freddy dragged her home with him when the party broke Up; in his opinion, evening lasted until the next day. He wouldn't let her go, had her elbow locked in his. He also lived in a skyscraper studio apartment, with his aged parents, whom he had uprooted from their native soil of California . . . Herself in a home-made Di rectoire gown of white muslin and lace mittens, Freddy a fair-haired Mexican in a crimson sash, they arrived at his apartment in the cold bleakness of a wintry dawn. His aged parents were asleep in the next room-at least, Marta hoped they were asleep. She was perish ing for sleep herself. After an hour or so, his mother emerged, evidently resigned to fantastic apparitions. She brewed. coffee in an electric percolator; then she and Marta helped Freddy pack his suitcase-he would, of course, be going somewhere, was it to Washington?

-and Freddy took Marta home in a taxi, on his way to the station. . •. She lived then in a model tenement on the East River; and she had to change her dress and go to her work in a stupor . . . She was not to see Freddy again for five years, until this moment, when he strolled into the lounge of a London hotel, to make another appointment for breakfast! He was abroad in connection with a moving picture exchange, and was Bying to Berlin next day. He regretted having a busi ness engagement for dinner and the evening. But whenever he got back, he would telephone her imme diately. Marta accepted the provisional invitation and 246 N EVE R ASK THE END the inevitable. "Life is just one breakfast after an other ," she said. "Then that's all right;" everything was all right with Freddy. As he rose to take leave, paying the check, with professional skill, for the tea as well as his own order, he gave Marta a long look of artless enquiry. His mouth was fresh-colored as a child's, and shaped to the naive expression of a child offering a kiss. . . . She thought, with fleeting irony) this will surely be the last breakfast. He's thirty-six.

Five years makes a lot of difference, at eight in the morning .... There was precisely that difference in their ages. And that fraction of time fixed their relation. Each of us, she thought, has a separate character, per sonality, for each of our friends. We may never guess what it is. . . . Though she knew what she was to Freddy. A woman of the world! He had so placed her because they met after her break with Keith. Freddy was then twenty-one. Naturally he regarded a grass-widow of twenty-six as sophisticated, attrac tivelydangerous. He aspired to her favors, ex pected to acquire from her some subtlety of wisdom .. Her sheer incapacity to fill the assigned part had con firmed his belief. He saw her as superior and im mune. He had once asked for a curl of her hair-a trophy for a collection?-and when she gave it to him, he was plainly at a loss for her motive. Because she had none, except indifferent amusement. . ..

He wrote down her address, her bank, in a note book, and took leave ... "Who is he?" Donna enN EVE R ASK THE END 247 quired frankly. Marta answered: "Freddy-oh, he's a nut. No harm in him," she added hastily. "He doe~ promotion, publicity, for all sorts of things." She met him, briefly and unpredictably,'wherever she went. In Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, New York; where he would be working up special editions of newspapers, or handling. the advertising of fairs, aviation meets, even political campaigns. Stepping off a train, or into a hotel, surrounded by strangers, she would step into his arms without warning, into an impermanent intimacy, and out again. He was a part of the contemporary scene, and to that degree a part of her life..... ((Is he married?" Donna pursued, with disarming honesty. "Not lately," Marta said.. "He was, a couple of times; I never kept track of his wives." Mrs. Jermyn said: "Why are there no happy mar riages in America?" Marta replied recklessly: "No happy marriages? There are millions. Sunk in sod den domesticity. Pauline and I can hardly wait to get back to break up a few homes. It's the buffalo you mean, that are extinct, and we're glad of -it. Mangy brutes, as dumb as-" She stopped, catching Gerald's patient reproachful glance. Donna saved her again, rising to go; the Jermyns rose also. Insincere courtesies were exchanged; everybody was charmed and de lighted. . . . Shaking hands, Gerald said: "I wish Alma had come over." "As between me and Alma,"

Marta said, "you sum up the popular sentiment briefly and eloquently." Gerald said plaintively: 248 N EVE R ASK THE END "You always laughed at the wrong time" , But any time would be wrong, Marta thought. Be cause they were not synchronized. . . . Curved space was nothing compared to the confusion of times brought together by this commonplace group meeting acci dentally. Subjective time was tied in bowknots among them .•.. Such incongruities were taken for granted in New York; they were of the essence of it, for New York is not merely a different but a wholly new dimen sion. It is the whole cycle of America thrust upward vertically, like the Rocky Mountains) by the pressure of converging forces. It is tomorrow ... London is horizontal, spreading outward from a center, from the preserves of privilege, the great houses and pleasure grounds of the nobility. The space they had main tained for themselves remained open and magnificent, though the power and the glory had quietly departed.

England has come to a pause in time. For a moment of history, the clock has stopped. The English are somnambulists. . . . Europe protests against America with bitterness and dismay because the visible spectacle of tomorrow is terrifying. The attraction of the future resides in the unknown, in the boundless expectation possible only to ignorance. Yesterday is dear to us be cause the effort is over. They had been happy) the three of them, because by joining hands they closed a circle. Allot which I saw and part of which I was . .. Pauline speeded the parting guests and shrugged.

N EVE R ASK THE END 249 "That was fairly awful. ... Wonder if there is any Inail?" She stopped at the wicket. "Jimmy and David," she commented, pleased but too well aware of the contents to hurry about opening the letters. "What have you got?" Marta held a telegram. She said in a small voice: "Russ can't come over till Thursday." l'But my boat sails on Saturday," Pauline said woe fully. "There'll be only two days." Time defeats us always, Marta thought ... Or do we come back and come back through it eternally?