It was in the middle of February that Gordon finished his first draft of ‘These, Our Women.’ By the first week in March he had delivered the corrected typescript to his agent.
‘The Bremen mail’s just in,’ the girl in the front office told him as he came through. ‘I’ll see if there’s anything for you.’
There was: a note from Stanley. It contained local gossip. Business was slack, it said, and London quiet. He had only been to one party in the last fortnight. A goodbye party for the cast of ‘Ganymede’. They had gone straight from the party to the boat train. They had caught the Scythia. Gordon had glanced over the pages casually for a first reading, meaning to return to it when he was in his apartment.
At the word ‘Ganymede’, he paused. Joan Malcolm was on her way back to the States then. And the Scythia was a slow boat. It might be that Stanley’s letter travelling by the Bremen had overtaken it.
‘Have you got a copy of today’s Times}’ he asked.
A copy was discovered. He turned to the shipping. The Scythia would dock that morning.
‘Could you find out where the Scythia is?’ he asked.
He had not to wait ten minutes. The Scythia had just passed quarantine.
‘Then you might telephone this telegram,’ he said.
On a sheet of paper he scrawled the message. ‘Welcome back. If you have a spare minute any time, do ring Caledonia 5-5627.’
Within ninety minutes his telephone bell had gone.
‘It’s Joan. Joan Malcolm. Darling, how did you know I was on that boat? I hadn’t told a soul. There wasn’t one person here to meet me. Yours was the only telegram.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘At the customs.’
‘Are you through them?’
‘Not within sight.’
‘Shall I come down and help you?’
‘Angel!’
He found her beside a large pile of baggage, awaiting the arrival of a final suitcase. It was cold. She was buried close into a vast fur coat. As he saw her, there came that excited flicker of anticipation and recognition that she always brought him.
‘You look fine,’ he said.
‘I feel fine.’
‘Here’s that suitcase.’
He got the customs official for her. He fastened the trunks after the paper stamp had been affixed. He found a taxi.
‘Where’s all that going?’ he asked.
‘Most of it’s checked through to the Lafayette.’
‘Are you lunching anywhere?’
‘Darling, how could I be?’
‘Nor am I.’
‘I suppose you know all the speakeasies?’
‘I’ve a pocketful of cards.’
‘You are a blessing!’
They had only met twice before. At the cricket match nearly four years ago and in her dressing-room for those few minutes. But he had the feeling that he had known her all his life, as they chatted together while the taxi rattled them across town; as they undid the luggage in the hall of the Lafayette; as they sent the taxi back northwards to the East Fifties, as they sat opposite each other in one of the few speakeasies that did not look like a night club, and in which the waiters were not familiar.
She told him of her plans. She was going to Los Angeles, probably, with ‘Ganymede’ for a two months’ run. They were going to make a picture of it afterwards. No, she was not sure if she was going to get the part. She did not know yet what her screen tests were going to be like. If they were all right, and her picture was a success, she would probably be made an offer by Paramount. Would she accept it? Would she, hell!
They chattered about London. She had been just crazy about London. She had been heartbroken to leave it. And had she left any broken hearts behind her?
‘Oh, darling, I hope so. One, at any rate.’
They had laughed at that. Wasn’t she sure that it was broken? Englishmen are so reticent.
She told him about their parting. He had come to see her off in an M.C.C. tie. Its yellow and scarlet had shone garishly against the drab gloom of Paddington. ‘I keep this for very sober occasions,’ he had said to her.
‘That’s as good as saying that you’ve only to lift a finger and he’ll fly with you to China,’ Gordon said.
‘What should I do with him in China?’
Again they laughed. They were always laughing. He had never had a companion with whom he had felt so at ease. She returned to the subject of Englishmen.
‘Are English women as reticent as that, too?’ she asked. Gordon supposed they were. He thought of his long love affair with Gwen, in whose course the word love had not once been mentioned, whose nearest approach to sentiment had been that final ‘Bless you’ in the crowded Strand. He supposed that he and Gwen had cared as much for one another as people did outside grand passions; if there were such things.
‘I don’t know how you ever get yourselves understood if you’re both like that.’
‘We talk shorthand.’
‘It’s very difficult for foreigners who don’t know how to read it.’
He supposed it was. He supposed that it was there that half his misunderstanding with Faith had lain; that they wrote a different shorthand; that he had not realized that her apparent absorption in him, her telephone calls over the Atlantic, her insistence upon his constant company meant no more than Gwen’s unpossessiveness had done: that it was a transatlantic gesture; just as his own seeming irresponsiveness was the English way of speaking in an undertone. Had not Faith said to him: ‘How can I tell what I’ve meant in your life?’
And, ‘Do you know,’ Joan was saying, ‘that there wasn’t even a cable from him on the boat!’
‘The English don’t send telegrams.’
‘Oh, Gordon, don’t they? Won’t there be any answer to the long night-letter I’ve just sent off?’
‘As likely as not, there won’t.’
‘But one must answer telegrams.’
‘He’ll answer it with a nice long letter.’
‘Gordon, I’m so glad I’ve met you. I’ld have cried my eyes out if there hadn’t been a telegram tomorrow.’
He asked if he was rich. Not a dime, she told him. He was young, and insolent and lovely.
‘Insolent!’
‘You can’t think how rude he was to all my friends. I felt so proud of him.’
And suddenly before Gordon’s eyes there rose the picture of him, a counterpart of the bicyclist. Did not there run right through a man’s life the same woman in different forms? Did not there run also the man who touched that side of her he himself left untouched? Was it not almost certain that Joan between whom and himself had they met under different circumstances love might have blossomed, would be attracted either by such a man as himself or the kind of man by whom that other side of Faith had been touched and held?
‘He’s insolent, and young and proud,’ said Gordon. ‘He does masterful and gentle things.’
Joan started. ‘How did you know that?’ she said.
‘You’re not sure of him. He makes you unhappy, you’re jealous of him; desperately jealous. You’re more fascinated by him than in love with him. But it’s something that you feel you’ll never forgive yourself if you let go.’
Joan’s beautiful dark eyes grew wider.
‘How did you know that?’ she gasped.
He did not answer. He wanted to hear more about this man. She would want to talk about him, he knew that, to anyone who would be likely to understand.
‘Where did you meet him?’ he asked.
‘At Twickenham. He was playing for the Harlequins. I couldn’t take my eyes off him all the afternoon. Then he came back in the same train with us, and friends introduced us.’
‘He was playing three-quarter?’
‘How could I be expected to know that?’
‘Anyhow, he wasn’t in the scrum.’
‘He didn’t put down his head and push.’
‘I know him, then.’
His name was Clewer Green, and Gordon had met him during winter sports in Weiner. They were both staying at the same hotel. It was the first time that Gordon had ever gone there. The previous Easter he had been to Finse. There is no better ski-ing to be found in Europe. The snow is dry and soft. The sun shines out of a blue sky steadily. The day began with the vast varied Norwegian breakfast. The cold bordt spread with fifty dishes; with cold meats, with fish, with cheese, with eggs. A panorama of hors d’oeuvres. You set out after breakfast, with sandwiches in a knapsack on your back. For six or seven hours you climbed and flew over the white expanse. You returned exhausted; with your muscles loose, your brain a-doze, to sit in the twilit drawing-room before the smoking log fire. Rarely had he felt so supremely well. He had imagined that Weiner would be like that.
It wasn’t. It was like going to school again. Within a half-hour of his arrival a bustling secretary had told him where he could hire skis. ‘You’d better practise a little on the nursery slopes this afternoon. Then we’ll put you on your third-class tests tomorrow. And as soon as you’re through those, you’ll be allowed to go on runs.’
On the boards in the hotel passages were placards with notices about tests and runs and competitions and awards. Everyone wore or was trying to wear some badge or other. Caps and shoulders were studded with the gold and silver K’s. Everyone was being dragooned into the passing of some test. The standard of ski-ing was very high. It was as professional as only a public schoolboy can make a sport. Nothing but ski-ing was ever discussed. The importance of a hotel guest depended on his capacity to ‘take it straight by Lone Tree slope.’ The women looked like men, the men like prefects at a public school. It was in this atmosphere that Gordon had met Clewer Green. Green was a cricket blue, a first-class footballer and a member of the Oxford ski-ing side. He was very handsome. He was popular. His photographs were very frequently in the illustrated papers. He was definitely one of the Weiner bloods.
Talk would cease when he came into the dining-room in the same way that the chatter of the fags in the Fernhurst cloisters had ceased when a cap had passed. He was also afflicted with a very marked inferiority complex. Gordon, during the ten days of his stay in Weiner, got the benefit of it.
On the first evening Green came up and began to talk books to him in the same way that a social climber will discuss drawing-rooms. As the snob will only mention those places and people, familiarity with which may be expected to confer credit upon himself, so Green mentioned only those books that he thought he should have read; speaking of them not because as books they meant anything to him, but because he imagined that knowledge of them would increase Gordon’s opinion of him. Gordon, however, who had great respect for Green’s powers as an athlete and none at all for his industrious study of Marcel Proust, in the same way that a person socially established will, in the presence of a snob, discuss only his less creditable acquaintances, drew parallels and instances only from writers of whom Green would have imagined that a reading would cast an unfortunate reflection on his literary taste. At first he had thought Green was an extremely tiresome person. Later, when he had contrived to change the subject of conversation, he had discovered him to be a pathetically self-conscious person, desperately aware of the fleeting nature of athletic success; aware that he was only asked to parties because he was a blue; suspecting that he would be ignored when his body lost its suppleness; afraid that at forty he would find it extremely difficult to hold his place in life.
He quite genuinely despised himself. ‘What’s the good of me?’ he would say. ‘I’ve got quickness of eye. I’m strong. I can run fast. But that’ll go. What’s going to happen to me? Because for the moment I’m talked about and asked to places, it’s worth a stockbroker’s while to pay me a reasonable salary for the sake of the business that I bring him. People do business with me, not because I know much about the market, but because they like to be able to say afterwards: “Green was saying this to me.” But they won’t want to say that when I’m no longer in the public eye. I shall be out of it by the time I’m forty.’
He was desperately frightened of the future. Desperately conscious of his own deficiencies. To Gordon, who had had to handle him with the tenderest care, he had never appeared in terms of glamour or insolence or power. But he could understand how the deploying of that insolence before Joan might be a protective mask to restore to him his self-esteem. The Green that he knew was not the Green that fascinated Joan. As no doubt the Horton before whose beauty Faith’s resistance was as water was not the Horton that his men friends talked about. Just as he thought of Green with rather affectionate contempt as a weakling who had not come to terms with his limitations, so were there men who would say on the same note and feeling: ‘Poor Horton.’
It was not difficult to see why Joan had fallen for him.
‘Gordon,’ she said, ‘how you understand!’
He compared the mood in which he had received Joan’s admission from the way in which he had revolted against Faith’s admission. For Faith, to whom he had wanted to give everything, he had been unable to feel pity, he had been unable to give understanding. Faith had relied on him to see her through this trouble and he had raged at her. Joan, who had expected nothing of him, had found in him the one friend who could assist her. It was ironical that: that Faith should have made him for another woman the friend that she had needed for herself.
‘I’ve so enjoyed myself,’ said Joan, as they left the table. ‘When are we going to meet again?’
There was a publishers’ tea being given that afternoon at the Chatham to celebrate the publication of a presumed best-seller. Would she like to go to it? he asked her. She thought she would. At the tea they met Edie Wasserman who told them there was an amusing cocktail party going on at Muriel Draper’s. It was nine o’clock before Muriel Draper’s party began to look like ending. An hour before that they had found themselves with enough invitations to last them over the entire week.
‘It looks as though we should be seeing a good deal of each other during the next few days,’ said Gordon.
They saw, in fact, extremely little of anybody else. They saw each other practically every day. Ringing each other up three or four times each day. They each knew where the other was at any given moment. He discussed her contracts with her. Should she sign up with Paramount straight away? Or wait till she had reached the coast? Awaited with her with anxiety the result of the screen tests; an anxiety that was turned by a more than favourable report into jubilant delight.
It was as near a love-affair as anything could be that was not a love-affair. They needed each other for their separate reasons. They knew that there was a limit set: a date marked upon the calendar, after which she would turn westwards to the Pacific and he eastwards to London or the Riviera. They flung themselves into the friendship with the recklessness of those who know that what they build is transient. There was to some extent a shipwrecked sailors’ bond about their friendship. He was a foreigner and a stranger in New York. She had been away so long that she had lost her contacts. Her friends scarcely realized that she was back. As she was to go away so soon, she did not think it worth while to pick up the dropped threads. Besides, love is an islanding of oneself. The only thing that mattered to her was the man she had left behind; Gordon, because he was the one person that she could talk to of him, who understood the situation, had been taken upon that island. Not that they talked much of Green. Not that they talked much of anything. They chattered happily of one thing and the other, as people do when they are in love.
They went to theatres together and cafeterias and cocktail parties and cinemas. They went to the Metropolitan Museum, to the Aquarium and on an absurd sight-seeing tour of New York in a glass-roofed car. They did all the things that Gordon had dreamed he would do with Faith.
He had never enjoyed a comradeship so completely and so fully. He had never been able to feel so complete. Each knew what the other was about. They were both entertainers. They had both had to drive the same hard bargains with the demands of livelihood. They had both the same hard core of ruthlessness. They knew how little use the public would have for them when they had ceased to please. They were not going to let themselves be exploited under the guise of friendliness. They recognized that about each other. They understood, too, that point about the business side of an artist’s career that only a fellow artist really understands; understood how an artist, though he may stage-manage his career, though he does not produce an unmarketable article, though he drives the hardest possible bargains with his employer, though he extorts the last penny that he can, though he would not work unless he was paid to work, though he seems to be as hard-boiled as any financier on Wall Street, does not, in fact, work for the sake of money, but because whether in paint, in print, in stone or upon a platform, he has something that he wants to put across. They both knew that their job came first; that there was no sacrifice they would not make for it.
They were talking once about her leaving London. ‘I thought I was going to die,’ she said. ‘I knew I’ld see him again, of course. But it wouldn’t be the same. I knew that. And then when they offered me a ridiculously small part in a ridiculously bad play, I so nearly took it. It would have meant being with him for another month at least, with the rehearsals. But I couldn’t. I felt such a meanie, but I just couldn’t.’
‘It’s always one’s work that comes first, isn’t it?’
‘Usually one knows it is. But there comes just one time when one’s not too certain, when one thinks that there’s something that may be more important.’
‘So you’ve felt that way too?’
‘I’ve felt that way too.’
‘And what’s happened to it, Gordon?’
‘I don’t know, Joan.’
He didn’t know. It was over and it was not over. He never wanted to see Faith again, but every night he tossed restlessly, longing for her, through unsleeping hours. It was the hold that Faith had still on him that was preventing his friendship for Joan from sweeping him into a headlong passion. He did not know what it was that was happening to that one love that made him think there was something more important in his life than writing. He only knew that he was very tired. That the strain of the last months had grown too great. He had known that, the moment the last lines of his book were written.
The last line of a book is rather like the last stroke in a boat-race. You will see right down the finish of a course a crew swinging apparently within its strength. The movement is measured, smooth, rhythmical. There is no sign of effort. You feel that they could continue rowing for hours with that even swing. And then the post is passed, and instantly every man falls upon his oar, collapsed and spent. The tension snaps. The crew has all the time been working beyond its strength.
It is not till the novel is finished that a writer realizes how big the strain has been. And to Gordon there had been upon that strain, the superimposed strain of Faith, of lecturing, of living in an unfamiliar world. If it had been in England that he had finished the book, he would have gone on a cricket tour; or taken a voyage somewhere; or gone to the sands and sunshine of Southern France. In New York, in the tense atmosphere of that cold, clean air, with the noise of parties, caught up in a cycle of parties, with prohibition dramatizing the atmosphere of drink, he found an increasingly restless need of noise with the need of alcohol to support that noise. He found himself, ordinarily a quite temperate person, drinking more and more.
Drinking in New York is something that only those who had been a part of New York’s life can understand. It is a rhythm beating through every aspect of its life. It is not that one drinks more in New York than in London. On the whole one drinks considerably less. One rarely drinks before the late afternoon. One often does not drink at dinner. Whole days will pass without one drinking anything at all. But prohibition has made the whole problem of drink dramatic. Fifteen per cent, of conversation turns upon it. It is a political issue. People will solemnly discuss hangovers. Reasonable people who in other countries rarely mention what they eat or drink at a dinner party will recount in the certainty that it will be found interesting, the Odyssey of a day’s drinking. ‘First of all,’ he will say, ‘I went to a speakeasy on Thirty-ninth Street. I had two cocktails there. Then I went on to a party where they served us rye. After that. . . .’
Liquor comprises the small talk of New York. It is what the weather is in England. To understand drinking in America without having been a part of American life is like looking at a stained-glass window from the outside. It is not only prohibition that makes drink dramatic. It is the uncertainty as to what one drinks: the absolute impossibility of gauging the effects of what one drinks. Gin and whisky are the only unstandardized commodities in the States. In Europe where you know exactly what you are drinking, you gauge the exact effect of the liquor on you. You know when to stop and what the effect of not stopping is going to have on you.
In New York one cocktail can have the effect of a sledgehammer blow between the eyes. Without warning you pass right out. Or again, you may be caught up by a sea of liquor. You will be lifted on crested waves of rye and juniper out of the trough of successive hangovers, till suddenly the liquor dies on you and you will be tossed like a log of driftwood on the beach.
It was on such a sea that Gordon found himself caught up, during those days of early March when with his novel finished, with no new work to occupy him, he rushed from party to party with Joan Malcolm. He was dazed; but at the same time every nerve was preternaturally acute. He knew that there were dates marked upon the calendar: that on the twenty-first Joan would be taking a train westward to Los Angeles, that at noon on the twenty-fourth the Lafayette would sail from 57th pier; that the American chapter would be over, that he would have to begin life again. Until then he could not bother. He relaxed to the stream.
It would end anyhow on the twenty-fourth.
It ended, however, eight days earlier than that. During the last week-end before Joan’s leaving. Ended thoroughly, in the way things do end in New York. It began in a penthouse on Riverside Drive that looked out on to the Hudson River. Gordon had been taken there during the previous summer. ‘If you want to see what a modernist apartment really can be,’ he had been told, ‘I’ll take you up to see John Mavio’s.’
John Mavio was an artist: a Greek who had settled and married in New York. His apartment was as good an achievement in coziness as existed. By raising the floor, by manipulating lights, by arrangement of bookshelves and window seats, one not very large rectangular room was made to serve as a dining-room, a studio, a drawing-room, a cocktail bar. Though there was no open fire to sit before, you felt no lack of coziness. It was that rare thing, a modernist apartment that was not an exhibition piece; that was something to be lived in.
But though it had been to see the apartment that he had for the first time been driven westward down Eighty-first Street, it had been for its owners’ sake that he had returned. There was nowhere in New York that he could be more certain of finding fun. In this marriage between a Greek artist and an American woman with her own career was symbolized a union between the old world and the new: that was capable of confronting confidently whatever situation might arise. They were artists, who enjoyed life and accepted life: who by taking a long view knew how to take a short; who could live in the present because they had lived in the future and the past.
‘What! you’ve never met them?’ Gordon had said to Joan. ‘We must do something about that. Let’s invite ourselves for cocktails and then take them on to dinner.’
There were usually people at the Mavios round about half-past five. The Mavios worked hard and played hard. Their parties were informal. They had a very admirable coloured cook. When dinner parties were arranged they were beautifully stage-managed. But usually the parties were picnic ones. People were asked to look in at six, and at half-past eight they would be still there; dancing, or chatting, or shooting crap. Sandwiches would have been sent out for. By eleven o’clock the party would still be moving.
‘We’ll have fun there,’ he said to Joan, as the taxi swung round the long curve of Riverside. For a week he had not been to bed before three o’clock. Every morning with his mail settled and his papers read, he was at the racquet club. Knowing that in a week’s time he would be leaving New York, he had crowded his days with engagements for lunches, teas, dinners. His telephone bell had been ringing all day long. He was grateful for the mauve cocktail that Ruth Mavio poured out for him from the vast glass jar that was set like a heathen idol, with glasses and sandwiches grouped round it like suppliant priests and penitents, on a stool in the centre of the room. He drank it in a gulp, felt better, held his glass out for another. He felt better then.
‘I can’t really believe you’re going so soon,’ Ruth said.
‘I can’t myself.’
‘You’ve been here so much this last year that one’s begun to think that you belong here.’
‘A part of me does,’ he said, and saying it remembered how he had talked with Faith of the way in which the traveller leaves pieces of himself in this and the other place, so that in no place can he find himself complete.
It seemed centuries ago since that first talk. Yet he had met Faith after he had met the Mavios. And that spring afternoon seemed only an hour or so away. He had the feeling that different sections of one’s life moved at different paces.
‘What are you going to do?’ Ruth asked him. He did not know. There was a vacuum waiting on the other side of March 24th. Faith had taken his whole life into her hands. Now she was handing it back to him. There was nothing he wanted to do, nobody he wanted to see, nowhere he wanted to go, nothing he wanted to write.
‘I often wish I were a person working in an office,’ he said, ‘with a month’s holiday a year. One wouldn’t have these gaps in one’s life then.’
‘You’re going to be in London though?’ He supposed he was. And he would be glad to be there. And he knew perfectly that within a few weeks of his return an idea for a new book would have come to him and with that idea would come a zest for living. But at the moment Joan Malcolm was the one link he had with living.
‘Oh, Joan,’ he said, ‘I’m going to miss you so!’
‘I’m going to miss you, Gordon.’ She stretched out her hand to his and pressed it. Their hands clasped, they sat in silence; while the gramophone played and a couple danced to it, while John Mavio, dark, little, alert and vital, argued about modern art; while Ruth Mavio, crumpled on the floor, rolled dice to a chant of a ‘roll on seven’; while one by one the guests began to take their leave. It was eight o’clock before the last guest had gone.
‘Where are you taking us?’ Ruth asked.
There was a place on Seventeenth and Third. They had German food there, Gordon said. It was quite amusing. There was German music. And one drank out of great glass mugs, beer that was almost beer.
‘I’ll get the car,’ said John.
It was a fast, low car: a two-seater.
‘We’ll get in the back,’ said Joan.
It was very cold. A clear, starlit, moonlight night. They huddled close to one another as the car rushed eastwards through the clattering avenues, to the long bare expanses of the Park. Through the frosted air the towering splendour of Fifty-ninth Street stood in its proud blaze of light and shadow. It was beyond speech beautiful. He would be saying good-bye to it so soon. In a week Joan would be on her way to California. He would be in the vacuum.
‘Oh, Joan,’ he said.
She turned towards him. She was very lovely. Their shared troubles had brought them very close. The car swung westwards through the Park scattering its light between the leafless trees.
‘Gordon!’ she sighed.
Desperately, in a kiss that was more than anything an attempt to annihilate their unhappiness, they clung together.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,’ Gordon said.
It was hot and crowded in the lower room where the music played in soft, sentimental strains. It looked for a moment as though they would not be able to get a table. Ruth turned slowly round, looking at the walls with their odd photographs and prints of muscled Sandows.
‘I’ll choose that one,’ she said at length.
‘Here’s a table,’ the waiter said.
It was wooden and narrow and rectangular. It looked small when the four of them were seated round it. It looked smaller when the large plates piled high with dumplings and sauerkraut and heavy, pink-looking boiled meat had been arranged about the glass mugs that contained a greater cubic content of glass than beer.
‘This is a squeeze,’ Joan remarked.
‘It’ll be all right when that’s cleared away,’ the waiter retorted, pointing contemptuously at the plates of meat. He clearly regarded food as a necessary but irritating interval between drinks. Within five minutes he had swept away the plates, and brought four unordered steins.
‘Now you’ll be comfortable,’ he said.
‘It’s nice here,’ said Joan. She stretched out her hand to Gordon. They sat silent, listening to the slow tender music. ‘It’ll be nice when one’s old,’ said Joan, ‘and one’s done one’s work and doesn’t mind what one looks like, and can sit in a garden by the Rhine, drinking beer and listening to music.’
‘I’ve insured my life for sixty,’ Gordon said.
‘How old are you now?’
‘Thirty-two.’
‘Then you’ll be sixty in ‘58. I’ll be fifty-three then.’
‘You’ll have done enough acting by then, won’t you?’
‘Oh, darling, I do hope so.’
‘We shall get very fat, shan’t we?’
‘We’ll just do nothing then.’
‘I shall tell everyone how beautiful and slim you used to be.’
‘None of them will believe you.’
‘I shall challenge them to duels.’
‘I wish it wasn’t such a long way off.’
‘How long will it be before we meet again?’
‘Not too long.’
‘No, not too long.’
And they laughed and sat holding hands while the music throbbed and swelled and sobbed.
‘I know some quite amusing people who live three blocks away,’ said John.
‘I’ve got to make a speech tomorrow,’ Gordon said.
They asked him where he was going to make a speech.
‘At one of Eve Stuart’s dinners,’ he told them.
They asked him what it was going to be about. He didn’t know, he said. That was what he was worrying about. They told him that that was silly: that tomorrow was a long way off.
‘I ought to go home and think it out,’ he said.
‘You can think it out at the night club we’re going to take you on to.’
It was like every other night club. It had a bar; a couple of coloured musicians; a minute square of floor; a number of tables were packed close together round it.
‘I feel like death,’ said Gordon.
‘You’ll feel better after this,’ they said.
It was straight rye. And he did. There were ten people at their table. He did not know any of their names. They were throwing a party next week-end. They wanted Joan to go to it. She was sorry, but she was going to Hollywood, she said. Gordon would be able to, though.
‘No I won’t,’ said Gordon. ‘I’m going to Hollywood.’
‘But I thought you were going back to London?’
‘I was.’
‘When did you decide to go to Hollywood?’
‘This minute.’
‘Do you usually plan things that way?’
‘Invariably.’
He did not know who was asking him the question. He had decided to go to Hollywood. He must make his plans to go to Hollywood. One needed money to go to Hollywood. He had no money.
‘I want to telephone,’ he said. ‘I want to telephone a night letter.’
He took Joan and led her to the hall. ‘You must back me up in this. You know Stanley.’
He got on to the Western Union. He wanted to send a week-end letter to London: he had just finished a novel he said. He wanted to accompany ‘Ganymede’ to Hollywood. What was the maximum he could be lent? He handed the telephone across to Joan. ‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea if Gordon came to Hollywood?’ she said. ‘That’s settled, then,’ he said.
‘I’m so sorry I shan’t be able to come to your party,’ he said on his return.
‘I wonder what Stanley’ll say,’ said Joan.
‘Something typical.’
‘How long’ll you stay in Hollywood?’ Ruth asked.
‘As long as my money lasts,’ he said. He would book a passage back by the French Line through Panama. He would stay on in Hollywood till his last dollar had gone. Then he’ld get on the boat. It would be a five weeks’ journey back. He’ld work the whole of it. ‘Or I might go back to the islands,’ he said.
Sitting there, in that noisy, smoky, stuffy New York night club, his head heavy with jazz and rye, he felt homesick for the wide Pacific: for the palm trees, and the schooners becalmed within the coral reef of a Paumolus atoll: for the red and white of the pareo: for the sweet scent of the tiare: for the singing and the dancing: for the wash of water upon the reef. He would ship from San Francisco for Samoa. There were the Gilbert Islands.
He had met a missionary from the Gilbert Islands in a trading schooner from Port Vila that was paddling its way round the lagoons of the New Hebrides. It had been a lazy little boat where you paid a hundred francs a day, which included food and as much as you could drink; it was the kind of boat where you found whisky set out beside your coffee on the breakfast table. For three days they had talked: he and that missionary, about the Gilbert Islands. It would be fun to go there.
And there was an island called Bellona he was curious to see. It was the kind of island that only gets marked on a very large-scale map. It was next door to Rennell Island, south-east of the Solomons. They had told him about it in New Caledonia. It was only inhabited, they had said, by women. When a girl child was three years old, she was sent there from Rennell Island. When the young men of Rennell Island grew to manhood and the time came for them to take wives, the chiefs sailed across to Bellona to bring back such women as were needed. It was from a group of New Hebrides planters that Gordon had learnt that. He had never known whether they had been pulling his leg. They had been very pleasant fellows. ‘Now, are you telling me the truth?’ he had said. ‘Because I write, and I shall go back to England and put all this in a book. And I shall look very silly if none of it is true.’ They had assured him that it was true. That the last thing they would think of doing would be to pull the leg of their ‘young romantic’; some of them they maintained had been there, the women had swum out to their ship and had proved most exacting. But Gordon knew to what extent a writer was fair game. He had heard planters boast of the way they had fooled journalists, which was the planters’ retort for the manner in which writers had abused the hospitality of planters. He never had been sure about Bellona. He had never mentioned it in any of his books. He would be curious to go there and make sure.
He began to talk about Bellona Island. He told Ruth Mavio that it was quite likely that there should be such an island: that primitives would be likely to take the only sure precaution that would keep women chaste. There was no other way, he thought. A woman would cry her heart out on your shoulder, would promise to fly with you to the far world’s end: would say that she could not live without you. Then, after a three months’ interval, the first thing that she would do would be to start talking to you about some other man. ‘Women were happier in the days when they were treated as chattels,’ he went on. ‘They haven’t enough work to do nowadays. Women,’ he said, ‘can be only kept faithful by having three meals to cook a day and a fresh baby every eighteen months.’
He developed the theme with the lightness and sureness with which one can develop those themes alone in which with a third of oneself one believes. He was sustaining himself, he knew, solely upon the rye with which every quarter of an hour or so he found his glass replenished. But he had never been in a more complete control of his faculties. Every nerve was tightened. He saw everything very clearly. He remembered the description a fellow officer had once given him of a shot of morphia.
‘I walked back from the M.O.,’ he had said, ‘and everything was lovelier than I had ever seen it. I had never seen such golden sunlight, or such green leaves.’ He had never seen the brass buttons glitter so, he thought, as he passed the sentry; he had never heard such a rattle as the wrist hit the magazine in the present. For an hour it had been like that. Then suddenly, without warning, the bottom had gone out of everything. It would be like that sooner or later with himself, Gordon knew. But for the moment he had rarely been more vividly conscious of his personality. It was four o’clock before Joan asked to be taken home. ‘In six days’ time I shall be on my way to Hollywood,’ was Gordon’s last thought, as he fell asleep.
He woke five hours later with the uncertain feeling that follows a heavy night. He lay blinking at the ceiling; wondering if he were feeling ill; trying to remember what had happened on the previous night. He had telegraphed to Stanley; he was going to Hollywood. Colours seen by candlelight did not look the same by day. Was that going to be a good thing? He did not know. He did not care. It did not matter much to him what happened. He might just as well go there. He put his hand against his forehead. He seemed all right. He got up. The sun was shining brightly across the brown carpet of the sitting-room. He felt gay and happy. Thanks to steam heat one never had in New York that grey waking to the cold one had in London. The telephone bell rang. It was Joan speaking.
‘Darling, how are you?’
‘I’m all right.’
‘Then don’t eat anything.’
‘Till when?’
‘Till lunch time. Then have a cocktail first.’
‘All right.’
‘We’re not lunching, are we?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘But we’re going on somewhere afterwards, aren’t we?’
‘There’s a cocktail party at Edie Wassermann’s.’
‘And weren’t you taking me to some friends of yours first?’
‘I think I was.’
‘At any rate, you’ll call for me the moment lunch is over.’
‘I will.’
‘And some time between now and then,’ thought Gordon, ‘I’ve got to prepare the speech I’m going to make tonight.’
It was the last dinner of Eve Stuart’s season: and it was her biggest. There would be the best part of seven hundred guests. He was very anxious to speak well. Both for the occasion’s sake and because of his quite genuine personal affection for Eve Stuart. Speakers were allowed a free choice of subject. He had meant to say something about English poetry. He would apologize for being serious. He would say that there were only two subjects on which Englishmen were forbidden to be flippant. One was cricket, the other poetry. He had thought of developing the idea that the qualities on which the fame of a nation rests are usually opposed to what are supposed to be national characteristics; that whereas the English were always pictured as composed, unsentimental, conventional, England is chiefly famous for what has been achieved by men who were the opposites of that: by the rebellious, and the adventurous; by colonial administrators who had disregarded the authorities of Whitehall; by sea captains who had held their telescopes to their blind eye; by all those who had represented the poetry rather than the prose of living. So that by the irony of contrast this so solid-seeming people had produced the greatest body of poetry of any country since the days of Greece. There should be a good speech along those lines. But somehow he could not get the phrasing of it right, as he walked down Lexington in the cool spring air; as he stopped at the florist’s at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street to send a spray of gardenias to Joan; as, perched on a stool in the drug store opposite, he drank his morning coffee.
On his return to his apartment he tried to get his thoughts clear by putting them on paper. But he could not think on paper. ‘It’ll come all right when I get there,’ he thought. And he spread open the vast Sunday supplement of the New York Times. He opened it at the book section. On the list of forthcoming novels he read ‘Exiles of Eden,’ by Gordon Carruthers. It would be out in early April. He would be getting his six advance copies in a day or two. It was already out in England. He wondered what Faith would make of it. When he had written it he had thought of nothing but her. It had been her book. Now he did not care whether she liked or didn’t like it. He didn’t feel that way about her any more. Soon he would be saying good-bye to her; in all probability for ever. He would stand under the canopy of an apartment building. He would take her hand. It would be over. There would be other people in the taxi to be dropped. People in the seventies and eighties. Then the car would swing south again. There’ld be the long sweep of Park with the red and green lights flickering, and the great golden dome of the Central building covering it. In eight days’ time.
But then he remembered that in eight days he would be half-way across America. He would not be giving that last party on the eve of sailing. He would not be sailing at all. He would be rattling across a continent to the coast. How would he say good-bye to Faith, then? Would she come to the train to see him off? Would he have a party on the Friday instead of one on the Monday, as he had planned? How would he feel when the moment of good-bye came? How would she feel? For all that this sudden glamour had come back to dazzle her, would not her very possessiveness be troubled at the loss of him? No one cared to lose what they had once owned. What was it she had said once? ‘I’ve got no hold on you when you’re away.’ Hadn’t she realized that then she had all the hold she needed, her need of him? And with that need loosened, her hold had loosened, too. Pacing backwards and forwards up and down the narrow square of his apartment, he argued and reargued the situation out. He tried to concentrate on his speech for that evening’s dinner. But between his thoughts and his resolve came the picture of that first meeting with Faith on his return, of her quiet voice saying to him: ‘He’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen.’ Every intonation of that voice was photographed upon his mind. ‘I must be getting down to the squash court,’ Gordon thought. His eyes were heavy; there was a throbbing beginning about his temples. Nothing that he saw seemed real. But as he had so often found before, keenness of eye had nothing to do with health. To play football one had to feel supremely well. But you could go on to the cricket field feeling that you would like to run a twenty-five mile Marathon and be unable to time the ball at all. Whereas at other times you would feel so limp, so blear-eyed, that you would never want to leave the deckchairs by the pavilion rails and yet in the open find yourself seeing the ball as though it were five times its size.
‘I’m feeling like death,’ he told the pro. ‘You’d better give me seven.’
‘I’m giving you six and this is going to be my lucky day.’
It didn’t prove to be, however. Gordon had never seen the small black ball so big. He was volleying shots that ordinarily he would not have attempted. He swung cricket shots with his left foot flung forward. He hadn’t played so well since the day that he had promised Faith he would go to Villefranche.
But when the game was over, and he had his shower, weighed himself and found that in the last twenty-four hours he had lost three pounds, he knew none of the exhilaration, the loose-limbed, loose-jointed delight in living that follows usually on a hard-played game. He was all in. He sat forward: his head rested in his hands. He was lunching with a congressman whom he had met at Albany on New Year’s Day at the inauguration. He did not know whether congressmen served liquor or did not. He was a democrat and a wet. But the majority of prominent American politicians, however opposed they might be to prohibition, kept the law as long as it remained the law. He did not know how he would get through lunch if they didn’t serve a cocktail. ‘I ought to go back and have a shot of rye before I start.’ But there might be cocktails. And he was afraid in his present conditon of mixing drinks.
There were cocktails. After the second he felt well again. He entered livelily upon a Tammany debate. If they wanted a democrat President in 1932, he said, it was no good letting the rest of the United States think it was just someone running on the Tammany ticket. He did not believe, he said, that New Yorkers realized how jealous the rest of America was of New York: how infuriated they were when they thought that Europeans were judging America by New York: that they resented New York’s claim to be the capital of America: that they were afraid of being governed by New York: and if they thought that a Presidential candidate was run by Tammany, they would vote republican and dry, although all their convictions were democrat and wet. He thought clearly. He talked clearly. He felt well and happy. But none of it seemed quite real. It seemed no more real two hours later in a drawing-room where a cocktail party was beginning, as he talked to the hostess’s daughter, a college girl from Brynmawr home for the weekend. She was very slim, exquisite and willowy. She had the frank friendliness that the girls of no other country possess to the same extent. She was one of the people he was fondest of in New York. They were talking of the débutante system, of how you were one of four hundred in a season, of how a dance was given for you; then you were asked to other dances; of how proud you were to be cut in on every moment; how you grew so blasée that you couldn’t be bothered to turn up to the dinner-dance before half-past ten; how you dined first at home; how the moment the dance had started you grew bored and insisted on being taken to a speakeasy.
It was a woman’s country, Gordon thought. With girls brought up like this, with their staglines and their cuttings-in, how could you expect them when they became wives not to snatch at as their right the man they loved, the man they were in love with, the man by whom they were fascinated? But neither the girl he talked to, nor the talk that they exchanged was real. Only Joan was real: as she sat very straight in her chair fingering the long chain and locket that she had bought in the Caledonian Market, fluttering a lace handkerchief as she talked. She looked so calm, so composed. No one would think that she was homesick for an insolent and lovely lad who in fifteen years would have lost his looks, whose insolence would have become a whining, ineffectual aggressiveness. No doubt he himself looked as unflurried. ‘I’ve got to make a speech tonight,’ he thought. ‘We ought to be going on to Edie’s.’
It was a large party at Edie Wassermann’s. So large that the large, book-lined drawing-room was made to seem quite small. There were familiar and friendly faces. Gordon was on a sofa seated by Fania van Vechten; he was telling her that he was going to Hollywood next Saturday. She said that would be exciting and new for him. He said that life was always exciting but never new; that you just went round having the same things happen to you; that you were always cast for the same kind of part; that the Almighty might have an immense Stock company, but he had only room for you in one particular rôle. ‘You don’t believe that,’ said Fania. ‘If you believed that you’ld commit suicide, right here.’
‘I’ld do nothing of the sort,’ said Gordon. ‘I should only find myself cast for the same role in a different play.’
They argued about the way in which life was a series of repetitions; that only oneself changed, so that one was perpetually seeing the same situation from a different angle.
One day, he thought, there’ll be another Faith. She’ll say her heart’s breaking. We’ll part, there’ll be an interval. When I come back to her, I’ll know that it’ll be about another man that she’ll want to speak to me. And as I shall be expecting it I’ll be very patient with her and gentle and give her a shoulder to cry upon. ‘We all have our little griefs,’ I’ll say to her. And she’ll never guess how much has to be shrugged away before that can be said light-heartedly. She’ll be so grateful to me that I shall win her back. Faith would have made him a good lover for another woman. She would have taught him what to expect of women since he had learnt what they would expect of him. ‘One plays the same part differently but it is the same part.’
So he talked, but none of it was real. Joan was at the other side of the room, but looking at her he could hear her voice though it was low pitched through all the other eddying voices of the room. She was making a mock political address. ‘Hoover,’ she said, ‘is an animated penguin, sitting on the Coolidge eggs.’ She fingered the silver chain about her neck, the lace handkerchief fluttered before her face. Gordon moved over to her. ‘What do you think Stanley will say?’ he asked.
‘Have you any money there at all?’
‘I don’t think I have.’
‘When will you get any money from your novel?’
‘Not till it’s published.’
‘When will that be?’
‘In the autumn some time.’
‘Darling, you’re going to be very poor.’
‘I’ll lie for a little very low.’
That was one of the advantages of being a writer, he explained. You had not to keep up an establishment. You hadn’t got to stay, as a business man had, by your work. You could take your work with you. You could go away quietly to some place like Villefranche and work there till things were straight.
‘And I never thought that you needed to worry over things like that,’ she said.
‘People get told about the big prices authors get. They never realize how little they can get.’ And he told her of an evening when he had been dining with Stacy Aumonier. The evening paper had fallen open at the review of Michael Joseph’s book on ‘Short Story Writing for Profit’, to which Stacy had contributed a preface. ‘Mr Stacy Aumonier,’ the review began, ‘is one of the half-dozen living writers to whom the short story is an art.’ Stacy had laughed. ‘That’s pretty ironic,’ he had said. ‘Every post brings me in a great wad of press cuttings saying that I’m one of the six best short story writers. I’ve not sold a story in America for eight months. And I’m so poor that I don’t know where the money comes from for the weekly bills.’
‘You won’t be able to stay very long in Hollywood, then.’
The journey there and from California to London, if he went second on the boat, would cost a hundred pounds. Whatever was left over from Stanley’s generosity he could spend in Hollywood. He supposed living would cost him there about forty pounds a week. He could not see beyond that parting. Life would have to be begun again then. ‘I’ve got to make a speech this evening,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go.’
She asked him when he expected to have done his speech.
‘At the latest by twelve.’
‘I might be at Toni’s then.’
‘I’ll look in on the chance.’
‘Do that.’
As he walked up Lexington to his apartment, he began to phrase his speech. But though he saw the outline of his speech, though he knew how one argument would lead him to another, he could not frame the actual sentences. ‘It’ll be all right, when I’m on my feet,’ he thought. As he lay back in the warm water of his bath, he felt confident and unflurried. And then just as he began to dress, the drink died on him.
It was a sensation that he had never had before; that you never would have out of America. In England if you drink too much, you become drunk and that is all there is to it. In America drink has the cumulative quality of a drug. For a week Gordon had been drinking heavily. During the last thirty-six hours he had been drinking solidly. At no point during that time had he been within miles of being drunk. He had had complete control of all his faculties. He had behaved normally. He could remember everything that had happened. He had scarcely felt unwell. But all the while the world he had been looking at had grown more and more unreal. He had seen it through drugged eyes, and now suddenly the support that had sustained him during those hours was removed. He did not feel ill. He did not feel unhappy. He just felt inert, lifeless, sunk, incapable of effort. He knew now what people meant when they talked about ‘drink dying on you.’
With a detached indifference he made his way down the passage to the Biltmore, with its throng of expensively dressed men and women. Eve Stuart with an excited air and vast corsage of orchids was welcoming her guests. He was sitting between Blair Niles, she told him, and Amelia Ear-hart. Blair Niles was one of his oldest New York friends.
He wanted to ask about her new book. It had been described to him as a male ‘La Prisonnière.’ He had wanted to know what her attitude was to the problem. He had been told that she had treated it pathologically; that men were born that way, she had said. And there was nothing to be done about it. Himself he had believed that once. He didn’t now. It was because women had become so tiresome that men went that way. It was as much a faute de mieux as schoolboy orgies were. Men couldn’t be bothered with what they couldn’t trust. When women demanded three men at the same time they shouldn’t be surprised if men walked out on them; if they took a grubby substitute.
For Amelia Earhart he had the respect and interest that over five continents her gallantry had won for her. Yet as he sat next her at the high table that was raised in a circle round the pit in which the seven hundred guests were gathered, he had no wish except to sit back in his chair, silent. He did not feel curious or hungry or excited. He did not even feel nervous about his speech. He did not care.
The evening went its course. He knew that probably the last thing Amelia Earhart would want to do would be to discuss flying with someone who knew nothing about flying. But he could think of nothing else to talk about. So he talked of that, not very intelligently, and bored her probably. Then the man on the other side of her turned to her. And she began talking away from him. He turned round to Blair Niles. He felt they were good enough friends to make allowances for one another. ‘I’m just sunk, Blair,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I sit quiet?’
And she nodded sympathetically. In America one could make an excuse like that. In a world where one was pouring poison into oneself every day one had to accept excuses of that kind. So he sat quietly and looked down into the pit where the subscribers sat, and across the pit to the opposite curve of the horseshoed table. It seemed very far away. It would be hard, he thought, to make his voice carry to the far corner. Then the speeches started. Eve Stuart began to introduce the guests. They placed a microphone in front of her; from the other side of the room the voice echoed back six seconds later. That must be hard to speak against, thought Gordon. It blurred every sentence. It made a whispering gallery of the room. He had not guessed how hard it was going to make it till he himself rose to speak. It’ll be all right, he had told himself, as he sat there waiting. An audience was like an electric current. The moment he was on his feet, he would catch vitality from them. But the room seemed blurred when he stood up. He did not feel nervous, simply lost. He pitched his voice to the farthest end of the room; he had got there, he felt. He wondered if those on the nearer side were hearing. Then the announcer moved the microphone in front of him. It was the first time he had ever talked into a microphone, except upon the radio. His voice bellowed back at him, a second later than he spoke. To be repeated from across the room six seconds later. He lost the audience. He did not know if he was talking to the people in the pit or to the metal contrivance that re-duplicated his voice to him. His voice had no reality for him. The moment had no reality for him. He hesitated. He was nearer to panic than he had ever been. If he had cared at all, he would have panicked. But he did not care. The one person who had mattered had got lost. He could not be bothered about these people. He would stand here and say his piece and then sit down. He did not know if he had succeeded or if he had failed. He stood there and talked. His voice booming back at him, the people in the pit a mist. He was out of touch with his audience. But he found and gave utterance to words. There was applause when he sat down. He lolled back in his chair. ‘I shan’t be able to make Toni’s tonight,’ he thought.
He was woken next morning by the bell of his telephone. He glanced at his watch. Nine-thirty. He had slept that long. It was his agent speaking. There was a cable from London for him. As early as that! Then he remembered. London time was four hours ahead of New York time.
‘You’d better read it out,’ he said.
There was a pause. Then a puzzled voice saying:
‘There must be something wrong here. I can’t make head or tail of this.’
‘Perhaps I shall.’
‘It’s from Stanley. It says: Three hundred pounds maximum stop good idea if stop if not not.’
Gordon chuckled. It was typical of Stanley, in its wit, its appositeness, its generosity. He could have a clear month, probably more, in Hollywood. But in the clear grey dawn of his return to sanity he knew very well the folly of such a trip. Because they were lonely and unhappy he and Joan had turned to one another. With their hearts and minds full of another person they had clung together. But they could only make trouble for each other in California. They would spoil whatever it might be that they might one day mean to one another. There might one day come a time when they would make such a flight together, but it would not be now; it would not be this way. He rang up Joan.
‘I’ve a cable from Stanley,’ he said. ‘I’ll read it you.’
She laughed. ‘It’s like him, that.’ Then, after a pause: ‘I had a letter today from London.’
‘How many pages long was it?’
‘Are you happy?’
‘Indescribably.’
He laughed. ‘You’d better have dinner with me the night before you start.’
‘You’re not coming with us?’
‘I don’t think so, Joan.’
There was a pause.
‘On Friday, anyhow,’ she said.
They dined very quietly in the speakeasy they had gone to their first morning, the speakeasy which was so like a restaurant that you would have thought it was one. And they drank wine that might quite possibly have come from Germany, as though they were in a restaurant. And they talked eagerly, intimately: as though on this last night they needed to get said all that would have to wait so long for saying.
‘It’s strange to think,’ he said, ‘that in ten days’ time we shall be six thousand miles apart.’
‘I wonder when we’ll meet again.’
‘I wonder what we’ll be when we meet again.’
‘We met at the wrong time.’
‘People usually do.’
‘That first time wasn’t.’
‘Wasn’t it?’
‘I was lonely then. I was looking for somebody. I met you. I thought you were that someone. I was so mad at having to leave the game before you came back.’
‘And I was so anxious to impress you by making lots of runs.’
‘I so wanted you to get out.’
‘Usually I do so easily.’
‘And I was so sure you’ld come and see me. I couldn’t think why you didn’t. I kept saying to myself, “This evening he’s bound to come.” ’
‘I went to see you act.’
‘And you didn’t come round?’
‘I thought your life would be so full.’
‘It wasn’t. There wasn’t anyone.’
‘I wonder what would have happened if I had gone round?’
‘I wonder.’
It would have altered his whole life, he supposed, if he had. They had both been heart-free then. They had both had a certain virginity of emotion to give. Would they have made life or ruined it for one another? Or would it have worked out in any case to some such compromise as the present was. He looked at her. He had never had such a comrade as she had been; who was so easy, who was such fun to be with, who followed his thoughts so quickly, to whom he could talk in shorthand. She was the finest person he had ever met. Beauty and brains and breeding. Where else could he find those three so well allied? Yet sooner or later they might have found themselves pulling in opposite directions.
‘All the men who’ve been in my life,’ she had once said, ‘have resented my work: have been angry with my work for coming between them and me. You understand that.’
And just because he did understand that he knew how hard any permanent alliance on whatever basis could have been for them. An actress had to be near capitals: New York, or London. He would have had to make his life where her work was. He would have had to cut himself off from all that varied experience of travel from which his talent had been nourished. Either he would have stood in her way or she in his. Or else they would have gone separate ways with the inevitable result. Although they understood each other better than anyone else in the world understood them, it might be that it was better for them this way: with these occasional meetings: these occasional signals waved across time and miles. It might be that they could mean more to one another this way: that ambitious people, people with work to do, were not meant to have the solid domestic peace that curbed adventure: that their private lives must always be a strain so that they might throw themselves into their work the more completely. It might be. ‘I don’t think there’ll ever come a time,’ said Gordon, ‘when we shan’t mean something to one another.’
‘Oh, darling, I so hope not.’
Of all the life that had surged for him during the last year their friendship alone seemed likely to be with him at the next year’s end.
They went to a picture after dinner, and afterwards they went back armed with sandwiches to Gordon’s flat. It was the last time they would be alone for many months. It was a sentimental moment. He imagined that Joan was as responsive as he was, in the right setting, to the moment and the mood. But they both knew without need of parley, that they meant much more to one another that one night. So they talked quietly, hand in hand. It was after one that Gordon said: ‘I’d better be seeing you home now.’
Next day there was the clatter of the station, the start of the 20th Century, the flowers, the crowds, the presents, the good lucks, and the good-byes, with Joan for one moment held close against him, her lips on his. Then there was the scream of the whistle. And with slow, inexorable increase of haste, the car was passing into the dark tunnel. The silver lights of the 20th Century were being lost in the murk and darkness. Ten days and an ocean and a continent would be between them. ‘That’s that,’ he thought. There remained only his good-bye party. Then it would all be over.