Wheels within Wheels Page 25

  It was as though the very stones of the old streets were vocal: as though they were saying, “Yes, we know. We’ve had our troubles. We’ve survived them. You will, too.”

  “I must go and see Julia,” he thought.

  As he drove southwards down St. Charles Avenue, he rehearsed the phrases with which he would explain to Julia the nature of his position.

  The trouble, however, about imaginary conversations is, that one assumes the talk will open and continue under one’s direction. One assumes that the other person will make certain replies. They rarely do.

  Before he could start his innings Julia began hers.

  “Grannie’s furious with you,” she said.

  “That’s nothing new.”

  “But it’s about something particular this time.”

  “What?”

  “Your having taken me to the Lowenfelds.”

  “Why on earth shouldn’t I?”

  “They’re Jews.”

  “They’re very respectable Jews.”

  “That doesn’t alter it. They’re Jews.”

  “So your grandmother thinks that however charming, rich, honourable and influential a family may be, one oughtn’t, if they are Jews, mix with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she think I ought to ask her approval before I take you to see my friends?”

  “She thinks you should ask mine.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, darling, she asked me if you told me whom you were taking me to see and I said No, you hadn’t, that you just said, ‘There’re some friends of mine who’ve asked us to take tea with them.’”

  “Would it have made any difference if I had?”

  “I think it would.”

  There had come into her voice the firm tone that she had used on their first meeting at the county club. Her mouth had that same firm look. The hardness of a woman’s mouth was like the strength of a woman’s shoulder: such power, such flexibility beneath such softness.

  “You mean to say, that if I had said ‘I have been asked to take you to meet some friends of mine, but I must warn you first that they are Jews,’ you would have refused?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you enjoyed yourself when you were there.”

  “Yes.”

  “They were nice people.”

  “Yes.”

  “They were well-informed, instructed; the conversation was about something real; not just what so-and-so was doing; and how this person was related to that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t you agree that if you said ‘No’ just because they were Jews you would have missed making a very pleasant acquaintance?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m not going to see the Lowenfelds again.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “Because I am not going to get into the Jewish set.”

  “Who ever asked you to?”

  “You can’t know one Jew without knowing a dozen others. One Jew may be very nice. But a Jewish atmosphere is not right for a person like myself.”

  Her voice was pleasant and uncontentious; but her will was adamant. “It’s going to be like this always,” he thought. “She won’t argue. She won’t find fault. She’ll just state her opinions. She’ll say what she’s going to do and she will do it.” All the same, he could not let the issue pass like this.

  “You can pick and choose your friends in a Jewish set just as you can in any other set.”

  She shook her head.

  “A man may be able to. A woman can’t. You have to know the friends of your friends. You are born into a world. You’re a part of it. You mix with people of your own kind. It’s silly trying to be different.”

  She spoke with a firmness and a resolution that he could not but respect. And she was right, he knew that: from her point of view. She was entitled to that point of view. He felt differently. But that was his own concern. And as he met that look of resolution he realized how marriage now that he was without money, would mean the denial of his right to feel differently. You only had as much independence as you could buy. He would not be able to afford that luxury.

  Gradually he would find himself shut out from the various interests that had made life varied and full for him. He would be living in Julia’s house: would have the right to see such people and only such people as she chose to ask to it; since it would be her money that would support their entertainment.

  It would be impossible. She could only despise the man who came whining to her for pocket-money: who held revolutionary opinions in theory that he could not enforce in practice. And yet he knew that this was the last moment she would make easy a breaking of their engagement.

  She had begun to talk of the depression. It was a good thing, on the whole, she was inclined to think. Americans had had things too much their own way. Things had come too easily for them. They needed adversity to draw them close together: to make a nation of them. Depression would have the same unifying effect as war, without the cruelties and inhumanities of war. People drifted apart in times of ease and came together in times of sorrow. She took the example of the number of impending divorces that had been cancelled when the depression started.

  “Cynical people say it’s because they couldn’t afford two establishments, and went back to each other for reasons of economy. And now and again it probably was like that, but the majority of times it was because people who thought they could do without one another suddenly needed one another. I can imagine,” she argued, “growing indifferent towards someone who didn’t seem to need me. But the moment I found he really needed me, I shouldn’t hesitate.”

  On her young, lovely, unstirred face there was a look of high-set seriousness that answered the question John Shirley had set himself. He knew how she would answer the offer to break their engagement. “Why, my silly darling? How much more than ever now, I’m bound to you!” And whatever her parents or friends might urge she would never make the attempt to drive him into uncongenial occupation. She would let him live his life. Never had he been more conscious of her sterling qualities: her rectitude; her truthfulness; her loyalty. He felt proud and humble that he should have earned the love of such an one. At the same time, he realized how utterly he was the wrong person for her: how those qualities would be wasted on such an one as he. She ought to marry a young man with his way to make: whose ambition would match hers: who would have need of her particular qualities: with whom she could fulfil herself in a way that with him she never could.

  • • • • •

  So he thought as he drove back to the Boston Club.

  “I’ll go in and talk for a while,” he thought. Talk would be an anodyne.

  In the bar he found Maine, who was a very moderate drinker, surrounded by a number of young men who were anything but moderate drinkers. Hugh was a kind of hero to them. He stood for what they hoped to be. He was explaining to them why he thought America was bound to finish in the end ahead of its rival competitors.

  “By virtue of work,” he said. “We work harder than the people of any other race. We were set a harder problem. And we’re succeeding at it. The more you bite off the more you find that you can chew.”

  He elaborated the thesis.

  Shirley, as he listened, remembered an occasion nearly ten years back when he and Hugh Maine had discussed the same subject. It was at the time of his own revolt. He had just refused to handle a case for the district attorney in which he knew justice lay on the side of the defendant. The case was being brought not for reasons of justice but for ignoble personal political ends.

  “I’m not touching that kind of case.”

  “You’ll ruin your chances with the district attorney,” Maine had said.

  “I’d rather do that than put an innocent man behind the bars.”

  Maine had nodded his head.

  “You’re lucky to be able to pick and choose,” he had said. “When you are married and have children, you can�
��t afford to quarrel with your bread-and-butter.”

  That was how Hugh Maine had argued then. It was the nature of work, not the fact of work that had counted: now work in itself was its own justification: which was the American shibboleth.

  When the young men had gone and they were alone, Shirley reminded him of those old arguments.

  “You used not to talk that way when we were in a dugout north of Amiens.”

  “I know.”

  “What’s made you change your opinion? Not prosperity.”

  “Not that.”

  “Do you believe what you were saying, or did you say it because you feel it’s the kind of thing you should say: that goes down well?”

  “No, I believe it.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Hugh Maine hesitated. He was grey-haired now: with the hair thinning on his temples. He was still pale and flabby-cheeked. The line of his chin was obscured by fat. Under his eyes were lines and heavy pouches. He had still a typically boyish look. Yet even so, there was a sense of power in his face. He seemed to be a man who knew what he was doing. His speech was slow and solemn; but it was not sententious.

  “You’ll think what I’m going to say bromidic, I’m very sure,” he said. “But I’m over forty now, and I have come to believe that nearly all the platitudes that we inscribed in copy books at school are plain statements of the truth. Even shall we say to believing in the simile of the rich man, the camel and the needle’s eye. I believe that there comes to every thinking man a time when his faith fails him: when he sees no point in anything: when all effort—what’s Shakespeare’s phrase?—mars the thing it aims at. If one has money when that time comes, one’s as likely as not to stop working. One says, ‘Why go on?’ and so one never does go on. One stays where one is; in a mood of negative pessimism. That’s if one has money. If one hasn’t, or if one has responsibilities for the sake of which one has to earn money, that situation never arises. Whatever one may believe about the eventual object of one’s work, one has to go on working; and it’s like the stitch you get on a long race. If you go on running you get your second wind. It becomes easy going once again. If you go on working, you begin to see that there is a point, after all, in working. That it isn’t just so much water going through a sieve. But I can’t expect you not to look on all that as so many bromides.”

  As he smiled that old, engaging smile, Shirley knew for very certain that it was not bromidic; that it was the truth: that Julia and her father were of the same solid stuff. She combined the best qualities of American girlhood, just as her father had combined the best qualities of American manhood. She was in a way very like her father. She was having her period of revolt against the social conditions of her day: a revolt which had made her find an ally in him in the same way that her father had. She would outgrow that revolt, just as her father had outgrown it. And because of that first revolt, her ultimate conformity would be more firmly based—since it would be an argued-out conformity—than that of those who had never doubted.

  Maine had pushed on past his friend’s agnosticism and reached a positive belief. In the process he had outgrown his old friend: had gone beyond him: just as Julia would do. Only in Julia’s case it would be different, since there would be the tie of physical attraction that wore slowly through. There would be the bond of children: there would be the marriage bond, to which, being decent people, they would try to hold. And probably, being strong-minded people, would succeed in holding. But Julia was worth something more worth while than that. It was not a question of happiness or unhappiness: but of negativeness opposed to positiveness. She was a good American. She should marry a good American; make an American marriage. He could see now the many merits of the American pattern. But he could not fit into it. He was a misfit: just as in the first place all Americans had been misfits: men who, loving the countries of their birth, had been unable to accept their country’s shibboleths and had sailed the Atlantic in search of newer and wider worlds. Now, apparently, the reverse process was taking place, There were growing up in America people like himself who could not fit into their country’s pattern, whom an atavistic strain was drawing back to Europe, littering Florence and the left bank and the Riviera with dépaysés. He was one of them, he supposed: with no real place in the country of his birth: with no right to marry a girl who was born in it and could accept the pattern.

  “It’s not fair to her. She’s entitled to a better deal,” he thought.

  • • • • •

  As he drove back to the Quarter he realized that the hour for decisive action had surely come.

  The choice either way was “most ignobly brave.” With the loss of independence he had to decide whether he was to be dependent on his mother or on Julia. He smiled wryly. But he saw no alternative.

  • • • • •

  It was in the late afternoon that he turned his car out of Royal into Orleans Street.

  In front of the little theatre he saw hurrying towards him a trim, familiar figure.

  “Marian,” he called, and drew in his car beside the sidewalk.

  She checked her step, hesitated, then stopped.

  “It’s a long time since I’ve seen you,” she said.

  They had scarcely seen each other since Mardi Gras. There had been occasional passings in the streets: a smile and a waved hand. Once or twice in a moment of leisure they had paused and gossiped. But they had made no reference to that one night’s loving. There had been no attempt to resume that loving. They had guarded it as a secret: inviolate. They knew that one night’s yielding to a moment’s mood can be an exquisite and lyric ecstasy: to repeat that ecstasy was to embark upon a complication. They had had the common sense to leave unspoiled a lovely moment. But now, half stunned still by the news that he had received that morning, with the need to confide strong in him: the secrecy of the bond made the bond more real.

  “Why don’t you come to my place and have a coca-cola?”

  She seemed surprised; she hesitated.

  “Jump in,” he said.

  She looked at him inquisitively as he swung his car into St. Ann Street. It was surprising that he should have asked her to come up with him. If it were any other man she would have thought that the idea of a stolen hour had crossed his mind. She didn’t think that would be the case with John. She was certain that it wasn’t, from the weary way in which he lay upon the chesterfield. He looked like a beaten man. And once again a protective tenderness welled up in her: this time to be restrained. It had been all right once. But not a second time. She waited for him to speak.

  “I had bad news to-day,” he said. “I’ve lost nearly all my money.”

  It was a thing that a good many American girls had had said to them in the last four weeks: that many more were to have said to them in the next four years; so that the recital of man’s losses were to become even more tedious than had been in the proud days the recital of his gains. For to a man who was talking about his victories a girl could say “Let’s talk of something else now, please,” whereas when he was talking about his troubles she had to listen.

  It was a thing that Marian had thought herself. But now, hearing the words fall from John’s lips, seeing that tired look in his face, her heart responded. She could not bear him to be unhappy. He was so sweet a person; she had never met anyone so gracious, so gentle; at the same time so ardent. He had spoilt her for other men. Since that evening she had become so poor a companion for Elsie that as often as not she was left behind in the evening to sit over the radio. She had longed for him so much: so often: with all the hereditary, southern capacity for love. She had longed to force meetings on him. But her acquired American nature, her feelings of pride and independence, had held her back. She was there if he wanted her. He must know that. But she was not going to force herself on him: she was not going to force herself on him now, when he was weak and vulnerable: when she had only to play her cards in a certain way to make sure of him.

  “Darling,” she longe
d to say, “what does it matter if you have lost all your money? What does money matter, when one has youth and faith? I could make something of your life if you would let me.” She longed to say the words. But she did not speak them. All that she had learnt at school of a woman’s position and dignity in the world withheld her.

  But though she did not speak them, by some process of mental telepathy John Shirley was aware of the thoughts that were in her heart; and looking at her, his own heart heavy, his own future black, there came to him such a longing for escape, such a feeling of his grim inadequacy to cope with the part he had to play, such a reckless readiness to leap into the sea and clutch at any friendly spar, as three generations back had inspired a Frenchman at odds with his family and village to seek his fortune across the Atlantic’s width. Just as that ancestor had felt, “Somehow I must get out of this,” not looking further than the necessity and possibility of escape, so Shirley felt as his eyes met Marian’s, reading there an unexacting tenderness.

  Why shouldn’t they, after all? Alone he couldn’t. He would lack the faith, the courage. But he had that ten thousand dollars; the estate in Santa Marta was his; one could do something there; anyhow, one could get away. Looking her straight in the eyes and speaking very slowly.

  “To-morrow’s Friday,” he said. “Every Friday a boat sails from here for the West Indies. Would you run the risk of sailing on that boat with me?”

  “You know I would.”

  XVI

  Eastwards in New York Caroline Summers was pondering with calm and amused indifference the projects that Roy Bauer had enthusiastically laid before her. A one room apartment and cheap gin; bum picture houses and chop-sueys; or sitting at home beside a sandwich with the radio playing. It might be fun for Roy. But oh boy, that wasn’t what she thought amusing. She’d begin by selling her jewellery; then she’d start looking round. She’d enjoy herself plenty. She didn’t care about the dough so much: but she was going to have fun. If Roy wasn’t going to do her well, that was where he got off.