You Can't Go Home Again (34 page)

“What’s that?” said Mrs. Jack, and then went on immediately, “Oh, the picture! No, Steve. It was done in nineteen”—she checked herself so swiftly that it was not apparent to anyone but Hook—“in nineteen-six.” She saw just the trace of a smile upon his pale, bored face and gave him a quick, warning little look, but he just murmured:

“Oh…I had forgotten it was as late as that.”

As a matter of fact, he knew the exact date, even to the month and day, when it had been finished. And, still musing on the vagaries of the sex, he thought: “Why will they be so stupid! She must understand that to anyone who knows the least thing about Mallows’ life the date is as familiar as the fourth of July!”

“Of course,” Mrs. Jack was saying rapidly, “I was just a child when it was made. I couldn’t have been more than eighteen at the time—if I was that.”

“Which would make you not more than forty-one now,” thought Hook cynically—“if you are that! Well, my dear, you were twenty when he painted you—and you had been married for more than two years…Why do they do it!” he thought impatiently, and with a feeling of sharp annoyance. He looked at her and caught a quick expression—startled, almost pleading—in her eyes. He followed her glance, and saw the awkward figure of George Webber standing ill at ease in the doorway leading from the dining-room. “Ah! It’s this boy!” he thought. “She’s told him then that—” and, suddenly, remembering her pleading look, he was touched with pity. Aloud, however, he merely murmured indifferently:

“Oh, yes, you couldn’t have been very old.”

“And God!” exclaimed Mrs. Jack, “but I was beautiful!”

She spoke the words with such innocent delight that they lost any trace of objectionable vanity they might have had, and people smiled at her affectionately. Amy Carleton, with a hasty little laugh, said impulsively:

“Oh, Esther! Honestly, you’re the
most
...1 But I
mean!
“—she cried impatiently, with a toss of her dark head, as if answering some invisible antagonist—“she
is
!”

“In all your days,” said Mrs. Jack, her face suffused with laughter, “you never saw the like of me! I was just like peaches and cream. I’d have knocked your eye out!”

“But,
darling!
You do
now!
” cried Amy. “What I mean to say is—darling, you’re the
most
...! Isn’t she, Steve?” She laughed uncertainly, turning to Hook with feverish eagerness.

And he, seeing the ruin, the loss, the desperation in her splintered eves, was sick with horror and with pity. He looked at her disdainfully, with weary, lidded eyes, said: “What?” quite freezingly, and then turned away, saying with an accent of boredom: “Oh.”

Beside him was the smiling face of Mrs. Jack, and, above, the portrait of the lovely girl that she had been. And the anguish and the mystery of time stabbed through him.

“My God, here she is!” he thought. “Still featured like a child, still beautiful, still loving someone—a boy!—almost as lovely now as she was then when Mallows was a boy!”

1901! Ah, Time! The figures reeled in a drunken dance and he rubbed his hand before his eyes. In 1901! How many centuries ago was that? How many lives and deaths and floods, how many million days and nights of love, of hate, of anguish and of fear, of guilt, of hope, of disillusion and defeat here in the geologic aeons of this monstrous catacomb, this riddled isle!—In 1901! Good God! It was the very Prehistoric Age of Man! Why, all
that
had happened several million years ago! Since then so much had begun and ended and been forgotten—so many untold lives of truth, of youth, of old age, so much blood and sweat and agony had gone below the bridge—why, he himself had lived through at least a hundred lives of it. Yes, he had lived and died through so many births and deaths and dark oblivions of it, had striven, fought, and hoped, and been destroyed through so many centuries of it, that even memory had failed—the sense of time had been wiped out—and all of it now seemed to have happened in a timeless dream. 1901! Looked at from here and now, it was a kind of Grand Canyon of the human nerves and bones and blood and brain and flesh and words and thought, all timeless now, all congealed, all solidified in an unchanging stratum there impossibly below, mixed into a general geologic layer with all the bonnets, bustles, and old songs, the straw hats and the derbies, the clatter of forgotten hooves, the thunder of forgotten wheels upon forgotten cobbles—all merged together now with the skeletons of lost ideas in a single stratum of the sunken world—while
she

—She! Why, surely she had been a part of it with him!

She had turned to speak to another group, and he could hear her saying:

“Oh yes, I knew Jack Reed. He used to come to Mabel Dodge’s place. We were great friends…That was when Alfred Stieglitz had started his salon----”

Ah, all these names! Had he not been with these as well? Or, was it but another shape, a seeming, in this phantasmal shadow-show of time? Had he not been beside her at the launching of the ship? Had they not been captives together among Thracian faces? Had he not lighted tapers to the tent when she had come to charm remission from the lord of Macedon?—All these were ghosts—save she! And she—devouring child of time—had of this whole huge company of ghosts alone remained immortal and herself, had shed off the chrysalis of all these her former selves as if each life that she had lived was nothing but an outworn garment, and now stood here—_here_! Good God!—upon the burnt-out candle-end of time—with her jolly face of noon, as if she had just heard of this brave new world on Saturday—and would see if
all
of it was really true to-morrow!

Mrs. Jack had turned back once more at the sound of Amy’s voice and had bent forward to listen to the girl’s disjointed exclamations as if, by giving more concentrated attention, she could make sense of what the girl was trying to say.

“I
mean!
...You
know!
...But Esther! Darling, you’re the most…! It’s the most…! I mean, when I look at both of you, I simply can’t”—cried Amy with hoarse elation, her lovely face all sunning over with light—“Oh, what I
mean
to say is”—she cried, then shook her head strongly, tossed another cigarette away impatiently, and cried with the expiration of a long sigh—“Gosh!”

Poor child! Poor child! Hook turned pompously away to hide the naked anguish in his eyes. So soon to grow, to go, to be consumed and die like all of us! She was, he felt, like him, too prone to live her life upon the single instant, never saving out anything as a prudent remnant for the hour of peril or the day of ruin—too prone to use it all, to give it all, burning herself out like last night’s moths upon a cluster of hard light!

Poor child! Poor child! So quick and short and temporal, both you and I, thought Hook—the children of a younger kind! While these! He looked about him at the sensual volutes of strong nostrils curved with scornful mirth. These others of this ancient chemistry—unmothed, re-born, and venturesome, yet wisely mindful of the flame—these others shall endure! Ah, Time!

Poor child!

16. A Moment of Decision

George Webber had helped himself generously to the sumptuous feast so temptingly laid out in the dining-room, and now, his hunger sated, he had been standing for a few minutes in the doorway surveying the brilliant scene in the great living-room. He was trying to make up his mind whether to plunge boldly in and find somebody to talk to, or whether to put off the ordeal a little longer by lingering over the food. He thought with regret that there were still a few dishes that he had not even tasted. He had already eaten so much, however, that he knew he could not make a convincing show of taking more, so there seemed to be nothing for it but to screw up his courage and make the best of the situation.

He had just reached this conclusion, with a feeling of “Now you’re in for it!”—when he caught a glimpse of Stephen Hook, whom he knew and liked, and with a great sense of relief he started towards him. Hook was leaning on the mantel, talking with a handsome woman. He saw George coming and extended his soft, plump hand sideways, saying casually:

“Oh. How are you?...Look.” His tone, as always when he did something that was prompted by the generous and sensitive warmth of his spirit, was deliberately indifferent and masked with an air of heavy boredom. “Have you a telephone? I was trying to get you the other day. Can’t you come and have lunch with me some time?”

As a matter of fact, this idea had never occurred to him until that moment. Webber knew that he had thought of it in an instant reflex of sympathy to put him at his ease, to make him feel less desperately shipwrecked in these glittering, sophisticated tides, to give him something “to hold on to”. Ever since he had first met Hook and had seen his desperate shyness and the naked terror in his eyes, he had understood the kind of man he was. He had never been deceived by the show of aloof weariness or the elaborately mannered speech. Beneath these disguises he had felt the integrity, the generosity, the nobility, the aspiration in the man’s tortured soul. So, now, with profound gratitude, he reached out and shook his hand, feeling as he did so like a bewildered swimmer seizing on the one thing that could sustain him in these disturbing and unfathomed currents which were edged somehow with menace. He stammered out a hasty greeting, said he would be delighted to go to lunch with him some time—any time—any time at all; and he took a place beside Hook as though he meant to stay there for the rest of the evening.

Hook talked to him a little while in his casual way and introduced the woman. George tried to engage her in conversation, but, instead of answering his remarks, she just looked at him coolly and said nothing. Embarrassed by this behaviour, George looked round him as if searching for someone, and in a final effort to say something, to give some show of ease and purpose which he did not feel, he blurted out:

“Have—have you seen Esther anywhere about?”

As he said the words he knew how stiff and clumsy they sounded, and how absurd, too, for Mrs. Jack, as anyone could see, was standing talking to some of the guests not ten feet away. And the woman, as if she had been waiting for just such an opening, now answered him at once. Turning to him with a bright, superior smile, she said with cool unfriendliness:

“About? Yes, I think you’ll find her about—just about there,” nodding in the direction of Mrs. Jack.

It was not a very witty remark. To George it seemed almost as stupid as his own words had been. He knew, too, that the unfriendliness behind it was impersonal—just the mark of fashion, a willingness to sacrifice manners to the chance of making a smart retort. Why, then, did his face now flush with anger? Why did he double up his fist and turn upon the trivial and smiling creature with such smouldering menace that it seemed he was about to commit a physical assault upon her?

In the very instant that he assumed this belligerent attitude he realised that he was acting like a baffled clodhopper, and this consciousness made him feel ten times the yokel that he looked. He tried to think of telling words with which to answer her, but his mind was paralysed and he was conscious only of the burning sensation in his face and neck. He knew that his ill-fitting coat was sticking out round his collar, that he was cutting a sorry figure, and that the woman—“That damned bitch!” he muttered to himself—was laughing at him. So, defeated and discomfited utterly, not so much by the woman as by his own ineptitude, he turned and stalked away, hating himself, the party, and, most of all, his folly in coming.

Well, he hadn’t wanted to come! That was Esther’s doing! She was responsible for this! It was all her fault! Full of confusion and irrational anger at everything and everybody, he backed himself against the wall on the opposite side of the room and stood there clenching and unclenching his fists and glaring round him.

But the violence and the injustice of his feelings soon began to have a calming and sobering effect upon him. Then he saw the absurdity of the whole episode, and began to laugh and mock inwardly at himself.

“So this is why you didn’t want to come!” he thought scornfully. “You were afraid some silly fool of an ill-bred woman would make an inane remark that would prick your delicate hide! God, what a fool you are! Esther was right!”

But
had
she been right, really? He had made such an issue of it with his talk about the work he had to do as a novelist, and how he had to keep clear of her world in order to do it. Was all that just a way of rationalising his sense of social inadequacy? Had he gone to such lengths of theorising merely to spare his tender ego the ridicule and humiliation of such a scene as he had just precipitated?

No, that was not the answer. There was more to it than that. By now he had cooled off enough to be able to look at himself objectively, and all at once he realised that he had never got clear in his own mind what he had meant when he had talked to Esther about her world and his world. He had used the phrases as symbols of something real, something important that he had felt instinctively but had never put into words. And that’s why he hadn’t been able to make her understand. Well, what was it? What had he been afraid of? It wasn’t only that he didn’t like big parties and knew himself to be unschooled in the social graces that such occasions demanded. That was a part of it—yes. But it was only a part—the smallest part, the petty, personal part. There was something else—something impersonal, something much bigger than himself, something that mattered greatly to him and that would not be denied. What was it now? Better face it and try to get it straight.

Completely cool now, and fascinated by the inner problem which the ridiculous little incident had brought into sharp focus, he began to look about him at the people in the room. He watched their faces closely and tried to penetrate behind the social masks they wore, probably, boring, searching as for some clue that might lead him to an answer to his riddle. It was, he knew, a distinguished gathering. It included brilliant, successful men and beautiful women. They were among the best and highest that the city had to offer. But as he looked them over with an alert eye and with all his sensitivities keenly awakened by his present purpose, he saw that there were some among them who wore quite another hue.