Chapter XXIV

CHAPTER XXIV "ONE moment, please-good heavens-" Marta broke off to answer a muffied enquiry from Russ, "nothing; I was speaking to the waiter." Russ called back: ('Look in the inside left pocket." "I've got change," she replied. She shut off her mind. . . . "Thanks, merci, that will do." The waiter arranged the breakfast tray and departed. She wished there was a bolt on the door; locks were a mere formality ... Russ came out wearing a dark grey figured cotton ki mono, tied with a black sash; the pattern of the fabric was in some indescribable fashion masculine. When men wore lace ruffles and ribbons, no doubt the stuff took on the quality of its intended use as soon as the web was cut. His wet hair was brushed up into a solemn comic crest, rather Japanese, too. He always looked extremely clean. "Those waiters," said Marta, "make me so nervous. I had no idea French farces were absolutely realistic, with everyone popping in and out of doors and diving under beds. The waiter knocks and you yell wait a minute, and he oozes through the keyhole immediately.

304 N EVE R ASK THE END Pauline broke all records for the standing broad jump the first morning. Then. the waiter lingered chattily to improve his English on us; he cherished an ambition to go to New York. We revenged ourselves by teach ing him that in America the correct come-back to 'how do you do' is 'not so hot.' He went out saying it over-not so hot, not so hot. 1 hope he tried it on the next New England school teacher he caught rising like Venus from the bath ..... You look like Genji~" Hardly, said Russ, this was the cheapest kind. ((But Genji imparted a superior elegance to whatever he deigned to wear," said Marta, eating a ripe black fig, which made the bitter French coffee taste agreeably tonic. She was ragging him; she was a good sport. Shuffied up the cards and laughed. He ought to be satisfied. He didn't want to be foresworn again . . . Then what did he want? What more? •.•After every thing, he still wasn't sure.. . . .

"Yours is the real thing," he commented. Plain white, with no ornament but an embroidered medallion. Not the flashy export stuff. "It's the equivalent of a petticoat, I believe," Marta said. ((To be worn under neath." uA chemise," Russ said. "They wear three; and the white one has to be tied with a pink string, a narrow sash; pink for luck." Marta had noticed that he knew all he needed to know about women's clothes, in several languages. He had had a great many women. She didn't mind being one of them. Not now. As there must be a last time, she might be rather grateful N EVE R ASK THE END 305 to those others. Perhaps out of all one lost or spoiled one gained just enough instructionfor that last time. Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part; Nay, I hav8 done, you get no more of me. •••"1 shall buy me a pink string today," she said. "For luck." Russ said: ((Sometimes you remind me of my wife so much you make me shudder."

She was taken aback. "I'm sorry-what did I do?" "No," he said, ((1 didn't mean it that way. She was interesting." Marta had it at last. "You're in love with her yet." "A little," he said. Now Brownie would be huffed ... But she wasn't. You couldn't ever tell what Brownie would do. And that was how she reminded him of Harriet. "She was the one!" Marta said. "That made trouble between me and Nonie," Russ said. "Nonie expected me to hate Harriet, never think of her or speak of her again." Marta asked: "What was it about her, Harriet, that gave her such a hold on you?" "I don't know," he said. "She was like a bad child I'd taken into the family; she belonged. And she was a bad child." . . . Heedless and headlong. A wish was a plan to her; she turned night into day; she couldn't get on with his mother-who could?-but all those trifles, however multiplied, were immaterial. They parted, inevitably, because they were going dif ferent ways.••."Were you happy together?" Marta asked. "Yes. But that's not enough . . ." Isn't it?

306 N EVE R ASK THE END Marta thought. It came between you and Nonie. And yet Nonie was wrong. You oughtn't ever· to hate any one you've been so close to. It will destroy you; it destroys the world. . . . (,(We were afraid we might quarrel seriously, turn on each other; that's why we agreed to a divorce," Russ said. ((And I fell in love with Nonie. I guess I haven't got it in me to be faithful to one woman for long." "How long?" Marta asked quizzically. "A week?" "Oh, you-I could stand you for at least six weeks. You're about six different women. You don't have to go to bed with a man to keep him interested. But you'd be all right even if you hadn't any brains." He said something else.... A wave of scarlet flowed up over her neck and face. "Did I shock you-a woman of experience like you?" he quoted. She realized that he enjoyed making her blush, give herself away. As if to even the score . . . She was astonished. When he had only had to ask, on his own terms ... She shook her head, and went to the dresser for a cigarette, and said obliquely: "Pauline hit me off: I'm· not quite bright."

Russ came over with a match. He asked: "Have you ever seen Westminster Bridge at midnight?" His charming smile was reflected in the mirror. "No, but I've heard it's wonderful." She put down the lighted cigarette carefully. "It was you," she said. (tThe same as the other time, coming back from Brook lyn. What did you suppose?"

N EVE R ASK THE END 307 He said: "1 thought you were trying to see if you could get me going. Well-you could." She made a sign of dissent. ((Why, I let you-" He asked: "Would you have?" She answered: "You put the comether on me once. So I was afraid to go near you. Because--oh, you were separated from your wife; and in love with Nonie. And you weren't living with Nonie either. You needn't tell me; Nonie is a virgin. I thought you were looking for a-a substi tute." "No," said Russ slowly, "I wouldn't do that." "Not-not on purpose," she explained. "And not me especially. I didn't think badly of you. You've got an affectionate disposition. I guess it wasn't any too easy for you; and that would have made it worse. With everybody, your friends, Alma and the rest ••." He knew now what more he had wanted. He hadn't liked to think she could do that to him and not care. Affectionate was a good word! Probably she was right . . . Though whether it was better or worse to pick up a girl occasionally, as he used, he didn't know. He had done it, and that was that Or to seduce a virgin under promise of marriage No credit to him if Nonie wouldn't ..... They would then certainly have been married, as soon as it was possible-and he'd rather not figure that out either • . .

"When you're in a small set) it's taken for granted you belong to somebody," he said. Marta examined the implication disinterestedly. He had belonged to 30g N EVE R ASK THE END somebody. The problem of conduct involved would baffle the College of Jesuits to untangle. They'd have cheated like a shot if they had imagined they could get away with it; and most likely they'd have risked it anyhow if either had suspected the other's inclination. Furthermore, she guessed accurately the alternative he took ... Evidently 1 never had any morals, she told herself. Or only in reverse, an outlaw ethic.... She blinked as Russ said: "Was there anything between Dinty Connor and Alma?" "Nothing," said Marta promptly, glad to be able to speak the truth. . . . Flattering even to make the running against Alma. We want everything, she thought. So that's why Russ had no use for Bruce Dwyer. He won't ask about Bruce ... He didn't.

Russ was going to the office for an hour or two; then he'd be through; it was Saturday. "I beg your par don," he said suddenly, "do you mind-" Not at all; she stammered slightly, aware that her embarrassment sprang from the opposite cause. She had been think ing, he's uncommonly well-built, not middle-aged. None of us would mind, if we could afford it. You can tell fairly well by the set of his head, she thought, the same as in those old Roman portrait busts . • . Russ was holding his chin up, with the intense serious ness of a man concentrating on the back of his neck, adjusting his tie. She ,crossed over and smoothed the fold of the collar. His shirt was of white handloom silk. "More than Oriental splendor. With monoN EVE R ASK THE END 309 grams!" "1 wouldn't have thought it of myself, back in Rockford, Illinois," he said, half apologetic. ('But why not? You brought them from China?" ((Well, this lot just came; I asked a friend there to have them send me a new supply ..." He must write to Louise.

Next week.•.. "They always put on monograms," he added, as if exculpating himself. "It's cute," said Marta, and bent her head to kiss the neat white silk letters. "It's over your heart." He felt it there, a shudder that was both pleasure and pain. The charm of all women, which he had never been able to resist, was in that kiss, unexpected, light and laughing. He kept still, for if he returned it then he would somehow be unfaithful to three women at once. Marta chose for lunch Jane's favorite restaurant. She thought altruistically that Russ would not object to seeing a pretty girl. He saw two; Jane was with Sally Stephenso.n. Jane was sorry they could not join forces, and asked Marta to dinner Sunday. Jane and Sally conferred over sheets of typescript, making pencil notes. Sally had the sea-grey eyes and rippled hair of a young Juno. Their clothes were of an absolute chic. Afterward, in the Bois, Russ commented: "They said they had to talk business."

"They make big salaries," said Marta. "And earn them." "Both stunning beauties, dressed to the nines," said Russ. "That's their business," Marta pointed out. ((They don't need a man to support them," Russ sum med up. Marta explained that Jane had married at 310 N EVE R ASK THE END seventeen, and her husband did not support her. Sally, too, was divorced. "I daresay they'll marry again, but Jane has turned down a millionaire and Sally refused both a title and money." Marta had sometimes won dered why Jane took the trouble to keep up a friendship with her, who was neither smart nor beautiful. But it was because Jane, too, was a working woman. They had that in common. "That's a new thing, it has hap pened in our time," Russ said reflectively. In hap pening, it had broken his own marriage. Marta said: "Getting married isn't a man's chief objective. I didn't realize soon enough that it wasn't mine,. But for most women, probably it always will be."

Russ put in parenthetically that he had declined another invitation for himself and Marta. Golf at the country club, of course. Marta said she would go along if he wished to play. He did not. "They'd expect us to stay for dinner; do you want to spend the evening in a good home?" He chuckled at Marta's involuntary recoil•••.The Bois was too near the city, but they found a shady spot and Marta spread her scarf to pro tect her white frock. She did not. immediately follow his drift when Russ said: "Till I went to Chicago, I'd never had a drink. The local manager, Tip Kearney, used to take me out with him and another fellow, Heinie Weiss muller. Tip generally ordered sherry and vermouth for me) because I wasn't used to anything stronger.. And I'd sit and listen to him and Heinie. They knew the ropes. Chicago was a tough town.

NEVER ASK THE END 311 I didn't meet any girls there, except . . . I was sorry for those girls. Once they were in they couldn't get back." "I don't see why not, if they tried," Marta reflected. "The rest of us worked for our living." "You wouldn't have gone under in the first place," Russ said. "You've got too much brains." "1 don't believe that made the difference," Marta said. "Nor morality either. The most brilliant wo man I ever knew-before I grew up, I mean-was one of those. We found out afterward. ...I\.n old-timer, Bowie Hamilton-he wasn't an old man, but born in the West, exactly the type Remington drew-a neighbor of ours, brought her out from town and she passed as his wife. Stayed through the sum mer. She was well educated, a good musician; she had been a lady. She played the melodeonin the Mor mon church, partly to obligeand partly for devilment; afterward she'd parody the sermon for us. She was a wit and a mimic, and I supposeshe was the piano player in the 'houses' where she'd been. That would make up for her being middle-aged; she was thirty-eight, she told me. I was eleven or twelve. In the fall she went with Bowie on one of his freighting trips to town and he came back alone. As soon as she got to town she started on a wild spree, drinking, and vanished on the next train. A couple of years later we heard she had died in a mining camp dive in the Coeur d'Alenes.

Of course she wasn't married to Bowie; the summer was a whim of hers. My mother was very fond of her, 312 N EVE R ASK THE END and said: '1 guess none of us know why we do the things we do.' My mother never did anything wrong in her life; that's why I remembered her saying that. There couldn't have been any others like Mrs. Hamil ton. That made it the more confusing. An extraor dinary woman. Looked rather like the pictures of Dolly Madison." •••In a straight black dress, high waisted, with elbow sleeves; and her powdery grey hair cut short and curled. Marta remembered with exactitude the arrival of Mrs. Hamilton, sitting up on the high seat of the freight wagon beside Bowie, who had reined in six horses with his left hand. Avery fair, tall woman, sun-burned from the long day's drive,. Marta met them on the road, by accident. Mrs. Hamil ton had a collie pup in the wagon, a fierce fat puppy; she gave it to Marta, who carried it home in her pina fore. Mrs. Hamilton made Bowie's shack mysteriously delightful, with nothing to produce an effect beyond a striped Hudson Bay blanket on the bunk and a glass pitcher holding white wild roses set on a strip of brown velvet laid across a pine table. The first artistic com position Marta had ever seen. She used to present herself in the open door as silently as an Indian; Mrs.

Hamilton invariably invited her to enter in the same tone she would have used to an adult, offered her ~1 cookie, and let her alone. It was a heavenly refuge; the fair stately woman diffused about her an atmos phere of harmonious indifference. Was it her irony that had undone her? She was a bad woman. How N EVE R ASK THE END 313 could one reconcile such categories? Marta acquired that summer an intellectual contempt for sublunary judgments. It had a permanent effectupon her mental processes. Oddly, her only equivalent experience was a lesson in arithmetic, when she learned that the deci mal system is not the only possible one, that any num ber will do as well as ten for a base, and mathematicians say some of the others would be more convenient. We use ten probably because we have ten fingers. . . . Much later Marta was to grasp the larger truth that logic must proceed from premises; it is a method of comparative measurement within a limited field; and subject, not superior, to life.•••She had no sentimen tality for "lost ladies," but she wouldn't trust a man who spoke of them grossly. Russ was grateful to them for the pleasure and release they had afforded him.

She liked him for it. "What a crazy wo\"ld we've lived in," she said. "And they tell us now it was puritanical in our time. It was tough and wild. But it can't be described; no body could understand who didn't live through it, be cause every imaginable contradiction was true." ((C,hicagowas tougher than anything you can find in Europe now," said Russ. "1 was there nve years. Then I was transferred to Pittsburgh." There was a black interval, when he didn't care where he was, didn't care to meet anybody on account of Tip.... "After awhile I got acquainted with a suburban set, subscription dances and that sort of thing; respectable girls. I never thought 314 N EVE R ASK THE END of wanting those girls • • • There were two kinds of women ... Then·1 met Nonie and Harriet." A new kind. Girls one could talk to, desire, marry. But not hold. "Yau see, it was just because Harriet had her own interests, she couldn't go with me when my job took me away. I'm not blaming her, but it was bound to end the way it did."

"If you'd married a girl like Caroline ·from your home town, you'd still be married to her; would that suit you any better?" He became an embodiment of obstinate negation. "Most the boys I knew did. And stayed there. They'd go with a girl for a year or two, and then it would be taken for granted. Sometimes they had to get mar ried." A good deal of adolescent experiment went on surreptitiously. Perhaps he was saved by the lack of pocket money for such simple social treats as the town afforded. And by his mother's strict supervision. At fifteen, he had been initiated by a girl two years older than himself, his second cousin; driving home from a picnic. An unemotional submission on his part. And he was scared all the time that his mother might give him a licking-for staying out late! "I always intended to get away," he said, with retrospective gloom. From his mother, Marta thought. From virtue it self, which was stamped with the image of his mother.

The age was shaped by an unparalleled moral dualism. All great races build up rigid conventions of abstinence, and break them continually. Unless restrained, their N EVE R ASK THE END 315 power will How away like water. Unless it breaks bounds) it becomes sterile, incestuous. • • .N ot only the vicious and coarse-grained and appetent went the pace, but the passionate spirits, the generous and adventurous . . . . It wasn't much fun for the good women, the guard ians of virtue, either. Or why did they tell their daughters to cut and run? •••She said: "If it hadn't been the women it would have been something else. Don't hold it against us." He said unexpectedly: "Do you think I treated Nonie badly?" "How?" Marta was perplexed. "Not marrying her," said Russ. "But you had to wait for your divorce, and then Nonie had changed her mind?" "I don't know," said Russ. "I stopped writing. So I don't know. I was very much in love with Nonie for a year or so.

.L'1fter that it was mostly habit." And yet he was fond of Nonie; he would always be fond of her.... When he thought of Harriet he saw her averted profile, with an edge of light on it-she would be sitting on the piano bench, by the window, pretending she hadn't heard him come home) if they were on the outs-and then the abrupt graceful motion of surrender when she turned to him and made a kissing mouth. When he thought of Nonie he saw the dense dusk of her hair, the quick intelligence of her hands, and the sweet reasonableness of her expression as he approached the limits she had set. , . , Knowing that he'd probably go out and pick up a girl, if not that night another night, because he 316 N EVE R ASK THE END couldn't stand the strain. A year was a hell of a long time. He had stuck it that long • . • It isn't any use telling him, Marta thought. Appar ently a man can't ask a woman for his conge. I suppose we ought to accept the-fact that that's their nature. Per haps Nonie had worn through it, too ..• Anyhow, he doesn't need to be told, or he wouldn't ask.

"There would have been someone else," said Russ. ('And it didn't seem worth while." ((I don't know either," said Marta. A jilting is a blow to pride; but how wounding·to love to be married unwillingly. "When everything has got so mixed there seems to be no right thing to do." Nonie had taken him from Harriet. But she was too fine to pur sue him with reproaches • • • Marta could not say whether one person could spoil another's life, or mend it. She would not disclaim responsibility for her OWll. No one else could have made quite such a bad business of it as she had done for herself. "1 suppose Ernest says that Caroline made him what he is today. I hope she's satisfied. Did you ever actually know a man whose wife made him what he was?" Did he? He knew Tip Kearney .•• CHAPTER XXV HE had not thought of it from that angle. And he had thought of it a good deal. It would come back to him as sharply as if it had happened yesterday.