Wheels within Wheels Page 14
• • • • •
The positions were considerably changed when they joined the American Expeditionary force, on the same afternoon. They were men now, but whereas Shirley had grown into the strength and confidence of early manhood, Hugh Maine’s work at a desk, the responsibilities of a home, children, marriage, business had made him the sedentary worker who was ill-fitted for the active life of the army. In the committee room Hugh Maine was now an impressive figure. His wife had tidied him; his clothes fitted; his ties were neat. Whereas strength in an athlete will turn to fat, Maine’s fatness had changed into an effective massiveness. His solemn manner suited a man who carried responsibility.
In ill-fitting khaki, however, he looked awkwardly, uncouthly boyish, the kind of soldier who was destined to be a sergeant’s scapegoat. His two years’ service would have been in all human probability supremely wretched, but for Shirley who, himself on the road towards promotion, had dragged his old friend with him. Hugh Maine, he had explained, would be quite useless in command of men; but in an orderly room he would be of supreme value. Not only had Shirley made those years tolerable for Maine, he had as likely as not, by keeping him in back areas, saved his life as well.
They had been, during those months, as inseparable as they had been in Maine’s bachelordom. They had shared tents and billets. They had gone on wild parties in Amiens. It was just as it had been in early days, only now it was Shirley as the senior officer who played the big brother; who kept his juniors out of trouble; who put a face on things; and in the case of Maine was a check on serious mischief.
“You’re a married man, we can’t have any of that nonsense here,” he’d say.
But just as in collegiate days Hugh Maine, while protecting and guiding Shirley in practical and worldly ways had relied upon him mentally, had brought his ideas to be tested against Shirley’s keener wit, now Shirley in a mood of gathering rebellion brought his ideas to be tested by Maine’s wider experience of men and matters.
Like so many other soldiers on so many other fronts they talked much of what they would make of life when the war was over; of what kind of world would await them when and if they returned home from the Argonne. They were resolved, as were so many other soldiers, that the crime of war should never be repeated; that its lesson was not to be ignored; that future generations must profit from the present generation’s calvary; that the living owed it to the dead to show that their deaths had not been in vain; that the old men whose shortsightedness and selfishness had caused the war, whose cowardice, obtuseness and self-seeking were continuing it, should be swept from power. Like so many other soldiers they believed that the foes in front of them were less dangerous than the foes behind; that they and the soldiers in the opposing trenches had been betrayed by what was false within. They suspected that war was like the spot upon a body’s skin. It was the proof of poisoned blood. The spot could not be removed till the blood was cleansed. They believed, as so many soldiers, that there was dry rot in the framework of their civilization. It was to Hugh Maine that Shirley took in the first place his revolt against the American ideal.
“We’ve dressed it to look different from the European ideal,” he said. “We think it is different. The men who framed the constitution meant it to be. And for a time we were able to keep it different because America was so large that there was room in it for an expanding race. But the moment the frontier closed, we went for Imperial aggrandisement, just like Europe; in the Pacific; in the Caribbean; in Central and South America. What are we doing here? Are we here for an ideal’s sake? If we were, we’d have been here three years ago. We’ve come like bailiffs, after Wall Street’s money. We’ve lent money to the Allies, and so we can’t afford to let them lose. We say we’ve learnt how to avoid Europe’s mistakes, but we haven’t. We have copied their failings; or rather, we’ve repeated them, since they are human failings and we’re human. We’re not better than they are. We are immeasurably behind them in the things that matter. All that talk about the great American adventure that we listened to in college doesn’t sound so grand to me just now.”
Thus they argued: agreeing for the most part; as many a thousand other soldiers were agreeing in their draughty tents, their hard-floored billets, their rain-bogged dugouts. But Shirley’s logic, his lawyer’s logic, did not stop where the revolt of the others stopped, in a vague and general resolve to make the world fit for heroes.
He did not believe that the world could be made fit for heroes, since human beings were only intermittently heroic. It was a circle, he said. One worked to a point, then fell away from it. It was a process of rise and fall. America might be at the point of a rising curve. But what was the point of working oneself to the bone only to hurry America towards the point from which the downward curve would start? Why not take life easily? What was the point of expending one’s entire force in the hastening of a calamity? So he argued.
And with the sight before him of the broken houses, the blackened trees, the long brown stretch of mud holes and all the pain and torture and heartache that they symbolized, Hugh Maine found it hard to disagree. Thus through the heat and stress of that dramatic summer when the tide of victory began to turn, the course of their discussion ran.
It was late in September that Maine had a bad touch of trench fever and was hurried to the base. By the time he recovered the war was ended; the process of demobilization started. He was sent straight home, while Shirley preferred to linger in France, taking a long holiday on the Mediterranean coast.
One never recognizes the point at which a personal relationship, whether a friendship or a love-affair, can be said to end. The point that afterwards one will look back to and say, “It finished there.”
Shirley never thought on the morning when he waved Hugh on his way to the M.O. that he was waving a friend out of his life. He had, however. When he himself returned to New Orleans in the late autumn of 1919, it was to find Hugh Maine, with his father dead, in charge of the family business; living in the large family house in Audubon Place with many cares upon his shoulders; an important figure in the city’s concerns; a man whose opinions were consulted by politicians and lawyers and financiers. A very busy man, with his photograph in the press at the head of interviews. His wife rarely out of the social gossip; entertaining here; having teas given for her there; sponsoring débutantes; on this and that reception committee for distinguished visitors. There were few points at which the Maines and Shirley would be brought in contact. They grew fewer as Shirley drifted further and further from the position he had seemed destined for.
So far apart had they drifted that he had not realized there was such a person in the world as Julia Maine.
• • • • •
That evening in his apartment in the Pontalba Buildings he mused for a long time on how between himself and the daughter of the man he had liked so much there should have been such an instantaneous sense of kinship as there had been when he had met her father.
“And I suppose that in just the way that I’ve lost touch with Hugh, I shall see his daughter once and then lose sight of her.”
He thought that. He was convinced of that. Nothing could have astonished him more than the letter he received three days later from Hugh’s wife, regretting that they had seen so little of him in recent years, suggesting a date ten days ahead when he should dine with them.
IX
Hugh Maine maintained a patriarchal, or rather matriarchal, establishment. His mother being still alive, he lived in the same house in which he had spent his childhood, boyhood, manhood; the whole of his life, in fact, apart from the first three years of marriage when he had rented a small apartment.
The house was in Audubon Place.
It was with an exciting sense of the past recovered that Shirley ten days later swung his car out of the bright thoroughfare of St. Charles Avenue into its aristocratic quiet. It seemed singularly unaltered since he had gone there first as a student in his ’teens. He wondered when he had gone there
last. Not since Hugh’s wedding, very likely. He did not know anyone else who lived there. He might have driven an occasional tourist through, but that was all.
It had not changed; in a city of changes, a country of changes, with all the change surrounding it, the large houses stood back before their gardens in sober, separate dignity, with pheasant-eye narcissus in starry bloom before the windows, just as he remembered. At the door there was a tall, bowed negro in a high white collar: the same or another; he did not know. The atmosphere was the same. In the large Japanese vase by the clock there was a bloom of lilac flowering; the tall clock was ticking just as it had done when he was a boy. The thick rugs in the hall were slippery beneath his feet; he found himself transplanted right back to boyhood and the old thoughts of nervousness at the prospect of ninety minutes of his best behaviour before the stern little woman in the grey shawl remarked, “Now, you young people, I expect you’d like to be alone. Take them to your study, Hugh.”
There, just as she had been twenty years ago, was the stern little woman in the straight ebony chair beside the fireplace. On the mantelpiece the same Crown Derby china. Behind her shoulders the same row of colonial prints. On the blue-covered sofa by the wall he was vaguely aware, as he had been then, of young people and the rustle of silk, the creak of patent leather. She was saying in that dry, fierce tone, “It is a pleasure to see you here again, Mr. Shirley,” as though he had had lunch with her the previous Sunday. Hugh, for all his portentousness, looked so boyish in his dinner-jacket and his slim-figured wife so bridelike that it was hard not to feel all this was happening long ago. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the mantelpiece. In the half-light it seemed a young man’s face.
There were no cocktails served in the Maine household. There never had been, even in pre-Volstead days. There had been wine served at table. That was all. There was unlikely to be that now, thought Shirley, as he prepared himself for one of the few places left in the world where the mauvais quart d’heure still remained.
It had always been bad. As in old days, he moved away from his hostess as soon as was politely possible. In the old days he had never made any attempt to talk to Hugh at such a moment. They were so intimate that they needed the greater intimacy of leisure. They had been such good friends that they could sit silent in each other’s company. But now silence embarrassed him. He felt he ought to talk, but did not know what to talk about. It was a relief when dinner was announced.
There were eight people seated at the round ebony table. It was the kind of dining-room that you would be unlikely to find in any other city in America. It had a lived-in look. The furniture was massive: had been ornate, probably, when it was new; but age had sobered it, so that it harmonized with the dark gilt-framed portraits on the walls, the heavy cut-glass candelabra, the heavy cut-glass of the table service. It was a family room, the four black servants in their white coats suggested with their silent obedient movements the rich plantation period out of which the urbanized aristocracy of New Orleans had sprung. Shirley was seated between Mrs. Maine and Mrs. Hugh Maine. Julia was across the table. They had not yet exchanged a word, but her eyes were watching his. They seemed to be testing him, putting him upon his mettle to speak well. She was wondering, he suspected, whether he was as interesting a man as at a first sight she had imagined. Her watchfulness put him upon his mettle.
Ordinarily Shirley was ineffective in general conversation; or rather, was content to play a secondary part in it. He was more interested in finding out what another person thought and knew, than convincing an audience that he was right, than impressing an audience with a parade of his information. He sought information; he preferred to withold judgment; but this evening with those grey eyes watchfully fixed upon him, he felt a need to dominate the gathering, and at the same time a consciousness of his capacity to dominate it. Usually he waited for some one else to open a conversation. Now he opened it himself. It was at the time when the Dusseldorf murders were terrifying an entire city.
He used it as a platform for a thesis.
“Have you ever thought,” he said, “how impossible it is to defeat a murderer who kills just for the sake of killing: who doesn’t kill a specific person for a specific reason? How is the average murderer detected? By a reductio ad absurdum. The police say, “In whose interest was it that this person should die?” They then ask where on a certain night at a certain hour were the people who could profit by such a death. It’s really only the murderers of the obscure, about whom little is known, who are undetected.”
He embroidered the subject.
“I’ll tell you of two murders that never could be discovered. Suppose there are two men, one of whom, A. wants his wife out of the way; the other, B. wants to kill his father. A. and B. scarcely know each other. Suppose by some means A. and B. were to form a pact: that A. should kill the father of B. and B. should kill the wife of A. The betting is a million to one against their being found out. Each has an alibi for the murder from which he profited. There’s nothing to connect either with the other.”
The subject went from one murder to another: to the various methods of killing that have been adopted: to the savagery of the Borgias; the humanity of the Tahitians. Shirley was careful to guide the conversation always into those channels on which he could speak authoritatively. Talk of the murders in mediæval Florence led to a talk of the Florence of the Renaissance: of how people had lived and thought then. Shirley had a sense of period. He was able in casual talk to make a place and a time live. He had anecdotes to tell. He had the whole table listening, the younger people questioning him, interested, eager.
“Life must have been very different then,” said Julia.
Shirley shook his head.
“I wonder. Externally it was. But in the things that matter personally to the individual I doubt if there’s been much change. Think of what’s happened in the last twenty years. Things have been happening so fast while you’ve been growing up that you’ve scarcely noticed them. Besides, the change had begun before you were born. I can remember the first motor car; the first aeroplane. Wells’s early novels seemed fairy tales. Now we think of them as the statements of facts. If anyone had told me that by turning a knob in a wooden box I could hear in New Orleans the sound of an orchestra in London, I should have thought that such an invention would have altered the entire fabric of life. But it hasn’t. The problems that really concern us are exactly the same problems that worried the Egyptians: questions of growing old, of how to bring up children; of how to make money go as far as possible, marriage. I don’t believe life’s altered very much.”
It was a problem on which everyone had his own point of view. It was the general American view that the scientific discoveries of the past decades, discoveries for which America was herself in so large a part responsible, had entirely altered the life of the individual: that the motor car, the telephone, the telegraph, had in particular by altering one’s conception of distance, released a world from servitude. That was in the main the young people’s argument. But Shirley disagreed with them.
“It’s only a relative difference. A hundred years ago if you had walked five miles you were as far away from home as if you had motored seventy to-day. You were an hour and a half away, that’s all. If life had really altered, we should be different people, and Shakespeare, the Old Testament and Tolstoi’s novels would read like the accounts of a foreign people. But they don’t. They are direct transcriptions of the lives that we lead to-day. It’s only the costume that’s altered.”
Without monopolizing the talk, Shirley right through the meal directed it, controlled it. The performance gave him an exciting sense of power. At the Maine’s table, since there was no wine, coffee was taken at the table. There was no dividing of the sexes at the meal’s end. But just as she had twenty years earlier, Mrs. Maine, when coffee cups were empty, rose to her feet with the remark:
“And now I expect you young people would like to discuss your own matters among your
selves.”
It was at this moment that Shirley was most vividly reminded of the anachronism of his presence at this party. He had been invited here at Julia’s instigation. Yet he was her father’s contemporary. He could scarcely class himself as a young person by following these boys and girls who had been in their cradles when he and their parents had “clashed cymbals in Naxos.” Yet he did not want to remain stodgily behind with old Mrs. Maine and Hugh and Mrs. Hugh. He hesitated.
Julia settled the issue for him.
“Please, Mr. Shirley, come with us. Forget for once that you and daddy were in the same fraternity.”
• • • • •
The moment they had reached the small brown study with bookshelves running to the ceiling in which Shirley had spent in the past so many hours, Julia islanded him from the rest. There was a sofa for three: and an armchair at each side of it. By putting Shirley in one of the chairs and by seating herself next to him, curling herself up in the corner and leaning forward across its arm, she made it impossible for anyone else to talk to him; forcing the other three into a conversation among themselves.
“I was so excited when I heard who you were,” she said. “Daddy says you were the best friend he’d ever had.”
“I never liked any man so much.”
“Yet you never see each other now.”
“One drifts apart.”
“You’ve made other friends, I suppose?”
“In a way. But I doubt if a man often makes a real man friend after boyhood.”
“And from those one drifts apart?”
“As often as not.”
“That sounds lonely.”