Wheels within Wheels Read online

  South of Canal Street there are wide avenues and spacious gardens; country clubs, golf courses and a race track. There are parks and palm trees, and in spring the heavy scent of the magnolia. Here dwell the old families, the prosperous Creoles, the rich Jews, the bulk of the bourgeoisie.

  Comfort and health lie to the south, but it is in the Quarter that the most romantic city in the New World conceals the heart of its romance.

  To that romance John Shirley had never been unsusceptible. He had often regretted both his inability, for financial reasons, to mix much in the Quarter’s life, and the small use he had made of his opportunities when he had had them.

  He would smile when he realized the self that had scorned those opportunities. “That was a very serious young man,” he told himself.

  • • • • •

  It would indeed have been difficult for anyone not a prig to have taken himself more seriously than John Shirley had. He had planned his future on a large scale, in keeping, as he phrased it, with the traditions of his family.

  At twenty-three, when his age, looks, position had entitled him to a carefree youth, he had divided his days between the district attorney’s office and the law courts. His evenings he had spent in the large bedroom that his parents had converted into a study for him, over his books. He had worked for fourteen hours every day. He had never doubted himself, his world and their joint future. That had been before the war.

  • • • • •

  For him, as for so many others, the war was a somersaulting experience. He had not, as had so many others, left his health behind him in the Argonne, but he had left his ambition there. He was quite unable, when it was all over, to take up his former life with his old zest: his old one-minded enthusiasm. It was not that everything seemed tame; that he had lost the feeling, “This may be for the last time,” that had heightened his appreciation of every intense moment. It was something far less obvious, far subtler than that. He had begun to doubt.

  In Europe he had encountered a culture that made in comparison the things he had prized seem raw; an adult attitude of mind that made American thinking appear childish; and lastly, a suggestion of decadence that had made everything seem the pouring of so much water through a sieve.

  On his return he had been unable to share whole-heartedly the enthusiasms of his fellow-townsmen. He became negligent in the prosecution of work in which he was not interested. As a result of that negligence he found himself passed in the race by men who believed unconditionally in the value of what they did. He let them pass him.

  He had absorbed the European view that it is not necessary for a man with an independent income to work eight hours a day to add to it. He had a yearly income of three thousand dollars. He could live in his mother’s house. When his mother died he would have at least twice as much. If he was content to live on that, he was not doing anyone any harm. He was extremely punctilious in the settlement of his accounts. He avoided debt.

  The majority of people looked on an income as something to be earned. He looked on it as something to be spent. He maintained that living on three thousand a year demanded the exercise of far more ingenuity than the earning of twenty thousand. If one had anything one really wanted to make of life, that was to say; and there were a great many things he wanted. Places to see. People to meet. Music to hear and books to read. He did not think of himself as an idle person. He did not think of his life as an aimless one. To his relatives and friends he was a case for shrugged shoulders and an apologetic “Poor old John, and he might have done so much.”

  Personally he found life varied and amusing. He was content to go on finding it varied and amusing in just that way. He was, in fact, what one meets too seldom in America and too frequently in England, a man of taste and leisure, with impersonal interests and no personal ambition.

  • • • • •

  When he abandoned personal ambition he had not anticipated any substantial changes in his life. He did not believe that any substantial change was contained in the letter he had received one morning in the preceding summer from Bergheim, a New York broker, stating that an English financier was interested in the possibility of finding oil on his estate in Santa Marta, and suggesting that he might be prepared to allow the Englishman to prospect for a period of a year in return for the sum of a thousand dollars and the promise of a twenty-five per cent, share in such profits as might accrue.

  Shirley had laughed when he read the letter. He did not believe that that property in Santa Marta would ever be anything but a white elephant. It was entailed: it was mortgaged. It cost him more than it brought in. He told Bergheim to do what he liked and thought no more about it. He was still sceptical three months later when a large document arrived in a long envelope and a covering letter explaining that he would receive a cheque for a thousand dollars in return for his signature on an enclosed agreement.

  His elder brother had raised unquiet eyebrows when Shirley had brought the news to him.

  “You are probably being swindled.”

  “Probably.”

  “Aren’t you going to make some inquiries?”

  “No.”

  “But you are mad.”

  “I’m getting a thousand unexpected dollars.”

  “You might make a million. What’s a thousand?”

  “Enough to furnish a studio in the Quarter.”

  • • • • •

  Within a week of the cheque’s arrival from New York he had found the place he wanted.

  It was in St. Ann Street, on the north flank of Jackson Square, in the long, red-fronted pontalba buildings that, built originally for French emigrés, had known during their century of life many varieties of fortune; degenerating during the dark days of the carpet beggars, after the Civil War, into a farmyard for the haphazard negro families who had treated it as though it was a tenement: stocking its lower floors with cattle.

  Shirley’s apartment was in the roof, at the top of four flights of stairs. The windows were three feet high and on a level with the floor. By night the lamps shining up from the Jackson Square through the iron frame-work traced the letters P.A. on the sloping ceiling. It was a barrack of a place: vast and gabled: with a shower-bath and kitchenette at its far end. It was the kind of place of which nine people in every ten would have exclaimed: “Oh, but you can’t make anything of that.”

  Yet Shirley did make something of it. Not with any great outlay of expense: not by any attempt to make a period place out of it; or to make it fashionably modern with steel chairs, glass tables, oilcloth, curtains and cabaret posters on the walls. But just by cataloguing the various things he needed: a large writing-desk, a refectory table, plain chairs that went with it, a wide, low divan bedstead that could be screened away, a smaller divan that could be piled high with cushions, a row of bookshelves, carpets, an arm-chair or two, footstools, an occasional table, fire-guards. He had catalogued those things, then chosen them; at hazard more or less, in the antique shops of Royal Street and the large stores that flanked Canal. And because he had chosen the articles he liked; not the ones he thought he ought to like or that would fit into a decorative pattern, the various articles were homogeneous. The dark reds and browns of tables, carpets, cushions, fused into a harmony: so that the visitor, although he arrived gasping after the climb of four flights of stairs, felt himself immediately at ease, tranquillized and soothed.

  It had that effect on Shirley. Within a week of the unpacking of the final case he had become a part of the Quarter’s life.

  “This is the last big change I’ll ever make,” he thought.

  • • • • •

  He was still thinking that while Maitland in his bungalow at Santa Marta was deliberating his answer to Newton’s cable.

  Shirley would have laughed had he been told that at that instant the direction of his fortunes lay in the control of a man he had never met, of whose existence he was unaware. He believed himself to be very satisfactorily in control of his own destiny, as
he pushed open the door of a friend’s studio.

  The visit was unexpected, but in the Quarter such visits are part of the day’s routine.

  Three students were at work upon the life study of a girl.

  “We shan’t be long,” said the eldest, “if you don’t mind waiting.”

  In Paris, Shirley had spent enough time in the company of painters to relish the atmosphere of canvas, overalls, and palettes. He had come also to see with an artist’s eyes.

  He looked at the model impersonally, thinking not of the girl but of the problem her pose presented; of the blue-black effect of sunlight in her hair and of how the mauve of her frock would have to be subordinated to it. He then glanced at the pictures themselves to see how the task had been attempted and with what measure of success; thinking that one of the girls had shirked the problem by eliminating the sunlight altogether, painting the hair as black and not suggesting that the sunlight brought the colours of the hair into an interesting relation with the colour of the frock.

  It was later that he glanced towards the girl herself. And even then so motionless was she, so quietly did she hold her pose, that he did not think of her as a real person. So that when one of them said “That’ll do, Marian,” and the model stretched herself, it was like a waxwork becoming animate; or rather, it was like the curtain rising upon a scene. He was aware of a new landscape.

  There was silence in the studio. Two of the students were comparing their pictures. The third, having opened a package of sandwiches and arranged some plates and knives upon a table, had gone into the kitchenette to prepare coffee. No one was taking any interest in the young man and the model. Their eyes met in a look that was on her side thoughtful, open, uncoquettish. As she stepped down from the throne, he made room for her beside him on the sofa.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he asked.

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  “You can tell me what there is.”

  She hesitated.

  “You’re called Marian. What’s your surname?”

  “Cortelli.”

  “Then you’re Italian?”

  She shook her head.

  “French. My parents were born in Nice.”

  “Which means that your grandparents or anyhow your great-grandparents were Italian.”

  “They may have been.”

  Clearly she was not interested. Europe was far away. She did not care what lay at the back of her immediate parentage. She was American. Her children would be American. Shirley could guess at her story more closely than she could herself.

  He could see her background.

  A dark climbing street in the old town of Nice: with the washing strung from one iron, flower-hung balcony to another: children tumbling in the gutter: a heavy Mediterranean sun striking in sharp angles of amber light down the narrow alley of blue sky: men in blue trousers and open shirts grouped round the tables of small estaminets: dark-haired, dark-eyed women sewing in their doorways. A young couple faced with the difficulties of crowded streets, dreaming of the land of promise, of that new continent across the sea to which relatives and friends had sailed; from which relatives and friends had written with such glowing phrases. The resolve suddenly taken to try their fortune.

  Her parents had landed at New Orleans because that was the first port at which their ship had touched. They had brought with them a few clothes, a few francs, the traditions of their race. After the fashion of their race they had set up a shop in the foreign quarter. You would see innumerable such figures, immemorial Mediterranean types behind the counters of the delicatessen stores of a hundred Transatlantic cities. They had come, as all those many others had, planning when they had made their fortunes, to return to their own country, to buy a small property, to live upon their rentes. They had thought of America not as a country but as a place where money could be made.

  They had found difficulties, on their arrival. They had to pay tribute to the gangsters who protected them. There were difficulties with officials. They had allied themselves with the other foreigners: the Italians and the Spanish. There was talk of papers. They were told, by their friends, that it would be easier for them if they signed certain papers; naturalization papers they were called. They thought those papers represented a permit to trade. When they were told they were naturalized American citizens they thought they had been elected to some society. They never associated their papers with patriotism.

  They talked Nicois to one another; they had very few ideas to exchange with their Italian and Spanish friends and consequently needed a very small vocabulary. They picked up a sufficiency of broken English to carry on their trade with the Americans who bought cheese, garlic savouries and macaroni across their counters. They prospered since they were surrounded by prosperity; but in a small way since they were without vision. They grew fat and lazy; they never walked more than a dozen blocks in a dozen months. They still talked of Nice and what they would do when they went back there. But they had long since ceased to mark dates upon a calendar. They had long since ceased to talk to their daughter of the handsome Italian husband whom they would find for her. They had indeed little conversation with their daughter. They saw very little of her: had seen very little of her, in fact, since the officials who had insisted on the signing of their papers had told them that their daughter must be educated: that the State would supervise that education: that she must attend at a certain place at a certain hour on a certain day.

  And so Marian was taken from the delicatessen store and set with a hundred other children whose parents and grandparents had come in their odd times and fashions from the countries where their ancestry had lived for centuries, in the bare classroom where innumerable differences of upbringing and race were systematically to be smoothed out. They were told to dress alike, to look alike, to think alike, to speak alike. They were taught American history; and every morning, with their hands raised above their heads, they stood to their feet and swore allegiance to the stars and stripes and knew themselves to be Americans.

  Except for the dark hair, the dark eyes, the ivory-pale skin there was nothing to distinguish Marian Cortelli from the thousands of other girls growing to womanhood in twice a hundred scattered cities over the continent of North America. On the surface that was to say. Under the surface were the instincts born to her from a long race of Southern Europeans: instincts that made her intrinsically different from those contemporaries of hers who drew their blood from the cold latitudes of Scandinavia, or the green marshes of Killarney.

  So Shirley mused as he exchanged with Marian Cortelli such casual gossip as one does exchange at a first meeting with a new acquaintance. They talked of a film that was showing at the R.K.O.: of prohibition: of a murder trial: of the heat: of the proposed intention of the local authorities to destroy the French market. She said nothing, she expressed no opinion that might not have been expressed by any one of two hundred girls who had risen to their feet every morning in the college classroom and with lifted hands sworn their allegiance to the flag. Yet at heart she was—she must be—a Southerner: with the hot blood and the hot passion of the Mediterranean. She had had born to her a capacity for devotion, a capacity for revenge, a hard, passionate possessiveness.. And here, in New Orleans, she had had added to it an American independence, the capacity and the need to fend for herself: the pride of standing square on her feet and taking what might come to her: the sense of power that was every American woman’s strength.

  “I wonder what you’re really like,” he thought. “It would be amusing to find out. I’m going to see more of her,” he thought.

  • • • • •

  He found himself thinking of her that night, as he sat in the room that had been his father’s library, with a volume of historical reminiscence upon his knee: found himself remembering the way she had smiled, the pitch of her voice, the problem that her mingling of race presented. “Fifteen years ago I should have wondered if I were falling in love with her,” he thought. He smiled to h
imself, ruefully. “I’m too selfish nowadays to love,” he thought. To love one had to be prepared to give. He was only ready to accept what fitted in with his life’s pattern.

  He did not pause to consider that in the same way in which a sun rising over the crest of a hill will throw the shadow of a man on to a village two miles off, a cablegram at that moment crossing the Atlantic might be able to lift into vast proportions an incident trivial in itself.

  III

  On the following morning Maitland’s cablegram, lying in its Western Union envelope on a silver salver in the hall of a London house, caught the eye of a short, thin, elegantly dressed woman as she hurried down the stairs.

  Without being beautiful, she was the kind of woman at whom most men would have bothered to look twice. Her figure was supple and her movements graceful. At a distance you would have taken her for a girl. During the casual instants of a first meeting you would not have thought her to be more than thirty. It was a later, more searching glance that underlined the drawnness of the mouth, the slight peakiness of the nose, the fine lines round the grey, wide eyes: a restlessness which would have been fitting for a girl of twenty but in a woman of over forty predicted a certain unfulfilment; a summer that had known too little sunshine, that had lingered, uncomfortably delayed, into a late September. You felt that though she had been beautiful and though at any moment she might become beautiful again, at the moment she missed beauty.

  She picked up the cable, turned it over, tore the flap. She read, re-read it, then laid it down. Neither the signature, the message, nor the destination conveyed anything to her. Clearly it was for her husband. Possibly it was important.