The Light Heart (24 page)

Anyway, what satisfaction would it be to see him now, with Maia looking on possessively and doubtless bringing out all the worst in one? None whatever. Besides, it would be dangerous. The door was safely shut now, he was Maia’s husband, the father of a child. Don’t open it. Don’t risk one’s hard-won immunity, one’s carefully preserved peace of mind, by flying round the same old candle-flame. Characteristically, her writer’s mind jeered self-consciously at the worn-out simile. She acknowledged an increasing tendency to edit even her own thoughts with a mental blue pencil poised for clichés and sentimentalisms. Soon she would just turn into a manuscript, she thought impatiently, with no human spontaneity left.

She turned restlessly away from the mirror, running critical, dissatisfied eyes over the homey, deliberately shabby room. Unpretentious Surroundings of Successful Lady Novelist. Her lower lip came out. All right, I’ll do it over, she thought. Something, expensive and artificial and becoming. Empire. Récamier sofas. Or I might go all rococo. That would jar them!

At this point the doorbell rang, and she heard Delilah greeting Johnny, who had not been invited this afternoon but whose appearance was a godsend in her present fractious mood. She flew at him, almost embraced him, made him effusively welcome, and asked Delilah to bring cocktails.

Johnny stood still in the middle of the carpet and eyed her with a narrow, sidelong, suspicious look.

“What are you up to now?” said Johnny.

“Why should I be up to anything?” Her gaze was wide and limpid. “You drop in—I invite you to sit down and have a drink—anything unusual in that?”

“You haven’t been so glad to see me in years,” said Johnny, unimpressed. “What’s on your conscience?”

“I haven’t any,” said Phoebe, all impudence and charm.

“That’s right, you haven’t. What do you keep where it ought to be? An umbrella stand?”

“I was just thinking,” Phoebe began, ignoring that, “it’s about time I had this room done over. What would you suggest?”

“Hunh-unh,” said Johnny, sinking into his favourite place on the right-hand end of the sofa. “Let’s not. I’m so used to it.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Phoebe. “How would you like something in old blue and gold?”

Johnny shuddered and shut his eyes.

“Or Nile green and white?” she added brightly.

Johnny groaned.

“You’d make a horrid husband,” she told him. “Every time I wanted new chair covers you’d say the old ones were best.”

“But in other ways,” said Johnny alertly, “I assure you I’d give satisfaction.”

Phoebe’s eyes fled before his, and Delilah came in with the cocktails.

It was bragging, but Phoebe could not resist telling him about the offer from the woman’s magazine, and how she had made up her mind to refuse it after all because—it seemed best to give a reason—she had so many things to do. Johnny promptly brought up the honeymoon in Cannes, and she refused that too, and there were no hard feelings. But gradually a silence overtook them, for Johnny had something on his mind. Finally he said, “Phoebe, whatever happened to you in England that time?”

Phoebe was startled, but almost contrived not to show it.

“What makes you think—” she began.

“Oh, come off it, honeybunch, you’ve got some sort of kink about England, I’ve known that for years. Sometimes I think it would do you good to get it off your chest. You fell in love, didn’t you.”

“Mm-hm,” she said, turning the glass in her hand.

“And I suppose he was a bum,” said Johnny.

“He was not! He was in the Army!” She bit her lip too late.

“What does that prove? So was I in the Army once. When we fought the war in Cuba I was in the Army, and I knew lots of bums who were in it too.”

“Well, he wasn’t one of them,” she reminded him tartly.

“Are you going to love him all the rest of your life?”

“No. Well, anyway—it’s finished. I shall never see him again.”

“Then why do you carry this white banner emblazoned with a strange device?”

“Do I?” She looked at him doubtfully.

Johnny set down his empty glass, removed hers from her unresisting fingers, and took both her hands.

“I don’t know how old you are, my angel, and I don’t care—but I do know I have been courting you for eight years off and on, and I was on the safe side of the law when I began. You’ll be an old maid, sweetheart, if you keep on, and I’ll be doddering—but still faithful. It seems a pity, though, to let so much good time go to waste.”

When she didn’t answer, and didn’t object, Johnny laid cautious arms around her and drew her over against his shoulder where she sat passive and thoughtful, and so he kissed her and she even let him do that.

“At last!” he murmured, and became more possessive, until she stirred drowsily and drew away from him, and went to stand beside the window, a hand on the curtains, looking down into the summer twilight.

“Don’t rush me,” said Phoebe, and Johnny, with his record of eight patient years, put his head down in his hands and rocked with silent laughter. “Johnny, I’ve never led you on,
have I. All this time you’ve wasted—I never held out any hope.”

“Never,” Johnny agreed at once. “It was entirely my own idea. I wasn’t ambushed into it. You discouraged me every foot of the way. Till now,” he added, brightening.

“I haven’t promised anything,” she reminded him guardedly.

“Nope. Not yet.” He stood up and followed her to the window.

“Go away, Johnny, I’m trying to think.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. We were doing fine without it.”

She looked up at him gravely, from beside the window, the light full in his face—his honest, boyish face, with its sleepy eyes and generous mouth and the well-trimmed moustache—his look of humble watchdog worship.
How
would
you
like
to
be
beaten
every
now
and
then,
a dim voice asked her across the years,
just
to
show
which
one
of
us
is
the
master?
Something inside her crumpled, and she put up both hands to her eyes.

“Sweetheart, what is it? Have I said the wrong thing?” Johnny stood over her, trying to take away her shielding hands. “Phoebe, what have I done? I apologize. Phoebe,
don’t
freeze over again, you were being so soft and sweet. Come back, Phoebe, the ghosts were all laid and we had just begun to be happy.”

“The ghosts aren’t laid. It’s no use, Johnny. Go away and find some other girl who will treat you better than I have, all these years.”

“I don’t want some other girl,” said Johnny obstinately. “I guess what it comes to is, I’d rather be kicked around by you than be kissed and cuddled by somebody else. It’s got to be a habit with me now.”

“You must break it, then. It’s wasting your life.”

‘The only part of my life that’s wasted is the part I have to spend away from you. Such as the nights. Was it so bad, when I kissed you just now?”

“No. I liked it.”

“Well, then!”

“But that’s drifting!” she cried rebelliously. “I can’t do it! It isn’t fair!”

“It was a nice piece of drifting while it lasted,” he said. “Phoebe, are you sure you’re not just writing a book? Are you sure if you saw him again he wouldn’t look like everybody else? Are you sure you could tell him from me in a crowd?”

“Yes, Johnny, I’m sure.”

“Well,” said Johnny vaguely, “that’s that. Had I better go now?’

She stood looking at him helplessly from across the room. She would have been the first to admit that her maternal instincts were not very highly developed. She was sorry for Johnny, but she had no impulse to mother him, or any other man who had worn because of her that look of aching despair. Perhaps if Johnny had not asked, if he had not apologized—if Johnny had been the master and shown her that he was, he could have had her then, for she was lonely, and longing for love. But, “Had I better go now?” said Johnny, and lost her for ever.

“I wish it was different, Johnny,” she said miserably, and what she meant was that she wished Johnny was different, with a hard, irresistible grip to him not to be denied.

“I wish it was,” said Johnny, and picked up his hat. “Well—you haven’t heard the last of it, you know.”

The door closed behind him, and she laid her arms along the edge of the mantelpiece and hid her face.
I
shall
still
love
you
—
immoderately
—
when
you
are
ninety…
. Oh, Oliver …

S
HE
and Johnny didn’t exactly avoid each other after that, but they did spend less time together as the year ran out. Around Christmas time Phoebe was surprised to receive a telephone call from Bracken, who asked to see her privately. She invited him to tea, and looked her best to receive him.

Bracken came straight to the point.

“Ordinarily, I believe in a strictly hands-off policy as regards the private life of my employees,” he began almost at once. “But you are wrecking Johnny Malone. Have you any idea of marrying him, ever?”

“No. I’ve always told him that.”

“Then you can have no objection if I send him out of town.”

Phoebe stared.

“I need a good man in Madrid,” Bracken went on. “Johnny speaks Spanish and he’s due for a promotion, if he can stay sober. He’ll never call his soul his own so long as he can leave it on your doorstep like the milk, and I’ve watched you trample him long enough. It’s Johnny’s unhappy destiny always to adore women who dangle him. Virginia did the same thing, till Archie put a stop to that. I’m going to rescue him from you by shipping him to Madrid before it’s too late.”

“Will he go?”

“Well, of all the conceit!” said Bracken wonderingly. “A good newspaper man goes where he is sent.”

“I see,” said Phoebe. “This is a form of blackmail. Marry Johnny or kiss him Good-bye.”

“I only wanted to make sure you had no honourable intentions,” Bracken said coldly.

“I’m afraid I haven’t.”

“Then he’s on his way.”

He was, too, by the middle of January. And with him went much of life’s charm and cosiness in the apartment in the upper Twenties.

Phoebe was aware of an increasing restlessness and dissatisfaction with her existence, and in March when a long-delayed letter arrived from Rosalind telling of another difficult birth which the baby did not survive and from which she was slow to recover, Phoebe suddenly made up her mind.

She would go to Germany for the summer. She should have gone long ago. And possibly to Cannes. Not to Madrid. Certainly not to London.

Heidersdorf
Spring,
1911

R
OSALIND’S reply to Phoebe’s letter asking if she might visit Heidersdorf that summer was a cable, journalistic in its contempt for the word-rate from the middle of the Continent:
Jumping
for
joy
at
prospect
seeing
you
again.
Come
straight
here
might
all
go
Cannes
together.
Conny
says
you
must
not
put
us
in
a
book.
Love.
ROSALIND.

Well, Phoebe thought, and read it again. Rosalind was sounding very much like herself.
All
go to Cannes together? That might be rather a circus. Conny says…
Well.

It was not necessary nowadays to draw on Sir Gratian’s legacy when Phoebe wanted to go abroad. Her own bank account stood the strain of an embellished wardrobe, a first-class passage on the new Cunarder Lusitania
,
and a sufficient letter of credit for several months in Europe. She sailed early in May, standing somewhat thoughtfully at the rail on the boat deck as the big liner slipped down the harbour. Several people she knew well were on board, and she would not lack for companionship during the voyage. Most of them were bound for London and the Coronation festivities in which Phoebe firmly refused to take an interest.

She would disembark at Havre and go from Paris by way of
Metz and Dresden to Breslau, where Rosalind would meet her with a motor for the drive to the
Schloss,
which stood on a pinnacle of rock commanding a magnificent view in the Sudeten-Gebirge, “a picturesque mountain region,” according to the guide book, “reached by a light railway and thence on foot” from various hyphenated villages, a few of them with “(inn)” in parentheses. Phoebe, who liked to be comfortable and was particular about the condition of the sheets when she travelled, had no desire to sample the inns of the Sudeten-Gebirge if a
Schloss
in the luxurious French chateau style was available, and she preferred a motor car to her own feet at any time.

She leaned her elbows on the rail and watched New York fall astern, while her mind slid back ruefully to a spring day nine years ago when she had stood like this, with Miles’s ring on her finger and adventure before her. Having just
experienced
her thirtieth birthday, she was now inclined to an increasing reflectiveness, amounting sometimes to a gentle melancholy. I am very well preserved, she would remark to herself with a pitying smile when she woke bright-eyed and becomingly dishevelled and surveyed herself in the bathroom mirror before brushing her teeth. And with that round, childish brow and full lower lip and the candour of her steady eyes, she would have passed for twenty-five at any hour of the day, and often looked even less.

Leaning on the rail of the Lusitania
,
eastward bound, she quite naturally began to think of her first voyage and its
unforeseen
events and consequences. First, she had lost poor Miles’s ring. Then she had met Oliver and never been the same again. It was because of Oliver, wasn’t it, that she stood here now, free, independent, successful—empty-handed. Without knowing Oliver, she would have been Miles’s wife these past nine years—probably she would have had several children by now, no reputation as an authoress, and no money of her own (unless Sir Gratian’s) to spend on a European holiday. And she asked herself seriously, would she have been better off?

She had become the least faithful of all the family about going home to Williamsburg for Christmas and birthdays. The rest of them always went. But it was tactfully understood in the family that for Phoebe it was difficult, because of that unfortunate business with Miles. And while Miles himself appeared to bear her no grudge, Phoebe had found it
convenient
to beg off sometimes from the traditional family anniversaries and reunions. She saw the Murrays often in New York. Since Great-uncle Ransom died a few years ago, Cousin Sue was free to visit Eden frequently, and Fitz and Gwen came north every winter to stay with Bracken and Dinah and see the shows and attend to his music sales. There was only Father, to take her back to Williamsburg—and of course Mother too, but Father was the one
you couldn’t do without for ever. But now he always set her dreaming about Oliver, who had a daughter too—Hermione (in four syllables, with the accent on the long
i
)
would be three years old this summer. Phoebe was sure that Maia had chosen that name. And did Hermione feel about Oliver the way she herself had always felt about Father?

The same young man wearing a belted topcoat and a soft hat passed along the deck behind her for the third time with an inquisitive, lingering glance—Phoebe was aware of him with a growing impatience, whereas such glances had once stimulated and then amused her. Another sign of being thirty, she thought. Too much trouble to play up to stray young men with
admiration
in their eyes. A fine thing. This boy would get himself introduced. Then he would offer cocktails, want to dance, want to sit in the moonlight and tell the story of his life. And she would be bored. A fine thing. Obviously it was time she had a holiday. Or something.

Phoebe took her elbows off the rail and marched towards her stateroom, giving the young man a brief, level look as she passed, designed to set him right back on his heels. Before she reached the bottom of the companionway she heard his feet at the top, and as a consequence she was scowling when she ran into the first of several convivial acquaintances in the main
square, whom at one time she had considered a welcome addition to the passenger list.

She escaped from them too and shut the door of the
stateroom
behind her, thankful that she had insisted upon sole occupancy. The wind was freshening, and as she began to take her gay new dresses out of the suitcases she felt the first gentle lift of the bow as it met the sea. Maybe they’ll all be seasick and leave me in peace, she thought vindictively, for she was a good sailor herself. What is the matter with me? Rosalind will think I’ve turned into a sour old maid, she reflected. Well, maybe I have. I wonder what Rosalind has turned into.

She had been wishing lately that she had kept all Rosalind’s letters and could refresh her memory on their half-forgotten contents. The idea had crossed her mind in the very beginning that it would be fun to write Rosalind in a book—the
irrepressible
and unimpressible English girl set down in a pompous little German circle ruled by her in-laws, before whose opaque self-esteem she could at times hardly keep her face straight. But Phoebe had formed an unbreakable rule as a novelist never to draw on her friends or her friends’ friends for copy, but always to cut her stories out of whole cloth. Besides, as time went on and Rosalind’s little tragedy of homesickness and loneliness and misunderstanding began to emerge, the whole situation became too poignant and private to go into print.

And now Prince Conrad said that she must not put them in a book.

The self-conscious conceit which could instantly suggest such a thing riled her—likewise the type of mind which could suppose that a guest would thus repay hospitality. As a gesture of defiance to His Serene Highness, Phoebe had packed several of the little ruled notebooks in which she always made her jottings for a new story. Just for that, she would keep a sort of journal of this summer in Europe. Just for that, she had put down, as they came back to her, various items of Rosalind’s past letters. Just for that, if she happened to feel like it, she would write a book about her visit to Germany.

The notebooks appeared early in the course of her unpacking on shipboard, and the one already begun she laid out on the. bedside table. She often thought her way back into Rosalind’s letters as she was falling asleep, and brought up impressions and highlights she had thought forgotten. When she could talk to Rosalind a great deal more would doubtless occur to her. And already she had recognized in herself a malicious itch to get her pen into Prince Conrad. Of course I
never
write about real people and I’m not going to begin now, she told herself again, hanging up dresses in the wardrobe, which was too short for them. But he
is
asking for it….

When she went down to the dining-saloon she found herself assigned to a large cheerful captain’s table, and became without visible effort the brilliant Miss Phoebe Sprague.

D
ROPPING
off to sleep that first night out, lulled by the
afterglow
of champagne at dinner and liqueur brandy with the coffee, and by the drowsy creak and swing of a very gentle swell, Phoebe sent her thoughts back to Rosalind. It had become a sort of bedtime game to reconstruct her ideas of what she was going to find at Heidersdorf.

There would be first of all that growing dread, mentioned over and over again in Rosalind’s accounts of conversations in her own drawing-room after dinner—Rosalind’s dread, not Germany’s, of war with England. Even Conny, she wrote, had begun to feel that it was sure to come, and seemed to be slipping all his old ties with England, one by one. They no longer went over for the hunting, as he had promised they always would; the leased house in the English countryside had never materialized; they had not attended the Court of St. James for years; and they went to Vienna and Paris, not London, when they wanted to shop and hear music and renew friendships.

Rosalind’s mamma and younger sister Evelyn made visits to Heidersdorf, as did a good many other people from
England
, and she spent some time among the gay international set on the Riviera, and in Switzerland. She still wrote wistfully of England as “home” but she saw very little of it any more, and apparently accepted exile as all a part of the unwelcome bargain she had been forced to make with her destiny—but Evelyn had succeeded in marrying a baronet during her first London season and now lived in a dear little Elizabethan house in Surrey. He hadn’t such a lot of money, but he was kind and stupid and he thought Evelyn was quite perfect in every way, and—she hadn’t got to live with her in-laws, and anyway, they were English in-laws and wouldn’t have been hard to bear.

It was very odd, Rosalind had remarked in a recent letter, how England got on Germany’s nerves. She had lived all her life in England without hearing a tenth as much about
Germany
as one heard about England in Germany in a week. They couldn’t let it alone. Even among themselves, and regardless of herself as an Englishwoman, they had to go on telling how superior Germany was in every way; they had to make fun of the English, whose low voices annoyed them into sinking their own robust tones to a funeral mumble in derisive imitation; they said there was never anything to eat in England except mutton and apple tart; they deplored the English flower arrangement which allowed everything to straggle all over the vase instead of wiring each separate stem so that the blossoms stood up straight like soldiers; they were sure the English always ate a meal before they left home in order to appear to have small appetites and leave food on their plates when they dined out.

But the worst of all was when they talked of
invasion
—the invasion of
England
—as a feasible and perhaps an advisable thing to do, because the German Army was angry with the English newspapers, which were angry with the German Press—and because they said Germany had no friends, only enemies, who were jealous of her growing power. The Kaiser swore
high and low that as Victoria’s grandson he was England’s best friend, and kept up a pretence of affection for his Uncle Edward, but although they exchanged visits at Cowes and Kiel, Windsor and Friedrichshof, they scarcely ever met without there being some kind of row, and international complications were sometimes narrowly averted. There was a natural
antipathy
between the two men, as between the nations.

Prince Conrad said it was a great pity, but was not inclined to discuss it sympathetically with his wife, her letters had made that pretty plain. He had always deplored the savage tone of the German Press towards England, Rosalind recalled, even in the old days when they were all in London. But even the Kaiser talked too loud, said Rosalind, and his ministers lived in dread of the occasions which called for public utterance by him, and always had to suppress and smooth over and deny for days after he had made a speech somewhere. If he got on to his pet subject—the “encirclement” of Germany, and her
vulnerability
, placed as she was in the centre of Europe and exposed to attack on all sides, and of Germany’s wrongs (all still pending) at the hands of envious nations who wished her ill and would not recognize her good, her
benevolent
intentions in building a fleet as large as she could, but to defend herself only and never to challenge (perish the thought!) the British Navy—when he got started like that, God only knew what his obsession might lead him to say before he could be diplomatically shushed again.

And yet, Rosalind would add with an almost visible shrug of her shoulders, the Emperor was a delightful companion when he chose to be, though his humour was likely to be of the coarse schoolboy variety, with puns, horseplay, and
practical
jokes. When he came to Heidersdorf for the shooting and during manoeuvres, he always asked her to play to him after dinner, and once he refused to kiss her hand till she had taken her glove off. (The old goat, Johnny Malone had remarked, when Phoebe read that page to her friends in New York.) But for all his rather flamboyant gallantries, Wilhelm believed that
women were meant only for
Kinder,
Küche,
and
Kirche,
as he did not deny when you taxed him with it, said Rosalind, who on her part as hostess to their imperial guest must have given her husband some bad moments.

The Crown Prince, Rosalind reported once a little while before his marriage, with an almost audible giggle, was even more so than his father, and was apparently making a collection of her handkerchiefs, which he tucked away in the breast of his coat with sentimental glances which someone else was bound to see sooner or later, and he wrote her note signed
For
ever
yours
—Conny, of course, would only laugh, so long as it was the Crown Prince, who was so “susceptible” that he was not allowed to travel in England for fear his virtue would be unduly taxed by so many lovely women and too friendly girls in a country notoriously lax about chaperonage, as every good German knew. Rosalind had to speak to him very severely and tell him that she would not be flirted with in such an obvious and banal fashion. Fortunately he took it meekly.