Wheels within Wheels Page 13

  Shirley, however, had no intention of allowing the talk to wander.

  “You’re a busy man and I won’t waste your time. I’ve come to talk business,” he said.

  “That’s what this little desk is here for.”

  “I want to play the market.”

  The broker raised his eyebrows. He knew, as everyone else knew in New Orleans, that Shirley when everyone else was rising on the wave’s crest had been content to ride the trough, accepting his heritage as a European might: making no attempt to add to it. Ambitionless. So John had given way at last.

  “You are very wise,” said Tooley. “It’s madness to leave your money in bonds, when you can double it on the market in twelve months.”

  Shirley shook his head.

  “I’m not tampering with that money.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t touch capital.”

  “It’s the old parable of the talents.”

  “You may be right. But these bonds that bring me in my three thousand dollars every year are all I’ve got. I’d be lost without it. I’d not be risking that. No, it’s some money that’s come unexpectedly. I’d like a flutter with it. I want your advice.”

  “How much would it be?”

  “About three thousand dollars, and there’ll be some more coming in driblets.”

  “If I haven’t turned that into ten thousand dollars within a year, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “It’s not that I’m after so much. I want a gamble. I want excitement. I want uncertainty.”

  “I’m not sure if I can give you that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “There’s not such a thing as uncertainty in the stock market. Everything goes up.”

  He leant forward, and pulling a paper towards him, spread it open at the stock exchange transaction page. He tapped the long, close-printed columns with his finger.

  “Look at that. Look at those figures. Think what they were a year ago.”

  “They may not go on like that.”

  “Boy, they just can’t help it.”

  “There was such a thing as the South Sea Bubble.”

  “That was London. We’ve learnt all they could teach us. Now we’re starting. Boy, a country of this size that consumes all that it produces and can produce anything it needs, doesn’t need a cent of the rest of the world’s trade. Let France keep its rentiers. We’re past all that.”

  It was the kind of talk that Shirley had heard on all sides of him during the last few years. And it might be true. Probably it was. Better informed men than he seemed to think it was. He might make a fortune with his three thousand dollars just as the others had.

  He handed his cheque across.

  “There you are,” he said. “There’ll be more along in a few days. I’ll pay it in to you as it comes.”

  “You wanted the purchases to be on margin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Backed with all you’ve got?”

  “To the last cent.”

  “Hear that,” said the broker, turning to his secretary. “Make a note of that. Mr. Shirley’s purchases to be backed with all he’s got, to the last cent.”

  “And don’t bother to send me accounts till I ask for them. I’d rather have it as a surprise when I feel like one. I’ll keep my own score.”

  “Sure, that’s the way. It’ll be a pleasant surprise to you, John. I can promise that.”

  He held out his hand to say good-bye. Shirley was a real client now; a potential money-maker.

  It would be amusing, Shirley thought, if he did make money. At any rate, he would have something to make the passing of his days amusing.

  • • • • •

  There was a party that afternoon at the Country Club. A young people’s party for his niece who was in her last year at school and by the autumn would be definitely collegiate. It was the kind of party that ordinarily Shirley would have taken good care to avoid. There would be bridge and backgammon and dancing; possibly, since the sun was shining, an attempt at tennis. There would be much bright adolescent chatter: with the parents, several of whom were his contemporaries, grouped in a corner pluming themselves on their children’s promise. He had replied non-commitally to his brother’s invitation.

  “I will if I can,” he had said.

  “Which means you won’t.”

  He had meant it to mean that. But his interview with Tooley had quickened him to a nervous tension that needed the relief of action. “I’ll go and see what the party’s like,” he thought.

  • • • • •

  For Shirley it was a curious experience.

  He still thought of himself as young: yet here was a generation produced by men and women whom he had thought of as his contemporaries, that regarded his generation as middle-aged.

  He remarked as much to a girl next whom he had chanced to find himself and with whom he had fallen into talk.

  “I remember when my brother’s second child was born. I went with him to the nursing home to see it. There was a large room full of cradles. They were like so many monkeys with their screwed-up faces and half-clenched hands. It was strange to think that in seventeen years the funny crumpled little thing in its white woollen shawl might have grown into a girl who would be distracting one’s peace of mind. And now here are the contemporaries of those babies, grown up.”

  “You thought that then?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “You’re now?”

  “In the late thirties.”

  She looked at him curiously.

  “The late thirties. One doesn’t think of you as old.”

  “I don’t think of myself as old.”

  “Yet I think of your brother and your brother’s friends as old.”

  “That’s because you’ve associated them with authority. When you saw them first they were grown up. You were a child. You’re meeting a person like myself for the first time on equal terms: we’re both grown ups.”

  “You think of me as grown up, then?”

  He looked at her for the first time closely.

  There is a certain standardization about American feminine education that makes well-bred American girls slightly indistinguishable in the same way that the English public school makes a pattern of the English upper middle class. Shirley had classed the girl next whom he happened to find himself as “just another pretty debutante.” Looking at her now more closely, he suspected that she was more than that.

  There was much in her that was standardized: her willowy grace, her carefully prepared complexion, her neat hands, the absolute correctness of her clothes; and more than that, a certain national look of face. He had read much of the Creole beauties of Louisiana. And the type existed: magnolia pale skin, dark hair, dark eyes, a languid manner. But just as the various races that had colonized America had been absorbed into the American pattern, so had the Creole characteristics been absorbed into the uniformity of feature that made an American girl look American whether she came from Connecticut, California or Louisiana. There was all that in the girl who sat next to him. But there was more besides.

  In the slight sulkiness of that full soft mouth there was, he suspected, not merely the selfish, restless impatience of the very young, but a dissatisfaction because life in a large sense was offering less than she had dreamed. In the firmness of that jaw there was not just the spoilt child’s readiness to seize any pretty toy that lay to hand, but a resolve when something worth while came within her grasp to lay firm hold on it. From her grey eyes he suspected that. Everywhere except in her eyes was resolution, firmness, the American woman’s consciousness of her power and the resolve to turn it to her use. But in her eyes was a doubt of that capacity: a need to be guided, to be reassured, a suspicion that life was not quite as easy as she had been taught at school.

  That look aroused a feeling of kinship in Shirley. She was going to face the problems that he had faced, problems that the ma
jority of his fellow countrymen seemed unaware of; had overlooked, shirked, disregarded. He felt a need to help her or at least to say, “Yes, I know what it is you’re up against.” She was lonely probably, beneath that surface charm, that surface efficiency.

  He asked her whom she saw mostly; whether people of her own age.

  “For the most part.”

  “That’s where America’s different from Europe. Over here as far as I can see one stays with one’s contemporaries all one’s life. One remains with the generation one grows up with. It isn’t like that in Europe. People of fifty and of twenty are going to the same parties.”

  “You’ve been a lot to Europe?”

  “I’ve spent more of the last ten years out of America than in it.”

  It was an admission that ordinarily he made either with some diffidence or aggressively, according to the company he was in; since the average American distrusted equally the American who lived outside American and the American who had no settled job. But now he said it with a certain pride, as though the extent of his travels was an achievement.

  It was as an achievement, certainly, that the girl at his side took it.

  “You have? And I’ve never been outside America. Where have you been? Do tell me!”

  At that moment there was a call from the other end of the room.

  “Julia, come and cut in. This rubber’s finished.”

  She looked up, irresolute and thoughtful. Then her mouth set firmly.

  “No, no,” she said. “I’m tired. I’ll stand out of this one. I’ll come in later.”

  With a smile she turned back to Shirley.

  “One can play bridge any day.”

  He could not remember when anything more flattering had been said to him. Nor could he remember a conversation that had this particular quality of stimulation. It was the first time he had talked on equal terms to someone much younger than himself: not, at least, to any one so intrinsically young. For he did not count as young the self-possessed young persons whom he had met in Montmartre and on the pyjamaed beaches of Juan and Monte Carlo.

  They talked of Europe: of what Europe stood for. They talked of books and plays and pictures. They exchanged ideas. She deferred to his opinions in a way that no one else had for many years. As a young man, older men had said to him, “Now, tell me, what do you young people think of this?” He had been taken then as the spokesman of the young idea: as an exhibit. Of recent years those older men had not asked him his opinions: in their view he was a failure and his opinions valueless. But this girl sought his opinions in order to instruct herself. She was not curious to know what older people thought. She wanted to know what was, and what was not. She asked him questions because she wanted to know the answer. Yet at the same time, when his answers lay contrary to her own opinions, she did not accept them uncontentiously. She would put forward her own opinions and her reasons for holding those opinions, simply and clearly. Her reasons and her opinions were alike clear and simple. She listened to his arguments with an intent, thoughtful expression on her face. If she had felt any step of his argument unsound she would say, “Yes, but surely that argument wouldn’t hold with what you said just now.” She noticed any slip in the flow of his reasoning. He had to think closely and to talk well. In consequence, he found himself thinking and talking more clearly than he had done for years. She stimulated him as for many months he had not been stimulated. He was more than sorry when not only a call but an emissary from the bridge table demanded that his companion should cut in a rubber. She looked steadily and thoughtfully at him as she took her leave.

  “I don’t know when I’ve been so interested,” she said.

  “I hope it’s not the last we see of one another.”

  “It won’t be. I’ll see to that.”

  A moment later she was laughing and chattering: careless and irresponsible: one of the young people at whose feet life lay, who were already preparing to remove from their path the tiresome pedantries of his own generation. For a moment he and she had met as equals, as friends; now she had gone back to her world; as he had gone back to his. It was with a sense of loss that he strolled across the room towards his brother.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “That? Julia Maine.”

  “Not Hugh Maine’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Time’s revenge.”

  That she should be that man’s daughter.

  It showed how much he had been out of things that he had not realized Hugh had a daughter of that age; showed, too, how little in recent years he must have seen of Hugh that their talk had never once led them to the discussion of the seventeen-year-old daughter whose welfare must have been Hugh’s chief concern during the last decade. Yet he and Maine for a decade at least had been inseparable companions. Of the fun that he had had during the ten years when he had the most fun, from his sixteenth year to his twenty-sixth, he would have been hard put to it to find a single really amusing occasion that was not in some way associated with Maine.

  • • • • •

  It had been a curious and from the start an unequal friendship. Hugh Maine was seven years older than Shirley. They had never really met as equals though the stronger position had not lain consistently on the side of age. It was a relationship that had changed with the changing conditions that had directed it. Shirley had met Maine first when he was sixteen. He was a freshman at Tulane, his promise and his brilliance carrying him into a group of men several years older than himself: men who considered themselves the bright blood of New Orleans: who would give supper parties in the Quarter: who would drive homewards singing on the tops of cabs: who were in constant clash with authority.

  In the same way that Shirley’s precociousness brought him into the society of men older than himself, so did Maine’s backwardness bring him into touch with men considerably younger than himself. In those days Hugh Maine was large, with pale flabby cheeks, a vacant, rather babyish expression on his face, and large wide eyes that seemed to be startled by everything they saw. He was clumsy in his movements. His clothes looked as though they had beenmade by a good tailor who had not bothered much. His arms, hanging loosely at his side, with the fat-fingered hands shaking against the flap of his jacket pockets, seemed to have been put on afterwards. He would indeed have been unattractive and unprepossessing, had it not been for his smile. Every now and then his face would light slowly with a smile of singular sweetness that appeared to be the expression not only of good nature and kindness but also of real wisdom. It was this smile that endeared him to his juniors. He had turned to them because as an only son of elderly parents he had grown up slowly: taking longer to assume the irresponsibility of youth. He was having his fling at a time when the majority of his contemporaries were ending theirs. He was accepted not as the ring-leader of his group, but rather as the brake upon the wheel. “We take him round for respectability’s sake,” they said.

  Of all that group there was no one with whom he felt more in touch than with Shirley. His solemnity was attracted by Shirley’s brilliance. His heaviness by Shirley’s dexterousness. It was next Shirley that he always arranged to sit and drive. The fact that Shirley was only an occasional participant in their wildness attracted him the more. He liked to picture Shirley more brilliant and more industrious than any of them: planning a far wider future. But now and again lending himself to their amusements: more prodigally: being wilder, gayer, more amusing. He had a kind of hero worship for Shirley: without ever letting Shirley see it.

  He was very much the big brother in all their dealings; giving Shirley such worldly information as he possessed; advising him on points of etiquette and social conduct; deriving an interior satisfaction from the thought of how one day when Shirley was a senator at Washington or a judge in the Federal Courts, he would say, “And I remember the day when I told that young man that a raw egg beaten up in Worcester sauce was better than any doctor the morning after.”

  Yet in spite of his big-bro
ther attitude it was to Shirley that he brought the news of his intended marriage. The look of astonishment on Shirley’s face, and his involuntarily ejaculated “Oh, but you can’t!” were, he said afterwards, the strongest arguments against an early marriage that he had had to face. As it was, they argued the matter out endlessly in all its pros and cons.

  “It’s a fatal handicap to a career,” Shirley had maintained. “You’ve got no liberty of action. There can be only one thing for you to do. You’ll have to go into the family business and stay in it for the rest of your life. You won’t be able to make experiments. If ever you change your views—I don’t mean about the girl, that may be all right. I don’t know anything about that. It’s about your career that you may feel differently.”

  It was career, career, career. That was the one argument that Shirley presented and represented. A man’s work was his life. Nothing else mattered.

  “You agree with that, don’t you?” he insisted.

  “Oh, yes, I agree with that,”

  “It’s a question of the parable of the talents. One hasn’t just a debt towards oneself. One owes it to one’s family, one’s State, one’s country, to make the best one can out of one’s career. One’s got to arrange one’s personal life so that one’s career, even if it’s not helped, is at least not hampered. You can’t deny that that’s sense, can you?”

  “No, no.”

  “And you can’t deny, can you, there’s a possibility of your finding yourself handicapped by an early marriage?”

  “No, I can’t deny it.”

  “Then, my dear fellow, why on earth….”

  But he did not finish his argument, for there came into Hugh Maine’s face the slow, infinitely endearing smile that was so disarming and in its way so wise.

  “I know, my dear fellow, I know. But I’m feeling that way about it. And one’s got to trust one’s instincts.”

  Even to Shirley that had seemed as sound a reason as any other. He had clapped his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  “Here’s luck to you,” he had said.

  But the fact of those arguments had reached the ears of Hugh Maine’s fiancée. Though Shirley had attended the wedding, been invited to a house-warming party and assured that no party would be complete without him, he had not felt his visits to the Maine ménage particularly encouraged. He had seen little of his old friend.