So Lovers Dream Page 3

  You had the same feeling about his wife. She was short, plump and double-chinned. Her eyes were brown and bright. There was a dimple in her cheeks. You suspected that her charm as a young girl had been doll-like and at the same time vivid; that she had been gay and wilful as far as the daughter of a retired colonel could be in a Dorsetshire village in the 1880’s; that her dance programme had been always full; that she had laughed over her fan at many be whiskered soldiers; that she had a store of memories to look back upon; and that on the whole she had been relieved to relax into middle-age, to put on weight, to become the spectator and the confidante, to watch life and be amused by it.

  Her sole worry indeed, as it was her husband’s, was the resolute refusal of her younger children to follow her example. At thirty she considered a man should marry, and Gordon showed no signs of marrying. He never stayed long enough in any place. He took flats and then sub-let them. He was always coming from somewhere or going somewhere. When she told him it was time he took life seriously, he told her that he took life extremely seriously; that he wrote a book a year and was a source of profit to the inland revenue. ‘No one,’ he explained, ‘will realize that writing’s work. They don’t think anyone works who hasn’t an office to do it in.’

  ‘Now you know, my dear, it isn’t that.’

  He knew, himself, it wasn’t. It was just that his mother regarded no one as living seriously who had not a home, a wife and children, in the same way that his father did not believe anyone was living seriously who did not pay his bills and invest a tenth of his income in gilt-edged stock. Neither Gordon nor his sister, Julia, gave their parents the solid comfort that comes from a rigid security of future. Julia was, it is true, married. And as she had remained married for a dozen years, it could only be called a modern marriage in that it was staged contemporaneously.

  In the last year of the war as a hospital nurse at Cedar Lawn, she had become engaged after a three days’ acquaintance with Frank Haystack, the eldest son of the Earl of Loomshire. When a marriage that was practically an elopement had ensued in the course of a last leave, everyone had prophesied that like other war marriages, it would prove to be for the duration only. To everyone’s surprise, it had survived. Nor had its lasting meant that it had developed into an ‘each going their own way’ relationship. They seemed and were genuinely happy.

  When Mrs Carruthers said, ‘I wish Julia would settle down,’ she meant that she wished Julia instead of taking a series of furnished flats on three-month leases, would acquire the freehold of a house, preferably in the country, large enough to contain a nursery. When Mr Carruthers said, ‘I do wish that Julia would settle down,’ he meant that it was high time Frank Haystack found some more solid means of self-support than the raising of reversions on properties whose value was rapidly decreasing.

  The only member of the family whose life was a matter of complete satisfaction to his parents was the eldest, Harry Carruthers, who had captained the Fernhurst eleven, had played in the seniors match at Oxford, been tried for Somerset, had passed into the Malayan Civil Service, had supervised and controlled the Dindings, had been magistrate in Penang, had been one of the assistant advisers to the Sultan of Johore, had not gambled in rubber but had invested his money in Canadian railroads, and had married at the age of thirty, a cool long-necked English girl who had borne him, in the course of seven years, three daughters and a son. The daughters were in Malaya, the son was recovering in London from a strenuous bout of measles. The sound of his nephew’s howling was the first signs of welcome that awaited Gordon.

  The nature of his welcome was flattering. Except in his arrivals and departures Gordon Carruthers was as un-dramatic a person as a constructor of dramatic narrative could be. And it was only his distaste for drama in private life that made his goings and comings dramatic. Their drama consisted in the meeting of a friend in Piccadilly and the reply to a suggestion that they might have lunch one day. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going to Zanzibar on Tuesday.’ It was indeed this reluctance to be dramatic that had prevented him from cabling home the change of plans that had made this particular return the most unheralded he had ever made. Even the prim features of the hatchet-faced Susan, who for twenty-seven years had unemotionally opened the door to Mr Carruthers’ guests, were startled into a look of pleasure.

  ‘Why, Mr Gordon, we weren’t expecting you for months yet.’

  To his parents his return was a complete surprise and it was typical of their separate temperaments that they should each attribute his return to a different cause.

  His father looked at him with grave eyes. ‘I suppose this means that you’re in debt.’

  His mother, the moment they were alone, breathlessly and anxiously whispered: ‘Darling boy, now tell me all about her.’

  It was his mother that he had to answer obliquely and with a laugh.

  ‘I’m afraid, mother dear, that I’m as far away from being married as I’ve ever been.’

  Chapter Three

  Like most professional writers Gordon Carruthers was a reluctant correspondent. He became self-conscious when writing letters. His correspondence with his parents consisted of bare bulletins of facts. ‘I have no real news for you,’ he would say. ‘My gossip would not interest you since you would not know whom it was about.’ As a result he was on his return besieged with a flood of questions.

  ‘Did you get Julia’s letters of introduction?’ his mother asked. ‘She was so excited about your going to New York. She was so anxious you shouldn’t get into the wrong set.’

  Gordon smiled.

  His refusal to be a social figure was a considerable grief to Julia.

  ‘You all try and make me something I am not,’ he had once laughingly told his mother. ‘You object to my being a writer because writers aren’t supposed to make good husbands. My father feels that novels don’t bring in five per cent out of gilt-edged stock. Julia’s worried because I don’t write the kind of novel that would get me invited to the right kind of party, and Harry feels that a pukka sahib doesn’t discuss those things.’ He had said it laughingly. But it had been more than a quarter true. In the middle of his third week in New York he had received a long letter of exhortation from Julia wrapped round half a dozen letters of introduction.

  ‘Be certain to present these letters,’ she concluded, ‘because I’ve written personally to the various ladies. They will think it very rude if you don’t write to them. And it is so important for you that you should not get yourself misjudged by being seen about with the wrong people.’

  Gordon had presented the letters. It was indeed through one of Julia’s letters that he had met Faith Sweden.

  * * *

  She was the first person that he had seen as he came into the room. She was standing beside an unfired fireplace; an arm leant along the mantelpiece. She was wearing a velvet dress that fell heavily in red-brown russet folds about her ankles. Her hair, that was corn-coloured, lay in a long curve across her forehead. Beneath it from her ears hung bells of topaz; on the fourth finger of her right hand was a topaz ring: from her neck by a golden chain hung a topaz pendant. Her nails that were long and pointed were polished to the same pink lustre as her mouth. Her shoulders were very white. They had a lazy droop. It was a breathless, brittle beauty. As Gordon came into the room, her eyes levelled on him a slow green gaze.

  ‘Mrs Roger Sweden,’ his hostess said, and a second later, in reference to a short, dapper, horn-rimmed spectacled person, ‘Mr Roger Sweden.’

  Gordon looked closely at the man. His wife was probably in the late twenties. He, quite clearly, was twenty-five years older. But you did not think of him as a man in middle-age. You did not think of him as being any age at all. You were conscious of maturity and the sense of power that is given by success; that is the equivalent, now that the capacity to take and hold depends on brain rather than on brawn, for the broad shoulders and muscled arms that fascinated the Sabine woman. You looked at Sweden and knew that you were in the presence of som
eone who could stand up to life. He was a likeable person, Gordon felt.

  But before he had time to reconsider that impression, he was being introduced to a slim, tall blonde who talked as though she feared that the penalty of dumbness would descend on her before the evening’s end. Before they had left the drawing-room she had told him the greater part of her life; by the time they were a quarter way through the soup she had confided a considerable instalment of the remainder. Her husband was in the State Assembly. Every Monday morning he had to leave for Albany by the 8.30. He did not come back till Thursday evening. What could a husband expect who treated his wife like that? ‘For four days out of the seven I don’t exist.’ Her non-existence was staged for the most part in speakeasies, preferably north of 125th Street.

  ‘It’s too lovely,’ she said. ‘I was dining with the Clare-monts the other evening, and dear old Mrs Claremont had just been reading “Nigger Heaven.” She wanted to know if it’s really true that quite nice people go to Harlem.’

  ‘In certain sections of London,’ Gordon told her, ‘it’s the smart thing to say, “I’ve just booked my passage on the Aquitania. I’m going over to Harlem Wednesday week.”’

  At that there was a titter round the table.

  ‘Now I wonder,’ said his hostess, ‘how many of us have ever been there.’

  There were twelve people seated round the circular-shaped, walnut dining-table. They were, Gordon assumed, representative of New York life. Their interests were legal, literary, political. He was curious to know what part Harlem would play in the lives of such a group. The half of them said that they had never been there. One or two said they had been there once. Another confessed to going there about twice a year. ‘If it weren’t so far away,’ she said, ‘I believe I’ld go there quite often. I don’t know where there’s a better cabaret than at Connie’s.’

  Roger Sweden entered the conversation late. ‘For the majority Harlem’s a mood,’ he said. ‘People get tired of Greenwich village; they get tired of Tex Guinan and Belle Livingstone. They want something new, and they go to Harlem to search for it. But they get tired of it as quickly as they would of any other speakeasy. The only ones who make a practice of going there are devitalized degenerates who need something primitive to wake them up. They’re so lifeless that only something a hundred per cent over proof can give them the sense of living.’

  It was the kind of speech that might have been made by an Anglo-Indian colonel. But though Sweden spoke authoritatively he spoke lightly, with the amused detachment of a man who has been in the world too long and knows the world too well to feel excited about anything. Gordon liked the way he spoke.

  His wife had taken no share in the discussion. She had sat back in her chair, her eyes travelling first to one speaker, then to another.

  ‘I went there once,’ she had answered, when they asked her her opinion. ‘It amused me rather.’

  Her voice was low with a slight Southern drawl. For some reason the fact that Harlem had amused her irritated Gordon. Before he had had, however, time to wonder why it should have, the lady at his side had begun to describe an experience that a friend had had there. The experience was described with animation, but had little point beyond proving her acquaintance at second-hand with Carl van Vechten. As she related the episode Gordon was conscious of Mrs Sweden’s green eyes watching him; they smiled as they met his. The smile was a bond between them; we are amused at the same things, he thought. More than once as the meal ran its course, he was conscious of that slow green gaze. It was intently but questioningly that she looked at him, as though she were taking stock of a strange country.

  When the women left the room, the men automatically grouped themselves round Roger Sweden. Their hostess was a widow and it was assumed unquestioningly that Sweden was the senior man there. Though the table was round, one had the impression that he was sitting at its head. He was, Gordon had been told, the president of a number of important New York corporations. He looked it. He was so used to walking into boardrooms, to finding a chair placed at the table’s head, that whenever he came into a private house he brought with him the air of being about to address a meeting, friendlily, informally, but at the same time, authoritatively. He gave the impression that he wanted to hear the opinions of the other members, but at the same time proposed to keep the proceedings under his control.

  They were discussing the invariable subject of depression. Sweden was voicing the opinions that Gordon had already heard voiced a dozen times: that it was not real money that had been lost, that the condition of the country was fundamentally sound, that the market had touched its lowest ebb.

  ‘At the same time,’ Sweden said, ‘it would be a serious thing if we were wrong. We’re not prepared, as Europe is, for setbacks. Prosperity has been used as a political slogan. It’s become the people’s creed. They’ve been told that America has learnt everything that Europe could teach, and unlearnt all Europe’s prejudices; that with her natural resources she has built a new kind of Empire whose power is unassailable. If anything were to shake the American’s faith in that religion, I don’t care to think what might happen.’

  He spoke as though the subject was of an academic, of an impersonal interest to him. He turned to the man beside him.

  ‘I should not be surprised if Coolidge hasn’t proved to have been pretty wise not to run for President that third time. He knew that the lean years were on their way.’

  ‘I wonder if he’ll ever run again.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Sweden. ‘What do you think, Freeman?’

  Though he did not monopolize the conversation, he kept control of it, changing the subject when it was half exhausted, arranging it so that each man in his turn was able for a moment to take a share in it. He asked Gordon a question about the dole, and Gordon could see that Sweden had manoeuvred the conversation that the question should be asked, so that he as an Englishman should be able to take his part in the talk creditably on a subject on which he was qualified to speak. Gordon was grateful to him for that, was conscious of and respected his tact, his power of controlling and directing men, his intellectual detachment. At the same time he could not help wondering what it would be like to be married to such a man.

  In the drawing-room Faith Sweden was sitting a little apart from the other women, not joining in their talk. At first Gordon had thought her languid, but now as he saw her sitting there it seemed to him that the breathless and brittle beauty on which so much care and artifice had been expended was her contribution to the party, that having achieved that, she was in herself completed and fulfilled; that with no further effort on her part she could exact homage; that she could rest silent as the artist did in the perfected creation. As Gordon came into the room she raised her head. There was a brocaded pouf beside her chair; she patted it.

  He had known that they would talk to each other after dinner. He had wondered how he should open the conversation. He need not have.

  ‘I had so wondered what you were going to be like,’ she said. ‘I’ve always heard that one shouldn’t meet the authors of the books one likes.’

  Her directness charmed as much as it surprised him.

  ‘You’ve liked mine?’

  ‘I’ve read everything you’ve written. I’ve felt there was something personal for me there. It wasn’t so much what you said as the way your phrases fell. There was a wistfulness about them.’

  ‘You felt that.’

  When people said to Gordon: ‘I suppose you’re tired of being congratulated on your books?’ he would shake his head laughingly. He never was. He was on the whole pleased and surprised when he found that anyone had read his books. His royalty accounts proved that a certain number of people had. But though in England he imagined that people would know his name, he never expected them to know more of him and his books than they might have learnt from reading reviews and studying the advertisement columns in the Sunday Press. In New York he did not expect anyone to have either read his books or to have hea
rd his name. And when he did find someone who actually had read one of his books, he usually found that what they had liked and remembered was a character, motif or situation that to him had seemed incidental to the plot. No one had ever spoken to him about his actual writing. He had indeed wondered whether more than one reader in a thousand pronounced to herself the actual sentences. He had watched people reading in trains and boats, in clubs and drawing-rooms. Practically never had he seen their lips moving as they read. They read with their eyes, not with their ears. And he had asked himself whether the care he expended on the rhythm of his sentences was not completely wasted, since his readers were unconscious of it. When Faith Sweden spoke of the rhythm he had aimed at with such care, but which no one as far as he knew had ever noticed, he felt that he had at last met the one person for whose sake everything that he had written had been framed.

  ‘I’ve so wondered what you were like,’ she said again. ‘A novel can be so impersonal. It’s hard to tell when it’s the author’s real self that’s speaking.’