Tomorrow Is Forever (23 page)

Spratt got into bed. He was tired, and was asleep in five minutes.

In his apartment, Kessler had not begun to get ready for bed. He was sitting alone on a sofa, asking himself over and over, “Good Lord, what have I done to her?”

Useless now to wish he had not come here. The damage was done. Now it was up to him to undo it. He had to convince Elizabeth that he was not Arthur, and leave her marriage as secure as he had found it. The task appalled him. It was going to require the last shred of his strength, and even with that he was not sure he was equal to it. He was giving way. The studio had been letting him work at home for the past few days. That was all right, as long as he had the story treatment ready on time. But the story treatment was quite unimportant compared with clearing up the mischief he had wrought in Elizabeth's life. Exhausted as he was he had to sit here all night if necessary, devising means of persuading her.

The strongest weapon was always the truth. Not the truth about his identity this time, but the truth about what it would mean to her if she continued to believe her recognition correct. If he could make that clear to her she would not want to believe it, Kessler told himself. Once he had done that he could rest, yielding to his weariness in the blessed thought that he need never make an effort again. He stayed where he was, thinking, until the daylight began to creep between the curtains and he fell asleep with his head against the sofa cushions.

12

W
hen Elizabeth awoke she could tell by the sun that it was late in the morning. Her first thought was that she should have been up to see Dick off to his eight-thirty class, then she remembered Dick was gone to boot-camp in San Diego. She sat up. It was after nine, so Cherry and Brian would be gone too, as well as Spratt. Elizabeth rang her bell.

The maid came in, bringing orange juice and the morning paper. “Why didn't anybody wake me?” Elizabeth asked.

“Mr. Herlong said not to. He said you were tired.”

Spratt had left her a note, scribbled in pencil across a sheet of studio stationery. “Elizabeth—Glad you're getting a long sleep. I told Cherry and Brian to go on to school without bothering you. I have to leave now, will ring you later if anything turns up, otherwise will see you tonight. All well. Chin up, the war news looks pretty good this morning, anyway nothing lasts forever. I love you, thought I'd remind you in case I hadn't mentioned it lately. Spratt.”

The maid brought her toast and scrambled eggs. She had been about to ask for bacon before she remembered what a rare commodity it had become. Elizabeth laid the note on her bedside table and looked around her at the day.

She felt fresh and well, and last night's tumult seemed a long way behind her. The morning was cool, sparkling like a jewel. It had brought back her courage; today was ahead of her and she could face it. In fact, she wanted to face it, to do what needed to be done and get it over. She thought of Kessler. She had to see him and talk to him like a reasonable human being. What a fool she must have sounded like last night. It had all been too much, that astounding recognition just after Dick's going. But Kessler?

Was that a fantasy or was it the truth? Last night she had been so sure, this morning it seemed more like an illusion born of nerves worn to the limit of endurance. Until those last minutes before she went to sleep she had not realized how tired she was. She had read somewhere that intense fatigue produced strange mental symptoms, like those of a narcotic that brought foolishness without unconsciousness.

But he did look like Arthur. That at least was not her imagination. It was Arthur he had suggested the first night she saw him, it was Arthur he had been bringing back all these months. Now, in the fresh light of the morning, was he Arthur or wasn't he?

If he was not, what a lunatic he must think her! But if he was, where had he been, why had he been silent, what was this going to mean? She had a picture of Arthur packed away in a closet, but it had been years since she had looked for it and it would take her a long time to find it now. Anyway, she did not need it. Her memory was vivid enough, and Kessler was there to be seen.

“I'll get this over now,” said Elizabeth. “Now. Today.”

She got up and went to her telephone. Apparently he had been waiting for her call, for he answered the phone himself. When she told him who she was he said, “Yes, Mrs. Herlong?” and waited expectantly.

“First,” said Elizabeth, “I want to apologize for my startling behavior last night.”

“Then you do know this morning,” he asked eagerly, “that you were mistaken?”

“I don't know that, not yet. But at least this morning I can promise you to behave like an intelligent adult. You told me I could see you today. May I come over?”

“Certainly.”

“Now?”

“Whenever you like.”

“Thank you.”

While she was getting dressed she remembered that last night Kessler had said he had a favor to ask of her. She must remember to tell him to go ahead, and not let what he called her mistake stand in the way. If she was wrong, he would forgive her and never mention it again, to her or anybody else—she was sure she could trust him for that. But if she was right—she shivered, and she did not know whether it was a tremor of hope or dread.

Kessler's housekeeper told her he was waiting for her in his study. Elizabeth went in and shut the door behind her. Kessler had been sitting before his typewriter, with sheets of manuscript around him. For an instant she wondered if he had been working, or if he had set the stage to make it look as if he found this so unimportant that he could go on with his work without interruption. But she thought of that only an instant. As she came in Kessler put his hand on his cane and stood up. Their eyes met, and Elizabeth said,

“I came here this morning to see if I was right or wrong in what I said to you last night. I was right.”

Kessler drew in a quick breath, without answering. Elizabeth came nearer and sat down. Holding her handbag in her lap, she leaned back to look up at him.

She said, “I have not been drinking and I am not hysterical. I had nine hours' sleep, and when I woke up my impression of last night seemed like a mistake based on a chance resemblance. It was not a mistake.” She smiled at him, pleadingly. “Arthur, let's face this and talk about it.”

“I'll talk about it as long as you like,” he answered her, and as he spoke he smiled too, as though sorry for her. “But it's not true, Mrs. Herlong.”

But Elizabeth continued, “You have a scar on your arm where you were burnt by a splash of boiling chocolate one night when I was making fudge. You have another scar on your right knee, made when you and I were practicing fancy dives and you hit the edge of the pool.”

Kessler sat down, and moved a pencil that was about to fall off the edge of his table. “I have so many scars,” he said, “that no doubt you could find two that would fit those you are talking about.” Then, supporting himself on his cane, he leaned toward her, and continued, “Mrs. Herlong, my body is such an accumulation of patches and makeshifts that to prove or disprove my likeness to any healthy man would be very difficult. I didn't grow this beard to disguise my face, but to cover some ugly lines on my chin that would make me even harder to look at than I am now. Yet you insist I resemble your first husband.”

Elizabeth felt no yielding of her conviction. “It's not just that you look like him,” she persisted. “It's—how shall I say it?—your mind, the way you think, the way you peak. You are interested in everything. You are full of scraps of knowledge on all sorts of subjects, picked up because of an insatiable curiosity about what goes on in the world. Your teaching Margaret to examine flowers through a microscope, your encouraging her to ask questions—it's how Arthur would have dealt with a child, and for the same reason. Your generosity, your tremendous tolerance, your encompassing love for the human race—that's not ‘like' Arthur Kittredge, it
is
Arthur. Yet you—” She stopped, her eyes on him with a passionate earnestness.

“Yet I tell you I am not Arthur Kittredge. I am Erich Kessler, and you are going to believe me.”

“How can I?”

“Can't more than one man be curious about the planet he lives on? Can't more than one man love the human race, as you put it?”

“You are talking in abstractions. I tell you, I
know
.”

Kessler shook his head.

Elizabeth shrank back into her chair, away from him. “How can you do this to me!” she exclaimed. “Don't you remember how I loved you?”

For a moment she covered her face with her hands. She did not know how thankful he was for that moment, when she did not see the tightening of his eyes and lips that even his grim self-control could not prevent. She got out a handkerchief and began twisting it between her fingers, then carefully untwisted it and folded it again. Her pause to regain her own calmness had given him time to regain his, and when he spoke again his voice was steady.

“Now that Dick has gone to fight for tomorrow's world,” he said to her, “it would be a catastrophe to see his mother refusing to give up her dependence on yesterday.”

Elizabeth started. “What on earth do you mean?”

He spoke to her in a low, intensely purposeful voice. “Mrs. Herlong, not long ago your son sat where you are sitting, defining in his own mind the question before this generation. At length he understood—I like to think I helped him understand—that he was living in one of the periods when the advance of civilization seems to halt because of forces that are trying to push it back instead of letting it go ahead as it was meant to do. He came to see that his side was the right and ultimately victorious side, because those who fight to raise up the dead past eventually destroy themselves.”

Elizabeth shook her head with a puzzled frown. “I understand that, but what has it got to do with me? With us?”

“It has a great deal to do with you and me. This battle between yesterday and tomorrow is only occasionally an international affair. But it's going on all the time in our own lives. Some of us refuse to let go of what used to be. We cling to it even when it is nothing but dust and dead leaves, instead of accepting the fact that we've got to go ahead in time whether we like it or not.”

Elizabeth did not answer. But she was listening to him, for he spoke so earnestly that he made her listen.

“You know men and women like this, though for the most part you've been too intelligent to be among them. You've lived past your first youth without any great regret for it, for you've acquired a richness of social experience that makes you a far more vital personality, for instance, than your daughter. You don't envy Dick and Cherry's friends. If you had to associate with them all the time you'd be bored beyond expression, for pretty and entertaining as they are, they're shallow and unfinished compared to what you have become. But you've seen men and women who have let time go by without being enriched by it, haven't you?”

He paused a moment. Elizabeth still did not understand where he was leading her, but she still listened.

“Sometimes it's so obvious that a child can see what they're doing—baldheaded grandfathers acting like fools over young girls, women in their fifties making themselves up into ridiculous caricatures of adolescence. Hasn't it ever occurred to you that they do this because they've still got adolescent minds? They've never developed to the point where they can enjoy adult pleasures in the company of adults, so they try to imitate and associate with the children whose equals they are. A ripe mentality is an achievement. It takes effort, and some people have never made the effort. So instead of growing up, they stay half-finished, and spend what ought to be their most abundant years paying their dancing partners and beauty operators to tell them how young they look. You've seen them and laughed at them.”

Elizabeth caught her breath in protest. “But you were just telling me I wasn't like that. I'm not—for heaven's sake, I'm not going to be a fat old woman who gets her face lifted and goes starry-eyed over a gigolo!” She laughed shortly at the idea. “But even if I were, what has this got to do with us now, today, with what I came here to tell you?”

“It has a great deal to do with it, Mrs. Herlong,” Kessler insisted. “You're a charming woman, not because you're sixteen but because you aren't. Genuine maturity has a gracious poise that youth never has. The charm of youth is its physical freshness, but the charm of maturity is a flowering of the spirit. Those others I was recalling to you, they have no youth and no maturity either. You have maturity, you know how fine it is—don't start to be like them. Don't reach back now!”

“I don't understand you!” she exclaimed. “I want to know whether or not you are Arthur Kittredge come back from that German hospital where they told me you had died. What are you trying to tell me?”

He answered her simply. “I am trying to tell you that if you want to believe I am Arthur Kittredge, you can persuade yourself that I am. You can make yourself see me as a living reminder of a period of your life that was very happy—that perhaps has grown happier in your recollection of it.”

“I didn't come here,” retorted Elizabeth, “to be advised whether or not I should believe in a fantasy. I came to be told the truth.”

“I am telling you the truth,” he insisted. “The truth is that you can stop living in the present if you want to. You can reach back and demand that the past be returned to you. But it won't be returned to you. You won't get back what you have lost, you'll only be destroying what you have.”

“But if you are—” she began, and stopped, her eyes going over him with an intense scrutiny. She had listened to him impatiently, but she had heard what he had been saying to her. He was like Arthur. But he was different too. When she had first looked at him this morning she had been sure. Now she began to ask herself again whether the differences meant another man or the changes of war and years.

“If you will let me,” Kessler said, “I can tell you why you want me to be Arthur Kittredge.”

“Go on,” Elizabeth said faintly.

“For the past few months you have found the present very hard to take. You have been looking back into a time when you weren't aware of the demands life was going to make on you. In those days every minute was delightful for itself. You had what you wanted and you didn't know you were going to have to pay for it. You've personified that lovely thoughtlessness of youth in the figure of the man who shared it with you. You want it back—not Arthur, but the young freedom Arthur symbolizes for you.”

Elizabeth started. She felt a tremor run through her, so sharply that for a moment she could not control her voice sufficiently to answer. She had never been resentful about the passage of time as some people were; actually, she had been too busy to think much about it. Or so she had believed until now. Was it possible that her looking for Arthur was only part of the universal human wish for irresponsibility? Her voice was thin with astonishment as she exclaimed,

“My God, is that what I've been doing?”

“Yes,” he said, “it is.”

Elizabeth was silent. She felt as if she had been accused of a sin, and found just enough echo of guilt in herself to be unable to speak in her own defense.