THE SKY DOMED UP into blue infinity; the ocean sparkled and shone as though it were a summer sea. On the decks of the Normandie coatless passengers lazed and walked in the warm sunlight of the benign May morning.
Lying back in her steamer chair, Vee was acquainting herself with peace again. It was good to be on this great sea, calm and well once more, headed toward the Paris and London she knew and loved; it was good to have survived all the darkness and hatred and pain and be looking forward once again. “I’m a survivor,” she thought, and smiled a little. “I guess I survive things.”
This trip was a sudden decision, at least on the surface. When she had left the hospital in middle March, she had lived at Ann’s house for a week, and met new people and gone to the theater. When Ann and Fred pressed her to go to the Coast with them, some instinct told her that she must not accept. “I’m on my own again. If I go somewhere, I’ll go alone.”
When the week was up, she had gone home, to begin the business of re-establishing her life again. It was hard at first, every room in her apartment, every table and chair, had associations with Jas; the tenacity of pain startled and dismayed her. She would still spring out of a dream about Jas or the baby, shaken and aching, she would still wake in the earliest dawn every few days and feel the stinging in her eyes. But she would grow calm again and know that she was climbing to a clearer place at last. That made the difference.
It was over. Everything with Jas was done and over. The very phrase could still pierce and sear, the wasteful phrase, the bitter, lonely phrase. But the fact behind the phrase was clean and sane.
She schemed purposefully to lessen the desolation of the slow days. She went to dinner with friends who meant little, she had engagements with men who seemed dull and mild. But she told herself this was an interim period, a mourning period, and the sorrow in it was eased by a hope that it would soon end.
She devised occupations for the days. The luckiest idea she had was to set about the business of finding the new apartment she would have to move into in the fall when her lease was up. She found a delightful place, with a small terrace, and a month slipped by while she did the basic decorating.
Once Mr. Ralsey came to call on her. They talked shop, and he wondered whether this coming summer wasn’t to be the last for many years for buying trips abroad. She smiled meaningfully at him, and he smiled back and shrugged elaborately.
And the next morning she woke up, and it was a sunny day, and she stretched lazily over her breakfast tray and said, “Dora, I think I’ll go to Europe. Half vacation, half business. It’s nearly two years since I went last time.”
So here she was. She wasn’t happy, no, but she was at peace again.
And about one thing, she knew triumph. Yes, triumph, for the long, stubborn battle had at last been won. And she and the Vederles were the victors.
The letters that had been kept from her until she was at home again, her next letters to Washington, her telegrams and cables, and finally her long-distance telephone calls direct to the Visa Division in Washington—they had threaded in and out of everything she had done in the last eight weeks.
And at last, the cable announcing the visas had come from Dr. Vederle. And even that cable had distress and disappointment in it.
ZURICH WRITES ALL GRANTED VISAS BUT NOT BEFORE MAY, JUNE, MAYBE MUCH LATER, HAVING NO QUOTA NUMBERS EARLIER. OUR APPLICATIONS MADE APRIL THIRTY-EIGHT. CONSULATE SHOULD HAVE RESERVED NUMBERS. SWISS PERMITS EXPIRING ONCE MORE. CAN YOU ONCE AGAIN HELP US?
That was when she had telephoned Washington, instead of writing. She was infuriated and showed it. Every conceivable thing to plague them had happened or been made to happen in this “Vederle case.” On the telephone, and then a few days later, Washington had been helpful, even sympathetic and regretful. But the explanation of “May, June, maybe much later” seemed airtight.
“The reason why the Consul General,” the letter read in part, “cannot give an absolute guaranty that visas will be issued to an applicant on a certain date and must base his estimate upon the indications at the time of his report is due to the fact that there are a number of factors in a visa case which cannot be determined precisely in advance, as, for example, the possibility which always exists that prior applicants who previously have been unable to qualify for visas have procured evidence adequate to establish their qualification under the law, and, as prior applicants, they must be considered before persons who apply after them.”
Who knew how many thousands, she mused, how many tens and scores of thousands of Germans and Austrians had registered with all the American Consulates long before that April day over a year ago when the Vederles had first applied? She remembered that Larry Meany had once told her the number of German-Austrian visas in the U.S. quota—about 27000, he had said. But he had also explained that this was split among all the consulates, and that each one could issue only ten per cent of their small total in any one month.
She had written all this to Ascona. She had gone to the Swiss Legation in New York, and then passed their message along to Dr. Vederle, too. With the letter from Zurich announcing that their visas would be granted, the Swiss authorities would extend their permits once again. Even that much of a document from the American Consulate, had power.
And then she knew, intuitively and positively, that the Vederles’ hope lay with the new quota year and not before. She knew, as certainly as if she could see the official ledgers, that there were no more visas left for May and June. Ten per cent a month for ten months—that must leave May and June blank. Even this she had written them; and urged them to stretch their thin, depleted patience for just a few weeks more.
A few days ago, she had cabled:
ARRIVING NORMANDIE MAY 23. MAY I VISIT YOU?
Their reply had lifted her spirits and filled her with pride. They had become so close. They trusted each other, they knew they could count on each other. They were friends; without faces yet, they knew everything that mattered about one another.
She was eager to meet them, to look into their faces and know them. They didn’t suspect it, but they had played a tremendous part in her widening world. They had made her see her own heartbreak as a symbol of the heartbreak of countless others. That was a great opening of horizons; in a different way, it was a tight link between her and the others. The link was firm now; it would not shatter. The horizons were clear now; they would not dim.
Long before, Vera Marriner had lain in a more positive sunshine than this one now warming her; she had lain on hot white sand and browsed through her memories as if she were browsing through some dim library open only to herself. She knew then that one volume was still missing and would be missing until she herself could formulate its contents. Some instinct told her then that not until she knew what in life mattered most to her would she be able to shape this ghostly volume into a substance.
Now she began to see some rough outlines for it. In the costly, indelible inks of the last terrible months, she had been sketching in its main points. She knew now some of the things that did matter to her, that would always matter as long as she were to live.
It was sketchy yet, this new awareness; it wasn’t graced by a formal pattern. But it had to do with that flashed parallelism that united her with all the others. Always she would be on the side of the betrayed and abandoned; she would fight with them because she knew what they felt. The ones rejected by some new regime, the others misused by some old economy, still others wounded and hurt by the strong and the many—with these she would instinctively and forever stand.
It would need a stand, it would need a fight, through the horrible war that was surely coming this year or next or next, and then on afterward when the immediate battle was won. All the ones who had ever hungered for security, who had seen their beloved children cheated of a chance for growth and opportunity and health, all the millions who yearned and were denied—these millions would be allies in every land, across every border, and she one small fighter with them.
She had bought her uniform with the coin of her own agony; she had forged her weapons from the steel of her own despair. Now she knew, and whenever and wherever the armies fought, she would be fighting, too. This was the lifetime in which the hottest of the battles would rage. You could feel it everywhere, in every nation, the new excitement rising in the blood of those who had been poor long enough, cheated long enough, treated long enough as if they were interlopers and trespassers on the earth that belonged to them because they were its children.
She had never understood “The meek shall inherit the earth,” and she had always resisted the counsel of acceptance that lay tacit within it. Now she heard from somewhere the rebuttal, rising like a battle hymn all over the world. The meek would never inherit the earth. But the earth’s people were not going to be meek much longer. If there were to be another war, it would be their war and they would win their war and their earth as well.
The sky domed up into blue infinity, the ocean sparkled, and Vera Marriner lay back in the warming sun and felt herself united now not only with the Vederles and with Bronya but with all the unknown millions behind and beyond them.
At the San Francisco airport, a shining silver plane flew in from the south and circled for its landing. Ann Willis watched through the window for her first sight of Beth Crown.
She had left Fred in Los Angeles for this two-day visit. During their last trip West, she had been unable to accept Beth’s invitation to visit her; she was determined to work in a week end with her this time.
It had been several months since Beth had written. But even the short, stilted letters that had come during the first weeks after the divorce had shown that she was not “getting over it,” as women of livelier temperaments did. She knew that Beth had gone home to her parents in Minnesota for the holidays, and then back to the small flat she had taken in San Francisco. And when she herself had written she had obeyed Beth’s instructions, “Don’t ever write me about Jasper; I’ll get over the divorce faster if I forget him completely.”
Almost as soon as she was out of the airplane, Ann knew that Beth had not forgotten him at all. The too-thin face and neck, the somber eyes, the low voltage of Beth’s whole personality told her that she still resisted, six months after the event, the divorce she had never wanted.
It was a day of mellow May sunshine, and as they drove off together in Beth’s roadster, Ann remembered that this very morning the Normandie had docked, and Vee was already in Paris. These two women who had loved Jasper Crown—how different they were and how different the ways in which they each met the disaster they had come upon through him. Vee would finally step clear of whatever remnants of grief still remained, step clear forever, and one day find love and happiness again. But Beth?
Beth had chosen San Francisco merely because her girlhood friends, Sammy and Liz Dales, lived there; they had never known much about her years with Jasper and wouldn’t remind her of them. Liz Dales ran a decorating business, and Beth had taken a job with her. She didn’t want to go back to New York for another few months. By then it would be easier to face everybody.
It wasn’t until they were both ready for bed, in Beth’s apartment that night, that their talk dipped below surfaces it had clung to all day.
“I just can’t seem to get used to it,” Beth said, with no transition from the thing she had been saying a moment before. “I’m not one of these modern women, I know it, but I can’t get over the awfulness of being divorced. I never will.”
Her voice was colorless, her whole being hurt and muffled. Ann knew there was no possible way to change her attitudes; they were too basic.
“Out at the ranch in Reno,” Beth went on, “I used to wonder about some of these women. Couldn’t they see that any marriage is better than no marriage? That being divorced and publicly discarded is worse than anything that can go wrong in marriage?”
“Oh, Beth, you don’t really believe that—” She clipped off the rush of disagreement. There was no use and it would only upset Beth. She felt out of sorts with her, and for a swift moment, she wished she had not come. But that was bad of her; they had been friends for so many years.
“Yes, I really do.” Beth looked at her searchingly. “I wouldn’t have gone to Reno, except that Jas told me in advance and that forced me.”
Ann looked away. The very mention of his name stirred the contempt and hatred in her mind.
“You needn’t look away, Ann,” Beth said, a little breathlessly. “I’ve imagined the whole thing through, anyway, and how happy and proud he is, and all of it. All of it.”
“All of what? Happy and proud about what?”
“The baby’s born already, isn’t it? I left New York October first, and he knew then—”
“What baby? What are you talking about, Beth? He knew what then?” Her mind snapped to attention.
Beth was staring at her.
“Isn’t Jas married again? Didn’t he get married the day the decree—? He told me I had to get it, because he’d been having an affair and they were going to have a baby—” Her voice splintered into the jagged tones of a primitive and terrible jealousy.
Ann tingled with a remarkable excitement. He had told Beth that on October first? But it wasn’t until New Year’s Eve—why, then, he must have—oh, no, it couldn’t be, no, not even Jasper. But that was absurd of her. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to get his own way, to force—
“He never married anybody, Beth. There isn’t any baby,” she merely said in a flat and inelastic voice.
“Ann! No—you can’t mean that—he wouldn’t have said—”
Ann shrugged. But her tight lips betrayed the gesture.
“Jasper is not married, Beth. There isn’t any baby.”
Beth had risen to her feet. She stood, thin and older-looking by ten years than she need have been. Her mouth drew out wide into a caricatured line. Ann had never seen her so violent about anything.
“He—then he tricked me. You mean he tricked and cheated me into going to Reno? He told me he’d been to doctors again and that he was all right. I was fool enough to believe that—even though I knew he didn’t really want children, just wanted badges to show the world that he could—it was the one thing he ever suffered about.”
Yes, Ann thought. And when he gets good and ready, he’ll marry and get himself the badge and have everything just the way he wanted it. But Beth didn’t know that; she never would.
Beth walked about the room. She pounded one fist against the other.
“It was all a lie. He lied to force me. I never would have gone—I wouldn’t be going through this now, this horrible feeling that I’m a divorcée, when the very word makes me writhe. He tricked me, Ann, he got the divorce by fraud. But—but that’s illegal!”
“I don’t know about things like that,” Ann said. “Only a lawyer could tell you about that. I just know he isn’t married and there’s no baby.”
She saw Beth’s eyes go to the telephone.
“Only a lawyer. Yes, I could call Mr. Grosvenor long distance and—”
“Who?”
“My divorce lawyer, in Reno. It’s old Nathan Grosvenor.”
“Hasn’t he a son who once—”
“Yes, yes,” Beth said impatiently. “He was connected with JCN at the beginning. Didn’t I ever mention that? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I could phone him now, old Mr. Grosvenor, I mean, and ask him—”
She went to the telephone this time, and lifted the receiver. Then she looked at her watch and hung the receiver back again.
“No, it’s too late. But in the morning, I’ll find out. He can’t, Ann, Jas can’t just cheat and—” A small cry escaped the hand she had pressed to her mouth. “This needn’t have happened to me. I wouldn’t have ever—”
“What would you call him for, Beth? Just to find out if it was fraud in a legal sense?”
Suddenly Beth collapsed into a chair. Everything about her seemed to collapse. Her shoulders sank, her hands hung limply at the end of her drooping arms, her voice fell to a whisper. But when she spoke, Ann knew that a hard core of resolve had formed inside her inert body. She had something new to live for now.
“Not just to find out, no. You can have a divorce decree set aside if it was obtained by fraud, if you were coerced by fraud.”
“You’d have to prove it, though, wouldn’t you? Not just say he said it, but—prove it?”
For a moment, Beth was caught up by this challenge. Then in the next moment, she went to a small cabinet, unlocked it, and drew out some papers. “I have a letter that proves he said it,” she said while she searched for it. “He sent it with flowers to the airport. ‘Not for my sake, but for the baby’s, I ask you to keep what I told you a secret’—I know it by heart, and how badly he felt that his news the night before had upset me.” She found it, glanced rapidly through it, and then handed it to Ann. “Look at the date. October first.”
Ann read it. The swine, the prodigious swine. She had said that to his face in the hospital corridor. She had told him she was one of his enemies.
Yet for a moment, she wavered. She could probably dissuade Beth if she really wanted to stop her from this attempt. She needed time to think, to decide what it would mean to Beth, for instance, if she tried and failed. And if she tried and succeeded.
“You wouldn’t get anything out of having it set aside, though, would you, Beth? What good would it really do you? You’d never go back to him, anyway.”
Beth’s voice rose, shriller than she had ever heard it. There was nothing colorless in it now.
“No, maybe it wouldn’t do any good. But he always did everything he ever wanted to me. He can’t trick and trap me into this, and get away whole. If I can smash this divorce up, I’d wait then—and get it when I want it. I hate this divorce—I always hated it. If there’s any way to undo it—”
Ann remained silent. Yes, it might be Beth, after all. Someday, she had predicted on that first terrible night when Vee had told her, sometime, somebody he had let down or double-crossed would have the guts to hit back.
But she had never thought of Beth. She had forgotten the terrible strength in these passive, implacable women.
Far away in the valley, the train’s whistle sounded. On the small station platform at Locarno on the last day of May, Franz and Christa waited in an extraordinary impatience. They had driven over from Ascona half an hour too early.
“It will be so queer to see her at last,” Christa said for the tenth time. “If only my English were better.” She leaned forward to peer down the shining rails.
He also looked out to see if the train had rounded the long, slow bend, but he made no answer. After a year of the daily English lessons, it rankled in her that she was not as apt a pupil in the new language as the children.
“Maybe she will stay longer than just two days,” he said. “If she hasn’t made too tight a schedule for starting the work part of her trip.
“We’d better see how she likes us first.”
“Yes. There’s the train now.”
They both fell silent. Until the moment they had opened her cable and found, not another message about visas or motive letters or affidavits, but the astounding news that she was soon arriving in Europe, they had neither of them dreamed of meeting her except on that still distant day when they should land in New York.
It was a thrilling moment. Often they had speculated about how it would be to see her and speak to her at last. They had wondered whether they would be drawn to each other in the flesh as they had been, increasingly, in their feelings. They admitted freely that they wanted their strange relationship to move on unharmed when it finally shifted from the plane of the written word and the printed cable.
Franz looked forward to her visit for a private reason besides. It would be a stimulant for Christa to welcome and know this woman whom she already trusted and admired. Indeed, to be candid about it, this visit would be for them all a blessed break in the monotony of this last waiting.
Weeks ago, when Vera Stamford had sent them a copy of the Washington letter explaining the last-straw “May, June, maybe much later,” and had sent with it her own forthright, human plea to stretch their patience until the new quota year began on July first—he had recognized at once that she was implying that there was exactly nothing more to be done except wait. But he had known, too, how formidable the load of time would be for the weeks that remained. Particularly for Christa.
There had been no further plea that they stay on in Switzerland. But some part of her spirit had gone into hiding. She was spinning a cocoon for herself to dwell in. And its name was Ascona.
The train was slowing to its stop.
“There she is, Franz. At the end; that must be she.”
Christa started up the platform, and in two long strides, he was abreast of her. He was pleased to hear the excited note in her voice; with some amusement he noted that his pulse had quickened. Far ahead on the platform he saw a slim, small figure.
“Oh, she’s beautiful, Franz. She looks quite beautiful. She looks so young, too.”
Yes, it was she. She had stopped, and was looking about her. He saw her eyes turn toward them. She smiled.
Vee saw the tall, striding man, the blonde woman, coming toward her. She broke into a little run and came toward them. How nice they are, she thought, how—
“You are Vera Stamford,” Franz said. His voice was husky.
“And you’re Dr. Vederle—and you’re Mrs. Vederle.” Her own voice was strange in her ears, as she put out her hands to both of them at once.
“This is—es ist wunderbar,” Christa said, and the excitement of this meeting was in her voice, too.
“For the last hour I thought, ‘What if we don’t recognize each other on the platform?’ ” Vee said, laughing. “I should have sent you a picture of me.”
“We would have known you,” he said, and his voice still struck at her with the warm, deep notes in it. She looked up at him, saw the dark, alive eyes, the candid face welcoming, her, liking her. She looked at Christa, at her delicate coloring, the shy smile, and she was stirred at the ready affection they each let her see.
They collected her bags then, and took her off in the small car they had hired for her visit. An awkwardness fell upon them for the first moments of the drive, but that did not dismay her. She had thought that it must be so, until they had had a little time.
“Paul and Ilse were furious that we would not let them come, too,” Dr. Vederle said. “They are so excited as puppies.”
“Yes, they have—that whole day, they ask, the train to go to,” Christa said.
Vee did not catch all of what she said, for the accent was heavy and difficult. “They’re handsome children,” she said. “That snapshot you sent of them was my only idea of what any of you looked like.”
All through the drive, dots of silence followed each spurt of talk, but it was a silence filled with their immediate response to each other. Vee was enchanted by the flowery countryside; she was going to be at ease and happy here with these two people. Talking with Mrs. Vederle would be hard at first; the barrier of language would stand between them. But Dr. Vederle—in spite of the almost perfect letters he wrote, she had never dreamed he would speak English this way. There was a faint accent, yes; the letter s buzzed a bit with the z sound and he stretched out some vowels. But otherwise—
“I wrote you that I know only a little German,” she said impulsively. “I’m so glad I don’t have to try.”
“I—but not I—I do not speak so well English as Franz and the children,” Christa said.
“You will, when you get to America, you’ll see,” Vee said. As she had done with Bronya, at the beginning, she put a little space of time around each word.
“When we get to America,” Dr. Vederle said. “This family knows those words better than the Ten Commandments.” He chuckled a little, but Vee did not laugh.
The house was charming, a flat-roofed cottage of rough cement, set on a rounded knoll at the edge of the lake. An outside staircase of rough stone bricks climbed up one side; the garden about it bloomed with roses and neat flower beds.
“I work in garden—all that time,” Christa said. “Like to home.”
The children stood side by side, primly waiting for their descent from the car. Paul was bigger than she had expected; he would be tall and distinguished and handsome, one day, she thought, like his father. Ilse looked like Christa; she was a picture child in the starched pinafore dress she wore.
Even the children’s voices held the special note that said this was a great occasion. Only after the first polite greetings were over did they subside into more ordinary tones.
“I know all about you,” Paul said shyly. “My father and mother always talk how you work visas in America.”
Dr. Vederle laughed aloud.
“Mrs. Stamford does other things besides get visas for us, Paul.”
“You’re just as our family,” Ilse said, nodding. “That’s what I know.”
“You see what we say here about you,” Dr. Vederle said, and Vee knew he was pleased at the inadvertent testimony.
The faint constraint wore away with the afternoon. By evening, the children treated her like any grownup, pleasant enough but inevitably of another category. Paul asked a dozen questions about the Normandie, and about the exact height of the buildings in New York. Ilse managed to seat herself next her always, tucking her small body close, on the porch settee or inside on the sofa, in a wordless friendship. The physical closeness caught Vee’s mind back to the buried thoughts about wanting a child. But she banished the thoughts in stern refusal.
Later, when the children were asleep, the three of them sat together talking until it was quite late. There was still the formality of the “Mrs. Stamford,” and from Vee the absence of any direct address by name. But apart from that, there went from one to the other of them the quick, sure intimacy of people who had lived through something arduous together until they had won. They retraced the successive steps they had each taken, and as Franz pointed to particular moments that were the high spots of his anger or despair, Vee repaid his confidences with a similar recital of her own feelings as this or that cable or letter came.
Christa said little. From time to time, Franz would turn to her and speak in German, and she would nod rapidly and gratefully for being saved from the difficulty of trying to follow everything. But she seemed pleased and interested throughout the evening; Franz noticed how she watched every gesture Vee made, how she studied the lovely, vivid face with its deep-socketed gray eyes, its fine modeling. Christa had said, “She’s beautiful, she’s quite beautiful.” Franz knew what she meant; this was not an orthodox prettiness, no, but there was an immediate striking appeal that had made Christa say it. He remembered the day a year ago when he had amused himself by trying to visualize her from the cool, official data in her affidavit, and he smiled.
“Have you a Steinway piano?” he suddenly said. His eyes gleamed with a kind of mischief.
“Yes, but that’s a funny question. Why?”
“Once I tried to imagine about you, and how you looked, short or tall, thin or fat, and also what you liked; I thought you might have a Bechstein, but then I changed the brand to a Steinway. Do you like music?”
“I love it,” she said. She was pleased that he should have tried to visualize her. She looked toward the piano.
“Franz plays it so—so wonderful,” Christa said. “You will admire.” She looked questioningly at Franz, but he shook his head.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “It is more interesting to talk now.”
The talk went, inevitably, to the news, to Hitler’s livid attacks on the British “encirclement” policy, to his recent renouncing of the naval accord treaty with Britain and the 1934 Nazi pact with Poland. They talked of the Italians in Albania, and of the increasing stridency of Hitler’s demands for the return of Danzig and a road through the Corridor to East Prussia. And they talked of war. Not whether or not there would be a war, as Vee reported so many people in Paris, and before that in New York, were still talking. But only of when it would start. In the fall? Sooner than that?
It brought them even closer. Vee knew the special fear these two must have, to be stranded without a country, without citizenship if war came before…
“It is not so easy,” Franz said slowly, and with a trace of the huskiness she had heard on the station platform, “to know how to say ‘thank you’ to you.”
“Oh, don’t say—please, it would make me feel—” She looked at each of them in turn and they all fell silent.
Suddenly she wished she could tell them what unsuspected role they had played for her—but one could never speak out about such things. Someday perhaps, back home, long after they had settled there, then if they were friends and close enough, then she might try to make them see it the other way round.
“But just the same,” he said, as if he were finishing a sentence, “if we do get to America in time, it will”—his dark eyes sought hers—“it will be you who has saved us.”
She made no answer. She could not.
In bed that night, under the bright moonlit squares of the windows, Vee lay waiting for sleep. She had stopped hearing their voices from the room across the small hall. The night was still, the air fragrant with a strange, tropical sweetness. And though she could not sleep, though her mind still carried her sometimes across the ocean, back to New York, back to Jasper, she lay for the most part in peace. “The world is round,” she thought quizzically. “You come to a frightful precipice and you think it’s the end of everything. But then you find that the world goes on from there. There aren’t any edges.”
This meeting with the Vederles had balm and solace in it. It held reaffirmation and hope for her. For fourteen years, their love had lasted; it was obvious they loved each other still. Through good years and bad, it had endured; it was steadfast, it was reliable. Here was this man, brilliant and renowned, yet apparently free of that excess of self-emphasis that was a prime characteristic of all the success worshipers. He had strength, but it was for others o use as well as for himself. He had force and it was for something bigger than ambition. She had sensed it in his letters. Now she knew.
There were other such men in the world. One day she might find—She broke off the thought abruptly. Patience, she counseled herself; it takes time. You don’t fall in love every minute, you don’t find happiness at every turn. But this meeting with them today was a strong stimulant to hoping. Someday she would meet a man who had the kind of clear quality that was so apparent when it was really there. It comforted her, strangely, even to be able to hope happiness again.
She fell asleep soon, her hand curled under her cheek. When she awoke, it was to a mixture of sunlight, the good smell of coffee, subdued voices drifting up from downstairs. She dressed quickly and ran down, eager to be with them again.
She stayed a week. It was a queer, variable week of shifting mood and color. Some of its hours had an easy, sunny simplicity, when they took walks or drives through the luxuriant countryside, when they sat listening to Franz playing Brahms ballades and Bach preludes and fugues, playing Beethoven and Schumann and Mozart. And then would come hours when she guessed that Christa and Franz as well were caught in an aching tension about their future; that they were both tormented by their exasperating inability to plan with certainty, to measure the time that would elapse before they could find themselves a permanent status once more. Never before had she realized so intimately that “the stateless” live always with the sensation of being lost and adrift; never before had she known how safe, how precious, it was merely to know you were a citizen of a nation.
And she realized other things, as the mornings and afternoons and evenings unrolled, and the veil of first strangeness was lifted between them all. She knew that Christa was afraid, that under her quiet smile and speech lay fear. It was only through small clues that she detected the truth about Christa, but she was sure it was truth.
“Are all those American girls,” Christa asked suddenly one morning, “so—chic and—and so—their life controlling—like you, Vee?”
“Oh, my clothes,” Vee answered with a shrug. “I’m in the fashion business, so I have to pay attention to them.”
“But you about everything are so—so with ease. You travel by yourself—you—always American women are so—so—”
For a moment Vee was silent. Then she put her hand on Christa’s arm.
“Don’t be nervous about America,” she said gently. “It’s a wonderful country, you will see.”
Christa nodded slowly. “But I think—it must be now—they hate every foreigner there. Like all the countries.”
Vee’s heart contracted as she saw the look in the blue eyes. This year had humiliated Christa, frightened something in her.
Things as small as that were clues enough. Franz had fears too, but his were the fears anyone would have who had seen the hundred obstacles that could lie unsuspected between the application for visas and the moment one finally received them.
“July. The new American quota begins on the first of July,” he said in a reflective, dubious way one evening. “But maybe the Consulate will then present us with some new delays for several months; how can one know anything about it?”
“But they said officially the visas would be granted,” Vee said.
“Yes, I know.” He smiled ruefully. “Just the same, when I withdraw now some moneys for living expenses, and the bank balance grows always less, I pray they don’t suddenly raise some new question about my resources. For now some Vice-Consul would look at my bankbook and make surely the great discovery that I have no forty thousand francs but only thirty-two thousand. Ergo, I am a fraud, a cheat, a falsifier of documents.”
Vee did not smile in return. He was exaggerating, yes; but there was enough sickening possibility in his words…
“He’s afraid something will still happen to keep them in Europe,” she thought. “But Christa is just afraid. That’s different.”
“It will be over soon, Franz,” she said aloud. “The whole visa thing is—it’s not the way America is.”
“You wrote me once, ‘We’re not all like that,’ ” he said. He tilted his head a little to one side, and studied the cigarette he held in his hand. Then his eyes raised to hers. “That letter I remembered many, many times this year.”
The days and evenings passed, and Vee saw into their hearts and understood how it must be. Even their two children, safe with their parents as so many of Europe’s children no longer were, even these two tanned, healthy children were not really untouched by the year they had been through.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Paul?” she asked him idly once, while he rowed her along the shore in the old boat that went with the house.
He looked quite solemn for a moment.
“I shall like to be that man in the Consulate,” he replied, “that gives out the visas.”
It caught her heart. A child’s sense of ultimate glory, of the full magnificence of strength and power. It wasn’t funny. Oh, it was anything but funny.