Chapter XXIII

"Ah, madame will wait for monsieur?" the headwaiter surmised sympathetically. I've breakfasted with Pau line every day for two weeks, Marta thought; and just once, yesterday, with Russ; trust the garfon to com prehend. She was still capable of blushing; when Russ joined her she could see that it amused him. Also that he must have slept well. They made a fair pretense of reading the paper. Russ apologized for not being able to fix a time for lunch; he would have to telephone her. She suggested that he should let it go; and he admitted that he was in for a heavy day. . . . So then she must have shopped or walked in the park; and they met f.or a hurried dinner at the hotel. Her luggage seemed extremely conspicuous as it was brought down; the boat train was full; and there were people Russ knew on the boat. They hadn't really spoken to one another since he said goodnight, until he helped her find her stateroom; his was on the deck above. When he put his arms around her she knew 290 N EVE R ASK THE END it had been a very heavy day. She sat beside him on the berth, with his cheek against hers. "Did you get them to accept your estimate.?" "They had to," he said. But it was like lifting a dead weight to deal with the English.

((Isn't that a new suit?" It was; he turned around, submitting it to her approval; was she in favor of pleats at the waistband? He also required her to certify the set of the collar. Well, perhaps the collar was a trifle loose, she said, patting and pulling it judicially. She thought, he's acting quite naturally as if I were his wife in the sight of God! Harriet could have held him; he's the married kind. He'd have cheated· a bit, of course. Perhaps that's part of being married. The "modern'" idea of being "perfectly frank" is fatuous. You cheat because you want to cheat; there's no point in it otherwise... ((1 told them to cut it closer," Russ said, with gloomy satisfaction. He had ordered four suits on his last visit to London. One of the men from the office would bring the rest next week. What opulence, she commented. Four suits, and trusty mes sengers to fetch and carry. "You don't know the worst," he smiled sheepishly. "One of 'em is a morn ing coat and striped trousers. And-" "Don't keep me in suspense," she begged. "I've got a silk hat,"

he said. She clasped· her hands. ('Could I see you in it?" ((Not if I see you first," he retorted. "It's the bank er~' special. A banker has absolute confidencein a silk N EVE R ASK THE END 291 hat." "He thinks it's full of rabbits," Marta con jectured. "Yau haven't changed, Brownie/' he said. "I'm afraid not," she said rather sadly. "That's the awful part of it." Everything else changed ... Russ passed his hand across his eyes. "Is the light too strong?" she asked. eel forgot my glasses again," he said. ((And working all day with figures.... Sometimes for a minute there's a sort of curtain shuts down. I don't need them when !)m out of doors." But that's bad, she thought, with a catch at her mid riff, where fear is. I mustn't say so. He knows it well enough .... He took her orders trustfully. She pulled the berth curtains to make a shadow, wetted a handkerchief with rosewater and laid it across his eyes, pressing her fingertips along the arch. ((Does that hurt?" "Not much," he said. "That's the supra-orbi tal nerve," she said, "in case anyone should ask you; or even if they don't, it is anyhow." She had prob ably got the-terminology wrong; but there was no mis take about the trouble, a serious congestion. Yet what vitality he had, quick and warm. From too· much love of living • •. "My arms ache at nights," he said. Since it was not for herself, she asked: «Do you positively promise to give yourself a vacation next Easter? When you've hung round Nurscia's altars the golden shields of Rome?" "Yes, I will," he promised. "I'll go out to the farm. If you'll come and visit." . . . A nd he saw on Palatin'Usth.e white porch of his home . .. "You 292 N EVE R ASK THE END should worry," she said. "I expect we'll all move in.

Alma and me and the rest. Like Ernest." Russ said: "I tried to persuade Colville he needed Ernest in London this week. He didn't get the idea." After a significant interval he added: ((1 think Ernest is going to the factory next month .." [ hope he does, Marta thought vindictively. "This is making you sleepy?" she· said. "Mhmm," he assented. She sent him away. Like a good boy... · .. They found each other on deck in the morning; the river was bright in the sun; and severa] people spoke to Russ, with an accent of curiosity, as they went ashore. Marta thought, I ought to be painted up to the part. The extra suitcases had a flagrant air; if only she had a portable dog or a parrot in a cage, it would be perfect ... Albert met them with the car, and Berthe hurried to the door when she heard Russ's key in the lock. A buxom Flemish housewife, with coilsof russet hair and generous curves; Marta thought, all the Dutch painters have immortalized her in her kitchen, in a golden glaze, surrounded by ruddy cop per pans and mounds of fruit. Her beaming welcome included Marta. Russ spoke to her in French, and her face clouded; she made a motion over her shoul der. The three of them were enveloped in a conspira torial hush. Ernest was at breakfast ..•• It's a chemical reaction, Marta thought .•••Russ changed, not merely into another person but another substance, dense, intractable, impenetrable. She herN EVE R ASK THE END 293 self was turning into a wooden doll . . . Yes, it was a fine morning; no, the Channelwas smooth . • •The large bright room became a vacuum, a railway station or public hall. .•. They would stand there forever, Ernest holding his napkin, his eyeglasses gleaming aridly ..• He did, finally, depart. t'Tel] .~lbert to bring the car back," said Russ. "I'll be at the office in an hour."

They strained their ears for the sound of the descend ing elevator. "I thought he'd go if I let him use the car," said Russ. Berthe cleared Ernest's place with exemplary speed; not until then would Russ take his own chair at his own table. "He makes one feel so incurably respectable," said Marta dejectedly. Even parrots and iapdogs would have been unavailing. uI'll have coffee, because it's bad for me. I guess the end of a misspent life is respectability. And the executors burn all the evidence; and the biographers insist that the late lamented was fundamentally a good Chris tian, though by oversight not a church member." .•. Russ enquired of Berthe, was Ernest dining in? Most certainly. Then they would dine out. Tomorrow night, Berthe said, Ernest would be absent, attending a farewell dinner for somebody. Russ translated the information for Marta. So they could din~ at home tomorrow. Berthe looked warmly pleased. . .. Any one but Ernest would take the hint, though anyone but Ernest wouldn't need it.

I might as well improve my mind, Marta thought; 294-N EVE R ASK THE END and decided upon the Plantin Museum, which Henri had omitted from his cultural itinerary. A lucky choice, it was finer and richer than any palace, with a beauty fit for use and wear, beauty in grain. The workshop was next the parlor; and the sonsy dames in silks that would stand alone had an air of being ready to step down from their gilt frames, roll up their sleeves, and flour their plump arms to the elbow in the bread trough. Good for the bourgeoisie; you couldn't beat them at their best.... She stayed a long while, sitting in the cloistered porch, before returning to the apart ment, where Russ was to pick her up for dinner. Per haps Berthe would give her a cup of tea. Berthe opened the door and her arms, placing the entire menage at Marta's disposaL Marta followed her to the kitchen and indicated her simple desires by pointing; they arrived at a profound understanding through alternate repetitions of "Non, non," "Ah, oui,"

and "merci," punctuated with laughter.. Presently Berthe left her in the living-room, with a smile that enfolded her, tucked her up, gave her leave to roam about at leisure, take a bath or a nap, pocket the silver spoons. • • • Berthe dotes on Russ, thought Marta, even to the extent of adopting any stray female he chooses to bring in. She feels he ought to have whole harems, as his just due, if he wants them. Complete devotion, for fifteen dollars a month .... Women are simpletons, I'm afraid, but nice simpletons. They spend themselves on small things, and are taken for granted, N EVE R ASK THE END 295 so they get neither cash nor credit. Women of Berthe's kind; not me. I'm probably of no significancewhat ever, an accident of social evolution. What can you be by yourself, if all you want is to stay outside the scheme? ... Why did They send me back again? I knew all the answers. And I won't give in. I can die as often as They can send me back; that's one on them. Because death is their trump card, as long as we fear it. As soon as we know better, it's ours. Be cause 1 know it, I'll have to live to be old this time; I'll hate it but I can stand it. I'll hate it like hell, though. I didn't know that I knew quite soon enough.

But if They send me back once more, I shall . . . That was queer. Her mind did that sort of thing sometimes. She had been thinking about women and men. Men did not want to be women, or said they didn't. And though women were supposed to, she had never wished to be a man. Why not? Because as a woman she found men interesting? Maybe men had the same reason; they'd have no place to go in the evening, as the man said when he refused to marry his mistress. . . . It's nothing but words. I'm fond of Pauline and Russ, not women and men. Russ could get a young and pretty girl for five dollars, if it came to that. He has, often enough, I daresay. I liked Wint Shelby, but not ... I'm afraid we have souls. And what they do to us is plenty ... Russ arrived and they escaped before Ernest came in. But they couldn't go back later; Ernest would be 296 N EVE R ASK THE END there. Antwerp was lost. She knew it the next eve ning beyond doubt. Russ called for her at her hotel.

She hoped she looked passable, in a black lace dinner dress; her arms were rounded, and she had gained color as well as weight ••..If only they had delayed half an hour .... There was a coat closet in the hall of the apartment, with several hats on the pegs; as she took off her light wrap, she asked Russ: "Which side is yours?" "Both sides," Russ growled. "The apart ment is mine." Ernest emerged from the spare bed room, angular and formal in a white tie and claw-ham mer. He advanced relentlessly, shook hands, did the honors. They sat congealed for another interminable period. Years. While she faded, grew blurred and blanched, felt her hair feathered with white over the left tem ple, where the pain was acute when she had her sick headaches. A woman of forty, in a black evening dress,'suitable to her age-oh, what was the use, she'd be forty-two next November. And one must sit still, pretend not to care. Nothing was left but dignity, the coldest comfort under heaven. Frost settled on Russ's head, grizzled his heavy brows; she hadn't no ticed before, he was grey. He sank into himself im movably. His expression was not a mask, it was his daily self, the man in authority, whose subordinates approached him with circumspection. Someone she had never met.... By themselves, they saw each other as they had been ten, fifteen years ago, when they were N EVE R ASK THE END 297 still young, or· young enough; when there was time ahead instead of past. T heir blood runs round the roots of time Like rain . .. One couldn't even remem ber it with Ernest in the room. Talking about the Federal Reserve Board. She suppressed a singular up surge of animosity against that institution, a conviction that it was unsound in theory and pernicious in its prac tices. It must be, if Ernest held it in reverence; it ought to be abolished.. Before it ruined the coun try .....

"Do you mind if I get rather drunk?" Marta asked Russ, when at length Ernest had torn himself away. "My God," said Russ, "did you know he was there, when we came in?" HSure," said Marta, surprised. "Instantly. I'd know it through a six-inch plank. I thought you said that on purpose, for his benefit." She did get rather drunk. She might as well. And they discussed the stock market. They might as well. Because sooner or later Ernest would return. The stock market, Marta said muzzily, must crash soon. She had said so for two years, and it didn't; so she wasn't going to change her opinion for another equally erroneous. Russ thought it wouldn't? But how, Marta asked with owlish solemnity, could it keep up? Russ believed in the New Economic Era. The ratio of production was increasing by multiplication in stead of addition. There was no limit. When manu facturing was literally handicraft, the luxury of the few meant narrowing the necessities of the many. Now 298 N EVE R ASK THE END everybody could have enough; and war was obsolete, ineffective as a means of acquisition. . . .

Maybe everything is different, Marta said dubiously. But it feels the same. Like a boom out West. They used to have a boom every few years. It always broke .... And in New York, she said, you don't get more for your money. Less, if anything; you pay more for the same thing. Miserable cramped apartments on Park Avenue, with low ceilings and inside rooms, at ten thousand a year. Millionaires driving out to their Long Island estates through miles of mean suburbs and rubbish dumps. . . • ('It ought to be the way you say," she conceded. "If people had any brains. When I was a kid I thought it would be splen did to grow up and have brains. You see, I thought grown people had brains. Last week I invented a theory, that the more you learn, the more chances you run of being wrong. If you don't know anything at all, you have one chance out of the possible number of answers of guessing right. If you deduce from in complete data, inevitably the answer is wrong . . . I trust I am boring you as much as I am myself?" she concluded anxiously, searching for a cigarette. Russ went to ask Berthe if more could be obtained in the neighborhood at that hour of the night. Their dia logue drifted out to Marta; it was very odd, she could understand French at exactly this stage, as if by a slow motion process, her mind retaining the sentences in suspension until she could examine them. Berthe N EVE R ASK THE END 299 was saying it was eleven o'clock. Time to go The white waterfall of net was a veil of tears as she resumed her cloak before the wardrobe mirror.

ulf you didn't have to continue living here,')· she said, "it would be interesting to see whether Ernest would move out tomorrow if-" No. She sounded like Ernest's sister-in-law ... Ernest's approval or disap proval would be equally cheapening. Sink down into yourself, talk about the weather or the tariff) move objectively through a brittle world • • . Russ had opened the drawer of a cabinet. "Would you care for this?" She didn't see what it was until he had slipped on her wrist a bracelet of pale gold inset with polished white ja~e and rose-quartz, plain and delicate. "But it's perfect," she said, and wondered how he had come by it. He thought of that too. She might be offended if she knew. Or she might laugh. He had seen it in a Chinese shopwindow, one evening when he was lit) and bought it. Next morning he couldn't recall whether he had meant to give it to Louise or send it to Harriet or Nonie. So he kept it.

He liked it himself; so he wished to give it to Brownie now, not satirically. He had an inexplicable fancy about Brownie, as if he didn't know exactly who she was. There were always obstacles. But the next time he would recognize her by the token . . . If he did two days' work in one tomorrow, they could get away to Paris the next day.... A mosquito bit her that night; and she slapped it 300 N EVE R ASK THE END with a drowsy ferocity that made her head ring. On the train, they were merely going away, they hadn't got anywhere yet.... The grain-fields were half reaped. Previously, Marta had been struck by the. absence of any trace of war, over the debatable ground. Russ said: "Look at the trees." She was at a loss. ('They're all the same height," he said. "Mown off by the artillery fire; second growth." "Did you want to go to the war?" she asked. He said: "Not this war." UWhy, did you know a better one?"

"The Spanish-American was the war I wanted to go to," he said. "You weren't old enough," she assumed casually. ('Wasn't I?" ley OU couldn't have been." "What do you think?" ((1 can't guess," she acknowledged. "That's a break for me," he said. "I nearly gave my self away." She thought, if he was, say, eighteen in ninety-eight, he'd be forty-eight. . . . Yesterday she could have believed it. Not now; he was himself again, young-young enough-and sulky and truant. But there were those peaceful wheatfields. And all the quiet people who astonish one by light allusions to un imaginable disasters they have survived ... Whatever his age, he didn't like it either. No more than she. He said abruptly: "I couldn't wire from the office for hotel reservations. What would you-" She almost said, your usual arrangement. She said instead hurriedly: "Whatever you think best. The N EVE R ASK THE END 301 custom of the country.... " "Oh, I've visited around,"

he said. "But] guess it would be more comfortable -only I didn't know if you might want to see your friend Jane." She said: ((1 could tell her I'm at the same hotel as before. The French telephone service will baffle her. And I'll go there afterward ... Do I have to show my passport?" "No, but you'll have to sign your name." He was trying to get a rise out of her, watching her color mount. "I can spell," she said. "It's quite a nice name." Paris was a wholly strange city; she had no sense of revisiting it. Through the back of her head she was conscious of Russ looking over her shoulder while she wrote. She falsified her age brazenly, to cheek him ... A copy of the hotel registrations went to the police bureau. It would be there, buried in the files) forever, part of the census of an imaginary city...• Upstairs, the staccato yelps· of the taxi-horns, muted by the side- ' street, re-created the real Paris. But it was outside.

The large, shabbily clean room was characterless, not French, not anything, merely an enclosed space. Like the blank intervals on a map, unexplored; here no writ ran.... Late, late in the evening Kilmenycame home; and nobody knew where Kilmeny had been ... Russ opened his suitcase, and the room acquired another quality. Now it belonged to them. Temporarily. So much space and so much time, clearly separated from everything that went before or might come after. The 302 N EVE R ASK THE END hour when all cats are grey .. . . "How neatly you pack," she said. "Berthe packs for me. When I get back, it looks like a bad accident. And I throw my clothes on the Boor. ••.May I take off my coat?" They began to laugh. His face was smooth against hers, though he hadn't shaved since morning. He hardly needed to shave; perhaps that was why he re tained such a deceptively boyish expression. He said: "1 haven't been very--entertaining."

She said: "1 like being here with you ... Anyway." "You're a dear," he said. They had a great kindness for each other. Only the simplest words would do. He wanted to sleep in her arms, literally, not a euphemism.