You Can't Go Home Again (33 page)

He had not wanted to come to the party at all. From the moment she had first invited him he had brought forward a barrage of objections. They had argued it back and forth for days, but at last she had won and had exacted his promise. But as the time approached he felt himself hesitating again, and last night he had paced the floor for hours in an agony of self-recrimination and indecision. At last, around one o’clock, he had seized the telephone with desperate resolve and, after waking the whole household before he got her, he had told her that he was not coming. Once more he repeated all his reasons. He only half-understood them himself, but they had to do with the incompatibility of her world and his world, and his belief, which was as much a matter of instinctive feeling as of conscious thought, that he must keep his independence of the world she belonged to if he was to do his work. He grew almost desperate as he tried to explain it to her, because he couldn’t seem to make her understand what he was driving at. In the end she became a little desperate, too. First she was annoyed, and told him for God’s sake to stop being such a fool. Then she became hurt and angry and reminded him of his promise.

“We’ve been over all of this a dozen times!” she said shrilly, and there was also a tearful note in her voice. “You promised, George—you know you did! And now everything’s arranged. It’s too late to change it now. You can’t let me down like this!”

This appeal was too much for him. He knew, of course, that the party had not been planned for him and that no arrangements would be upset if he failed to appear. No one but Esther would even be aware of his absence. But he had given his promise to come, however reluctantly, and he saw that the only issue he had succeeded in raising in her mind was the simple one of whether he would keep his word. So once more, and finally, he had yielded. And now he was here, full of confusion, and wishing with all his heart that he was anywhere else.

“I’m sure you’re going to have a good time,” Esther was saying to him eagerly. “You’ll see—” and she squeezed his hand. “There are lots of people I want you to meet. But you must be hungry. Better get yourself something to eat first. You’ll find plenty of things you like. I planned them especially for you. Go in the dining-room and help yourself. I’ll have to stay here a little while to welcome all these people.”

After she left him to greet some new arrivals, George stood there awkwardly for a moment with a scowl on his face and glanced about the room at the dazzling assemblage. In that attitude he cut a rather grotesque figure. The low brow with its frame of short black hair, the burning eyes, the small, packed features, the long arms dangling to the knees, and the curved paws gave him an appearance more simian than usual, and the image was accentuated by his not-too-well-fitting dinner jacket. People looked at him and stared, then turned away indifferently and resumed their conversations.

“So!” he thought with somewhat truculent self-consciousness—“These are her fine friends! I might have known it!” he muttered to himself, without knowing at all what it was he might have known. The poise, assurance, and sophistication of all these sleek faces made him fancy a slight where none was offered or intended. “I’ll show them!” he growled absurdly beneath his breath, not having the faintest idea what he meant by that.

With this, he turned upon his heel and threaded his way through the brilliant throng towards the dining-room.

“I
mean!
...You
know!
...”

At the sound of the words, eager, rapid, uttered in a rather hoarse yet strangely seductive tone of voice, Mrs. Jack smiled at the group to whom she had been talking. “There’s Amy!” she said.

Then, as she turned and saw the elflike head with its unbelievable harvest of ebony curls, the snub nose and the little freckles, and the lovely face so radiant with an almost boyish quality of animation and enthusiasm, she thought:

“Isn’t she beautiful! And—and—there is something so sweet, so—so good about her!”

Even as her mind framed its spontaneous tribute to the girlish apparition with the elflike head, Mrs. Jack knew that it was not true. No; Amy Carleton was many things, but no one could call her good. In fact, if she was not “a notorious woman”, the reason was that she had surpassed the ultimate limits of notoriety, even for New York. Everybody knew her, and knew all about her, yet what the truth was, or what the true image of that lovely counterfeit of youth and joy, no one could say.

Chronology? Well, for birth she had had the golden spoon. She had been born to enfabled wealth. Hers had been the childhood of a dollar princess, kept, costly, cabined, pruned, confined. A daughter of “Society”, her girlhood had been spent in rich schools and in travel, in Europe, Southampton, New York, and Palm Beach. By eighteen she was “out”—a famous beauty. By nineteen she was married. And by twenty she was divorced, her name tainted. It had been a sensational case which fairly reeked. Even at that time her conduct had been so scandalous that her husband had had no difficulty in winning a decree.

Since that time, seven years before, her career had defied the measurements of chronology. Although she was now only in her middle twenties, her life seemed to go back through aeons of iniquity. Thus one might remember one of the innumerable scandals that had been connected with her name, and then check oneself suddenly with a feeling of stunned disbelief. “Oh, no! It can’t be! That happened only three short years ago, and since then she’s—why she’s—” And one would stare in stupefaction at that elflike head, that snub nose, that boyishly eager face, like one who realised that he was looking at the dread Medusa, or at some enchantress of Circean cunning whose life was older than the ages and whose heart was old as hell.

It baffled time, it turned reality to phantasmal shapes. One could behold her as she was to-night, here in New York, this freckled, laughing image of happy innocence—and before ten days had made their round one might come upon her again in the corruptest gatherings of Paris, drugged fathoms deep in opium, foul-bodied and filth-bespattered, cloying in the embraces of a gutter rat, so deeply rooted in the cesspool that it seemed she must have been bred on sewage and had never known any other life.

Since her first marriage and divorce, she had been married twice again. The second marriage had lasted only twenty hours, and had been annulled. The third had ended when her husband shot himself.

And before and after that, and in between, and in and out, and during it and later on, and now and then, and here and there, and at home and abroad, and on the seven seas, and across the length and breadth of the five continents, and yesterday and to-morrow and for ever—could it be said of her that she had been promiscuous? No, that could not be said of her. For she had been as free as air, and one does not qualify the general atmosphere with such a paltry adjective as “promiscuous”. She had just slept with everybody—with white, black, yellow, pink, green, or purple—but she had never been promiscuous.

It was, in romantic letters, a period that celebrated the lady who was lost, the lovely creature in the green hat who was “never let off anything”. Her story was a familiar one: she was the ill-starred heroine of fate, a martyr to calamitous mischance, whose ruin had been brought about through tragic circumstances which she could not control, and for which she was not responsible.

Amy Carleton had her apologists who tried to cast her in this role. The stories told about her “start upon the downward path” were numerous. One touching version dated the beginning of the end from the time when, an innocent and fun-loving girl of eighteen, she had, in a moment of daring, lighted a cigarette at a dinner party in Southampton, attended by a large number of eminent dowagers. The girl’s downfall, according to this tale, had been brought about by this thoughtless and harmless little act. From that moment on—so the story went—the verdict of the dowagers was “thumbs down” on Amy. The evil tongues began to wag, scandal began to grow, her reputation was torn to shreds. Then, in desperation, the unhappy child did go astray: she took to drink, from drink to lovers, from lovers to opium, from opium to—everything.

All this, of course, was just romantic nonsense. She was the victim of a tragic doom indeed, but she herself had fashioned it. With her the fault, as with dear Brutus, lay not in her stars, but in herself. For, having been endowed with so many rare and precious things that most men lack—wealth, beauty, charm, intelligence, and vital energy—she lacked the will, the toughness, to resist. So, having almost all, but lacking this, she was the slave to her advantages. Her wealth had set a premium on every whim, and no one had ever taught her to say no.

In this she was the child of her own time. Her life expressed itself in terms of speed, sensational change, and violent movement, in a feverish tempo that never drew from its own energies exhaustion or surcease, but mounted constantly to insane excess. She had been everywhere and “seen everything”—in the way one might see things from the windows of an express train travelling eighty miles an hour. And, having quickly exhausted the conventional kaleidoscope of things to be seen, she had long since turned to an investigation of things more bizarre and sinister and hidden. Here, too, her wealth and powerful connections opened doors to her which were closed to other people.

So, now, she possessed an intimate and extensive acquaintance among the most sophisticated and decadent groups in “Society”, in all the great cities of the world. And her cult of the unusual had led to an exploration of the most shadowy border lines of life. She had an acquaintanceship among the underworld of New York, London, Paris, and Berlin which the police might have envied. And even with the police her wealth had secured for her dangerous privileges. In some way, known only to persons who control great power, financial or political, she had obtained a police card and was privileged to a reckless licence in the operation of her low-slung racing car. Although she was near-sighted, she drove it at murderous speed through the seething highways of Manhattan, and as it flashed by she always got the courtesy of a police salute. All this in spite of the fact that she had demolished one car and killed a young man who had been driving with her, and in spite of the further fact that the police knew her as one who had been present at a drinking party at which one of the chieftains of the underworld had been slain.

It seemed, therefore, that her wealth and power and feverish energy could get her anything she wanted in any country of the world. People had once said: “What on earth is Amy going to do next!” But now they said: “What on earth is there left for her to do?” If life is to be expressed solely in terms of velocity and sensation, it seemed there was nothing left for her to do. Nothing but more speed, more change, more violence, more sensation—until the end. And the end? The end could only be destruction, and the mark of destruction was already apparent upon her. It was written in her eyes—in her tormented, splintered, and exploded vision. She had tried everything in life—except living. And she could never try that now because she had so long ago, and so irrevocably, lost the way. So there was nothing left for her to do except to die.

“If only”—people would think regretfully, as Mrs. Jack now thought as she looked at that elfin head—“oh, if only things had turned out differently for her!”—and then would seek back desperately through the labyrinthine scheme to find the clue to her disorder, saying: “Here—or here—or here—it happened here, you see!—If Only—!”

If only men were so much clay, as they are blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling! If they only were!

“I
mean!
...You
know!
...” With these words, so indicative of her undefined enthusiasm and inchoate thought, Amy jerked the cigarette away from her lips, laughed hoarsely and eagerly, and turned to her companions as if fairly burning with a desire to communicate to them something that filled her with exuberant elation. “I
mean!
” she cried again—“when you compare it with the stuff they’re doing nowadays!—I
mean
!—there’s simply no comparison!” Laughing jubilantly, as if the thought behind these splintered phrases must be perfectly clear to everyone, she drew furiously upon her cigarette again and jerked it from her lips.

The group of, young people of which Amy was the radiant centre, and which included not only the young Japanese who was her current lover but also the young Jew who had been his most recent predecessor, had moved over towards the portrait of Mrs. Jack above the mantel, and were looking up at it. The portrait deserved the praise that was now being heaped upon it. It was one of the best examples of Henry Mallows’ early work.

“When you look at it and
think
how long ago that was!”—cried Amy jubilantly, gesturing towards the picture with rapid thrusts of her cigarette—“and how beautiful she was
then
!—and how beautiful she is now!” she cried exultantly, laughed hoarsely, then cast her grey-green eyes round her in a glance of feverish exasperation—“I
mean!
“—she cried again, and drew impatiently on her cigarette—“there’s
simply
no comparison!” Then, realising that she had not said what she had wanted to say, she went on: “Oh, I
mean!
“—she said in a tone almost of desperation and tossed her cigarette angrily away into the blazing fire—“the whole thing’s obvious!” she muttered, leaving everyone more bewildered than before. With a sudden and impulsive movement she turned towards Stephen Hook, who was still leaning with his elbow on one corner of the mantel, and demanded: “How long has it been, Steve?...I
mean!
—it’s been twenty years ago, hasn’t it?”

“Oh, quite all of that,” Hook answered in his cold, bored voice. In his agitation and embarrassment he moved still farther away until he almost had his back turned upon the group. “It’s been nearer thirty, I should think,” he tossed back over his shoulder, and then with an air of casual indifference he gave the date. “I should think it was done in nineteen-one or two—wasn’t it, Esther?” he said, turning to Mrs. Jack, who had now approached the group. “Around nineteen-one, wasn’t it?”