"Luke! I knew there was something fishy! Maybe there isn"t any Senator. Or maybe he"s divorced her, and n.o.body around here will know her. Or maybe she"s a little off, from his being dead, and wants to go on pretending he"s alive. With people like us-who wouldn"t know."
He put back his head in laughter. "Now I know how you did get through college." He kissed the back of my neck, and pushed me through the door. "State senator, dope," he whispered, as we knocked at Mrs. Hawthorn"s.
"Ready?" She opened the door and held it back in such a way that we knew we were to look in. "This is the only room I changed," she said. "I had it done again last year, the same way. I thought the man from Sloane would drop in his tracks when I insisted on the same thing. All that pink. Ninety yards of it in the curtains alone." She laughed, as she had done at the child in Bermuda. "Of course I had no idea back then ... I thought it was lovely, so help me. And now I"m used to it."
We looked around. All that pink, as she had said. The room, from its shape, must be directly above the big room below; its great windows jutted out like a huge pink prow, overlooking the three bodies of water. Chairs with the sickly sheen of hard candy pursed their Louis Quatorze legs on a rose madder rug, under lamps the tinge of old powder puffs. There were a few glossy prints on the walls-nymphs couched like bonbons in ambiguous verdure. Marble putti held back the curtains, and each morning, between ninety yards of rosy lingerie, there would rise the craggy, seamed face of the sea.
Mrs. Hawthorn put her hand on one of the cherubs, and looked out. "We sailed from there on our honeymoon," she said. "On the old Hawthorns" yacht, right from the end of the dock. I remember thinking it would give, there were so many people on the end of it." She took a fur from a chair, slung it around her shoulders, and walked to the door. At the door, she turned back and surveyed the room. "Ain"t it orful!" she said, in her normal voice. "Harry can"t bear it."
She had two voices, I thought, as we followed her downstairs and got in the car she referred to as her runabout, that she"d made Harry give her in place of the chauffeur-driven Rolls. One voice for that tranced tale of first possession-when the house, the dock, the boudoir, Harry were new. And one for now-slangy, agnostic, amused.
She drove well, the way she swam, with a crisp, physical intensity. There had been bridle paths through these woods, she told us, but she hadn"t really minded giving up the horses; swimming was the only thing she liked to do alone. She swam every day; it kept her weight down to the same as when she married. "You"ll be having to pick yourself some exercise now too, honey," she said, sighing. "And stick to it the rest of your days."
We would turn on to the main road soon, I thought, probably to one of those roadhouses full of Sat.u.r.day night daters such as Luke and I had been the year before, spinning out the evening on the cover charge and a couple of setups, and looking down our noses at the fat middle-agers who didn"t have to watch the tab, but were such a nuisance on the floor.
The car veered suddenly to the left, and reduced speed. Now we seemed to be riding on one of the overgrown paths. Twigs whipped through the open window and slurred out again as we pa.s.sed. Beside me, Luke rolled up the window. We were all in the front seat together. No one spoke.
We stopped. We must be in the heart of the woods, I thought. There was nothing except the blind probe of the headlamps against leaves, the sc.r.a.ping of the November wind.
"Guess the switch from the house doesn"t work any more," she said, half to herself. She took a flashlight from the compartment. "Wait here," she said, and got out of the car. After she had gone, I opened the window and leaned across Luke, holding on to his hand. Above me, the stars were enlarged by the pure air. Off somewhere to the right, the flashlight made a weak, disappearing nimbus.
Then, suddenly, the woods were en fete. Festoons of lights spattered from tree to tree. Ahead of us, necromanced from the dark wood, the pattern of a house sprang on the air. After a moment our slow eyes saw that strings of lights garlanded its low log-cabin eaves, and twined up the two thick thrusts of chimney at either end. The flashlight wigwagged to us. We got out of the car, and walked toward it. Mrs. Hawthorn was leaning against one of the illuminated trees, looking up at the house. The furs slung back from her shoulders in a conqueror"s arc. As we approached, she shook her head, in a swimmer"s shake. "Well, ladies and gents," she said, in the cool, the vinaigrette voice, "here it is."
"Is it-is this the night club?" I said.
"This is it, baby," she said, and the way she said it made me feel as if she"d reached down and ruffled my curls. Instead, she reached up, and pressed a fuse box attached to the tree. For a minute, the red dazzle of the sign on the roof of the house made us blink. GINGER AND HARRY"S it said. There were one or two gaps in GINGER, and the second R of HARRY"S was gone, but the AND was perfect.
"Woods are death on electric lines," she said. Leading the way up the flagged path to the door, she bent down, muttering, and twitched at the weeds that had pushed up between the flags.
She unlocked the door. "We no longer heat it, of course. The pipes are drained. But I had them build fires this afternoon."
It was cold in the vestibule, just as it often was in the boxlike entrances of the roadhouses we knew, and, with its bare wood and plaster, it was just like them too-as if the flash and the jump were reserved for the sure customers inside. To our right was the hat-check stall, with its bra.s.s tags hung on hooks, and a white dish for quarters and dimes.
"I never had any servants around here," said Mrs. Hawthorn. "The girls used to take turns in the cloakroom, and the men used to tumble over themselves for a chance to tend bar, or be bouncer. Lord, it was fun. We had a kid from Hollywood here one night, one of the Wampas stars, and we sneaked her in as ladies" matron, before anyone knew who she was. What a stampede there was, when the boys found out!"
I bent down to decipher a tiled plaque in the plaster, with three initials and a date-1918. Mrs. Hawthorn saw me looking at it.
"As my mother used to say," she said. "Never have your picture taken in a hat."
Inside, she showed us the lounges for the men and the women-the men"s in red leather, hunting prints, and green baize. In the powder room, done in magenta and blue, with girandoles and ball fringe, with poufs and mirrored dressing tables, someone had hit even more precisely the exact note of the smart public retiring room-every woman a Pompadour, for ten minutes between dances.
"I did this all myself," she said. "From top to bottom. Harry had a bad leg when he came back-he was in an army hospital before we got married. He gave me my wedding present ahead of time-enough to remodel the old place, or build a new one. I surprised him. I built this place instead."
"Is his leg all right now?" I said.
"What?" she said.
"His leg. Is it all right now?"
"Yes, of course. That was donkey"s years ago." She was vague, as if about a different person. Behind her, Luke shook his head at me.
"And now ..." she said. "Now ... come in where it"s warm." And this time my ear picked up that tone of hers as it might a motif-that deep, rubato tone of possession fired by memory. She opened the door for us, but for a scant moment before, with her hand on the k.n.o.b, she approached it as a curator might pause before his Cellini, or a hostess before the lion of her afternoon.
And here it was. The two fires burned at either end; the sultry hooded sidelights reflected here and there on the pale, unscarred dance floor. The little round tables were neatly stacked at its edge, all but one table that was set for service, as if now that it was 3 A.M. or four, the fat proprietor and his headwaiter might just be sitting down for their morning bowl of soup. On the wall, behind the tables, flickered the eternal mural, elongated bal-masque figures and vaudeville backdrops, painted dim even when new, and never meant to be really seen. It could be the one of the harlequin-faced young men with top hats and canes, doing a soft-shoe routine against an after-dark sky. Or it might be the one of the tapering Venuses with the not-quite bodies, behind prussian-blue intimations of Versailles. It didn"t matter. Here was the "Inn," the "Club," the "Spot," the Glen Island, where one danced to Ozzie Nelson, the Log Cabin at Armonk, the one near Rumson, with the hot guitarist, the innumerable ones where, for an evening or a week of evenings, Vincent Lopez"s teeth glinted like piano keys under his mustache. The names would have varied somewhat from these names of the thirties, but here it was, with the orchestra sh.e.l.l waiting-the podium a little toward one end, so that the leader might ride sidesaddle, his suave cheek for the tables, his talented wrist for the band. Only the air was different, pure and still, without the hot, confectionery smell of the crowd. And the twin fires, though they were burning true and red, had fallen in a little, fallen back before the chill advance of the woods.
So, for the second time, we sat down to champagne with Mrs. Hawthorn. There was a big phonograph hidden in a corner; after a while she set it going, and we danced, Luke first with her, then with me. And now, as the champagne went to our heads, it was not the logs, or the chair arms that moved, but we who moved, looping and twirling to the succulent long-phrased music, laughing and excited with the extraordinary freedom of the floor. I thought of Dave, the little man, but Mrs. Hawthorn never mentioned his name. She was warm, gay-"like a young girl"-as I had heard it said now and then of an older woman. I had thought that this could not be so without grotesquerie, but now, with the wisdom of the wine, I imagined that it could-if it came from inside. She had the sudden, firm bloom of those people who really expand only in their own homes. For the first time, we were seeing her there.
Toward the evening"s height, she brought out some old jazz records, made specially for her, with the drum and cymbal parts left out, and from the wings back of the podium she drew out the traps, the cymbals, and the snare. In the old days, she told us, everybody who came did a turn. The turn with the drums had been hers. We made her play some of the songs for us, songs I remembered, or thought I remembered, from childhood, things like Dardanella and Jadda Jadda Jing Jing Jing. She had some almost new ones too-Melancholy Baby, and Those Little White Lies. We gave her a big hand.
Then, just as we began to speak of tiring, of going to bed because we had to drive back early the next day, she let the drumsticks fall, and put her fingers to her mouth. "Why, I forgot it!" she said. "I almost forgot to show you the best thing of all!" She reached up with the other hand, and turned off the big spotlight over the orchestra sh.e.l.l.
Once more, only the sidelights glowed, behind their tinted shades. Then the center ceiling light began to move. I hadn"t noticed it before; it was so much like what one expected of these places. That was the point-that it was. It was one of those fixtures made of several tiers of stained gla.s.s, with concealed slots of lights focused in some way, so that as it revolved, and the dancers revolved under it, bubbles of color would slide over their faces, run in chromatic patches over the tables, and dot the far corners of the room.
"Dance under it," she said. "I"ll play for you." Obediently, we put our arms around one another, and danced. She played Good Night, Ladies. The drums hardly sounded at all. When it was over, she let the sticks rest in her lap. The chandelier turned, silently. Oval blobs of light pa.s.sed over her face, greening it and flushing it like long, colored tears. Between the lights, I imagined that she was looking at us, as if she knew something about us that we ourselves did not know. "It was lovely," she said. "That first year." And this time I could not have said which of her two voices she had used.
We left early the next morning. By prearrangement, she was to sleep late and not bother about us, and in a sense we did not see her again. But, as we drove down the private road, we stopped for a moment at a gap in the trees, to see the sun shining, great, over the sea. There was a tall, gray matchstick figure on the end of the dock. As we watched, it dove. She could not have seen us; probably she would not have wanted to. She was doing the exercise to keep her weight down, perhaps, or swimming around the dock, as she had done as a child. Or perhaps she was doing the only thing she cared to do alone. It was certainly she. For as the figure came up, we saw its arm-the one mailed arm, flashing in the sun.
During the next few years I often used to tell the story of our visit to Hawthornton. So many casual topics brought it up so naturally-Bermuda, the people one meets when one travels, the magnified eccentricities of the rich. When it became fashionable to see the twenties as the great arterial spurt of the century"s youth, I even told it that way, making her seem a symbol, a denizen of that time. I no longer speculated on why she had invited us; I never made that the point of the story. But for some time now I have known why, and now that I do, I know how to tell her story at last. For now that I know why, it is no longer Mrs. Hawthorn"s story. It is ours.
It is almost eighteen years since we were at Mrs. Hawthorn"s, just as it was then almost eighteen years since Harry had come back from France. I was never to meet anyone who knew them, nor was I ever to see her again. But I know now that there was never any special mystery about her and Harry. Only the ordinary mystery of the distance that seeps between people, even while they live and lie together as close as knives.
Luke is in the garden now. His face pa.s.ses the window, intent on raking the leaves. Yet he is as far from me now as ever Harry was from Hawthornton, wherever Harry was that day. He and I are not rich; we do not have the externalizations of the rich. Yet, silently, silently, we too have drawn in our horns.
So, sometimes, when I walk in the woods near our house, it is to a night club that I walk. I sit down on a patch of moss, and I am sitting at the little round table on the unscarred floor. I fold my hands. Above me, the gla.s.s dome turns. I watch them-the two people, about whom I know something they themselves do not know. This is what I see: It is a long, umber autumn afternoon. To the left the sun drops slowly, a red disc without penumbra. Along the country roads, the pines and firs are black-green, with the somber deadness of a tyro"s painting of Italy. Lights pop up in the soiled gray backs of towns. Inside the chugging little car the heater warms them; they are each with the one necessary person; they have made love the night before. The rest of the world, if it could, would be like them.
Two Colonials.
WHEN YOUNG ALASTAIR PINES came out from Leeds, England, to teach on an exchange fellowship at Pitt, a small college about a hundred miles from Detroit, Michigan, he was the second foreign teacher ever to be in residence there. Pitt, founded in the Eighteen-sixties by a Presbyterian divine, and still under a synod of that church, had kept its missionary flavor well up to the Second World War. Set in Pittston-a bland village of white and cream-colored houses whose green roofs matched, even in summer, dark lawns compelled by lamasery effort (and perhaps a cautious hint of divine favor) from the dry Michigan plain-the school had kept a surface calm even during the war. It was the centripetal calm of those who, living in the sacred framework of morning, noon and evening service and a perfect round of dedicatory suppers, could not help feeling ever so slightly chosen-of people whose plain living and high thinking was not that of poverty, but of ample funds conserved. Some of the college halls had been built as recently as the Thirties (when labor was so cheap) and the organ (though not baroque to the point of Episcopalianism) was first-rate. Salaries had lagged well behind. Since, however, the non-smoking rule was still in effect on campus, and no teacher was supposed to have wine or spirits in his larder, he was officially helped to escape the extravagances of the age, as well as some of its anxieties. True, the table set by most of the younger faculty was somewhat farinaceous, but this might be less Franciscan than Middle Western, since most of the teachers and students came from that region. A glance at the roster showed a global scattering of names which were American, not international; the Kowalskis and Swobodas were Poles and Czechs from Hamtramck in Detroit, the Ragnhilds and Solveigs from Minnesota, and so on. Alone in the catalogue until the advent of Mr. Pines, the name of Hans Weil-philologist and onetime professor of Linguistik at Bonn-represented a Europe not once, twice, or further removed.
With Hans Weil"s arrival in 1945, there had also come to Pittston the first of certain changes brought by the war. Like so many other scholars in the days of Hitler, Weil had been pa.s.sed from hand to libertarian hand like a florin stamped "Freedom"-whisked, in his case, to London, via Holland, in 1939, and from London to Rochester, New York, in 1942, after which he was presumed to be on his own. In 1945, at his own behest, or rather at that of his wife, whose sister and brother-in-law, helped by the Weils to America, now had a flourishing but immovable dry-goods shop in Lansing, he had come to nearby Pitt as provisional candidate for a newly established chair in the humanities, and had remained there ever since. There was small need for philology at Pitt, most of whose students were on their way to being music teachers, social workers or ministers, and Weil, lacking new-world versatility, did not find it easy to "double" in related courses. Nevertheless, he had no fears for his job.
On this fine fall morning of the new term, as Weil walked across campus at his short, duck-footed pace, the beret that he wore for his baldness emphasizing Raphael curves of cheek which softened the fact that he was almost as old as the century, and-as he would blithely have admitted-as profane, he well knew that his value to Pitt went subtly beyond its being able to mutter behind him that he had recently refused an offer from Yale. Thirty years ago, he was thinking, if by some unlikely chance he had landed at Pittston, he might at least have had to grow a beard, and, under the old tradition that all German professors were a kind of nursery-uncle emissary from the land of sugared postcards and cuckoo clocks, might also have had to submit to being called "Dr. Hans," or "Papa Weil." But as things were, he was not even under any particular necessity of writing those little monographs that sometimes brought him an Eastern offer. For, since the war, the GI Bill, and an engineering endowment from one of the big labor unions in Detroit, although Pitt"s lawns were still clear of cigarette b.u.t.ts and its brains still Protestantly clear of fumes, a complexity had entered its air. Through the windows of the music department"s practice rooms, once so liturgically pure with Bach and Buxtehude, he could now hear Bartok, Khatchaturian and even Sauter-Finnegan squawking under official sanction. Opposite, in Knox Hall, although there were still two strong cla.s.ses in scriptural exegesis and one on missions, called "The Protestant Evangel," a visiting divine from Union Theological was treating of Kierkegaard, Niebuhr and Buber in a course called "Quest"-and all four of these cla.s.ses were embarra.s.singly near a group of acolytes studying guided missiles, on the grant from the C.I.O.
For "comparative" thinking-the modern disease, the modern burden-had come to Pittston. And as Hans Weil walked down the main street, on his way for a word with Mrs. Mabie, the wife of the art historian in whose house Mr. Pines, the exchange fellow, was to be quartered, he knew that he owed his tenure to it. He had begun by being Pitt"s "refugee professor," and, with certain accretions of prestige and affection, he would end that way. He had merely to wear his beret, pay attention in his own cla.s.ses in Anglo-Saxon, stubbornly drink his forbidden wines at dinner in full sight of whatever of the faculty, and on their insufflated bosoms abide. He was their prideful little exercise in comparative humanity-he had merely to be.
A pa.s.sing car slowed, and the driver, unknown to him, called out, "Lift?"
"Walking, thanks," said Weil, thinking of how often he would have to say this until the new students got used to his intransigence, born of a youth spent with alpenstocks. For here, this near the automotive Rome, driving a car on the shortest haul had nothing to do with economy or abstinence. Even the poorest student might have his second-hand leviathan; Weil himself had his Pontiac at home.
Pa.s.sing under McFarland"s open windows, he waved up at the president"s housekeeper, who was airing the living room against a background of teal-dark wall. A good many of the Pittston parlors had taken on this color in the three years since the president"s mother had chosen it for hers. And at the curb, McFarland"s new two-tone Buick shone in silver-blue beauty, Rhadamanthine sign that by next year or so, other two-tone jobs, less violent in color of course than some that were floating the highways like zooming banana splits, would be chosen by those of the faculty who were "turning theirs in." He would keep his old one as long as he could. Whether from age, or from that creeping anti-Americanism which so often flawed the recipients of American bounty, he had begun to have a horror of turning things in.
And now, just ahead of him, was Mrs. Mabie"s. As Mr. Pines, presently riding undreaming through Pennsylvania or Ohio, might well say, once he got to know her-now he was "for it." Professor Weil"s affectionate remembrance of London and the English went deep, deeper than the language lilt and the old gray streets, down to that sudden rest of the heart when he had stepped off the Dutch plane into a ring of their steady, un-Wagnerian faces. Its compound would already have been working in him, at the good thought of young Pines, had he not been all too sure of what was already working in Mrs. Mabie.
Portia-Lou Mabie, a quondam painter known at her own insistence by her maiden-professional name of Potter (and therefore a constant twinge of explanation in the salons of Pittston and in poor old Mabie-Potter), was an unsuccessful faculty wife who was the more annoying because she gave no sign of knowing it. She was not, however, of that familiar sort, objects of pity, who were always twenty-three sour diapers too late for the Inter-Faith Tea. Dr. Mabie had met and been married by her while he was on a field trip to Mexico City, where-in common with others from St. Louis, Stroudsburg, Orlando-she had been leading the stridulant life of Greenwich Village when it hits the corrida. A bony princesse lointaine of about thirty-five, who wore her hair in a weak-lemonade waterfall down the small of her back, she was to Weil a confirmation of his private opinion that art historians ought never to come that close to art. She had a talent for endorsing the worthiest convictions in a way that made their very holders wish immediately to disavow them. Openly lamenting that she had been born too late to join the Left Bank expatriates of the Twenties, her shrill disparagements of the cra.s.s standardization of life in the United States brought a sudden flush of amor patriae to the most disaffected cheek. And ever since the Mabies" recent Fulbright year at Oxford, her conversation, fresh with Anglophiliac sighs and knowing locutions, was likely to become especially matey in the presence of Hans Weil-climaxing on the occasion of the Weils" yearly dinner for the McFarlands, when he had had to explain to the elderly wife of a Kansas divine what Mrs. Mabie had meant when she had left the table with a bright look at Weil, and the remark that she had to go and spend a penny.
Now, on her doorstep, he deplored, for Mr. Pines"s sake, the enthusiasm of her offer to house him, but the childless Mabies had two spare bedrooms, and there were not many such in Pittston.
Mrs. Mabie opened the door, chin forward, hair br.i.m.m.i.n.g over. "Oh Hans, did you try to ring me? I was out getting in some coal."
"Coal?" He knew the Mabies heated with oil.
"Yes, you know how they like a morning fire. And Pattini wouldn"t deliver less than half a ton, so I brought some home in the car. Come on in."
"No, no," he said. "I came only to say I cannot go with you to meet him tomorrow; I must go earlier for the language convention in Chicago. So I have here a little note-" He heard his own words, the German juxtaposition, with outrage. He almost never did that any more; the woman acted on him like a solvent, fuddling all his backgrounds together.
She made him come in, and, although he kept out of her sooty clutch the coat his wife, Hertha, had just cleaned for him, he had to follow her up the stairs to see the bedroom.
"Hope he"ll like his digs." She flung the door back smartly. "Just finished distempering the walls."
Looking, Weil hoped that Mr. Pines would see nothing more unusual than kindness in the hot-water bottle prominently posed on the turned-down bed, near the radiator, or in the huge, bra.s.s scuttle of coal in a steam-heated American room. "Distemper?" he said. He sniffed an odor. "Oh, yes, rubber paint."
"Worst thing about American progress," she said. "Always sure to bring something b.l.o.o.d.y nasty along with it."
He bent to examine the coal scuttle, thinking that he was not quite enough of an American, although naturalized, to be able to agree with her in comfort. "Didn"t know you used this fireplace. Don"t you burn wood in the one downstairs?"
Ignoring him, she fingered the hot-water bottle. "Such a naked red, these things look; that"s because we only use them for illness. But of course there wouldn"t be a cover for it in all of Michigan. I tried the tea cozy on it, but it was no go."
Weil straightened, and took out the note to the expected guest, placing it on the night table, where, next to the neat pile of towels and soap, he saw a worn packet of Players. "Portia-Lou. They are crazy for our cigarettes, you know. And after all, isn"t he here to see us as we are?"
She flung out a hand in an impatience that included Pittston, Michigan, the hemisphere. "Don"t worry. He will. He will."
"Well-" he said. ""Wiedersehen," and ground his teeth. He no longer said that, except to Hertha.
On his way downstairs, she called after him. "You and Hertha wouldn"t have brought over one of those big sponge-things, would you? Isn"t that what they use?"
He turned his head. "You mean possibly a loofah?"
"Oh, is that what they call them?"
"I wouldn"t know. I never saw one in London. But if my reading is correct he would carry his own with him. In something called a sponge-bag." He clapped his beret firmly on his head. ""Bye now."
"Cheerio," said Mrs. Mabie.
Later that night, at about one-thirty, when Weil could not stay asleep, as often happened, he got up noiselessly and went downstairs to forage in the bookshelves and the icebox until Hertha should miss him and come after him. This, the constant nervous rounding-up of what family was left to her-by telephone, by visit, from room to room-was almost all that remained, after all these years, of the effects of the concentration camp. It was why, as long as her sister Elsa and Sigmund had the store in Lansing, as long as she could talk with Elsa every morning, drive over for the biweekly Kaffeeklatsch, and exchange Sunday dinners, he would never take up the offers from Princeton or Yale. It was no use telling himself that they might none of them be here now had he not gone ahead to England; he could not forget where she had been while he had been safe from all but the bombs in London, nor would he forget her eyes, so blue under the grizzled hair, when she had said to him, on the morning the letter came from Pittston, "Only that we should be together, Hans! Only that we should all of us be together."
He was reading when she came to the top of the stairs in her nightgown. "Hans! You will catch cold. Soll ich cocoa machen?"
"Nein, nein. Ich hab" ein bischen Wein. Und Schmierkase. Wilst du?"
She wrinkled her nose, but came and sat at the table, looking over his shoulder. "You are working?"
"No, I just wanted to look something up, and I found it." He chuckled, thinking that he might tell her of his encounter with Mrs. Mabie, but she had little ear or eye for the nuances of their life here, content to display her cuisine at intervals to these supermarket savages, to wonder whether she could get the fruiterer to stock fennel, and to lament with Elsa that there was no little Conditorei in East Lansing.
"Here. Let me read you something." He got up and put an afghan around her shoulders. "What they call a stole, ja? Sehr schon, matches the eyes."
"Schmeichelkatz". You just want me to let you stay up." But she liked him to read to her.
"Listen." He read out bits of the pa.s.sage he had hunted up, smiling to himself, in Max Muller. ""We do not want to know languages; we want to know what language is, how it can form a vehicle or an organ of thought.... The cla.s.sical scholar uses Greek or Latin, the Oriental scholar Hebrew or Sanskrit, to trace the social, moral progress of the human race.""
He looked up. "You follow? Now listen." He took a sip of wine. ""In comparative philology the case is totally different. The jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of the Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo-Chinese, are as important, nay, for the solutions of some of our problems, more important than the poetry of Homer, or the prose of Cicero.""
He slapped his thigh, and took another sip of wine.
""The clicks of the Hottentots." What you think of that for a t.i.tle for my little Chicago piece on the Middle West "r"? Good, hah? In fact, b.l.o.o.d.y good!"
"Saufer," she said. "How much wine did you have? Come to bed."
He was still laughing when she got him to go to bed, and the next morning, looking for something to read on the train, he took Max Muller with him.
Meanwhile, on a Greyhound bus approaching Detroit, Alastair Pines, slumped next to the window he had opened at once on entering, was sleeping off both a night out in New York (paid for with the difference between the cashed-in train ticket sent from Pittston and the bus fare) and the eyestrain of hours of digestive gazing at the country that, unknown to it, he meant to call his own.
The wind, ruffling a blond lock that flopped engagingly over his forehead even when he was awake, pa.s.sed without a ripple over his well-rigged old Aquascutum, over his skis and duffelbag on the rack above. Travel fitted him like a skin; he voyaged with all the aplomb of his nation, of school holidays spent in Paris, of walking tours on the cheap in Yugoslavia. He was that un.o.btrusive man to be met everywhere in or out of the sterling area-leaning over the rails of the small steamers that plied the lesser isles of Greece, knees pressed together in the third-cla.s.s carriage going over Domodossola or through Torremolinos-the Englishman of between twenty and forty, whose berth in life and appearance is also somewhere adequately middle, who, to Americans, travels disarmingly light in baggage and heavy in experience. To his compatriots, he was recognizable in more detail, as that projectile still spinning with leftover impetus down the targetless postwar years, that "type" known to them as "R.A.F."
When he awoke, the bus was nearing downtown Detroit, and he was surprised to see that there were skysc.r.a.pers here too, not on a stunning pedestal of bridge and harbor, as in New York, but forming upward like some harder fusion of the smoky, after-barrage air. He leaned forward eagerly, though not romantically; the point about new places, and the duty, was to grip the fact of them. New York"s air, mica-shot, had the fluid chic of big business; this place had the heavy thunder-shade of industry.
He took out one of their sweets and ate it thoughtfully. With the two strings that he had to his bow, there was no reason why, during the year at Pittston, or after, he should not find some post here that would suit him. He had had three terms reading history at a provincial university, before the war saved him from the likelihood that he would be sent down. After the war, the government had been well pleased to send him to an engineering college, where he had since taught for several years. Browsing over a list of posts abroad, he had come upon the exchange offer from Pitt; trying for it on the hunch that they couldn"t have the pick of his betters, he had found his divided talents suited them to a T. He would be a Fellow in English, but would also teach a course in mechanics on the side-what luck to find that his education, on the spotty side for home, had shifted about in a way they seemed to admire here. And after his year here, he ought to feel cheeky enough to jump ship, into the wider seas of industry.
To Alastair, third son of a colonial servant who had died in the service before rising in it-but not too soon to see his children reared as they should be, on the strong a.s.ses" milk of the imperial habit-it was normal beyond notice to have a brother in Malaya, another in Johannesburg, a married sister in Cyprus and an uncle in Accra. Hitherto, Alastair had been the one who had worried them, but now he rather pitied them, d.o.g.g.i.ng along as they did, bewailing the loss of India, toward a half-pay retirement in Kensington-and all for a groundling lack-of-vision that had kept them from seeing the modern world as he had once been used to seeing it from his plane. At twenty thousand feet up, the technical lines of empire erased themselves; one saw that one might descend on the States as in other days one might have sailed to Kenya, but carrying a pa.s.sport now, instead of a gun. And colonial sacrifices were still to be made; although in the modern way one might have to give up one"s citizenship instead of one"s health. Had to be done, unless one wanted to fizzle out in some corner, still denying that sahibs were pa.s.se. For, entering a country already in a high state of cultivation, and one in a certain sense already appropriated, the trick was to play it in reverse, to go native as quickly as possible. Which he was fully resigned to do.
When he was met by his hosts at the end of his journey, they all took to each other at once. Dr. Mabie, stammering a pace behind his wife, expanded on being deferred to as "sir." Mrs. Mabie crimsoned with understanding when Mr. Pines referred to the bus as a charabanc. As for their guest, taking note of the man"s jellyfish way with his wife, and the woman-hair right out of the flicks, and such an oddly nasal way of talking-he thought them as American as anything he"d seen yet.
It was close to two weeks before the professor, delaying happily in conferences and libraries, returned to Pittston alone, having left Hertha for a visit in Lansing. He spent Sat.u.r.day night alone by choice, in one of those reflective lulls of the closely married, and, noting a card in the collected mail, went on Sunday afternoon to the McFarlands" opening tea of the academic season.
It was a lovely day, both crisp and smoky with autumn expectancy, and Weil, refreshed in perspective, leaned against Mrs. McFarland"s wall with an enjoyment not yet dampened by the grape-juice-tea punch, watching the Les Sylphides advances between teacher and student, savoring a familiar, faculty-wife hat heightened inexplicably by a new feather. Then Mrs. McFarland bore down on him with a group, muttering names all round in her furry Scots. "Yeer to stay on, Mr. Pines," she said, tapping one young man on the shoulder, and pa.s.sing by Weil, of whose worldliness she disapproved.
So this was young Pines. Listening with a pang of remembrance, Weil docketed the accent: not quite Oxford or B.B.C., but within the gates-of Knightsbridge say, Kensington, or St. John"s Wood. And could it be, yes, relaxing already into a certain Americanism? Looking, he saw what he used to think of as one of their blended faces, too browned and water-slapped for a man of intellect, too veiled for a man of sport.
He approached him, and they exchanged amenities on the wind and the weather, and on how Pines was settling in; it didn"t occur to Weil that Pines might not have caught his name. Those around them, all students, melted back in deference to this faculty meeting. From a group across the room, Portia-Lou waved to Weil and called out an inquiry about Hertha. The young man included himself in her wave, and signaled back. "Hi!" he said.
To Weil"s surprise, Mrs. Mabie"s nod seemed sullen. "You are quite comfortable at the Mabies"?" he asked.
"Oh yes, rather. She"s been incredibly, well-very kind really. Yes!"
"She seems a little-quiet," said the professor.
"Rather hard to take someone in, don"t you know. Privacy, and so on," said Pines. "By the way, you p.r.o.nounce it privacy here, with the long "i"?"
Weil nodded. "The great vowel change. Among others."
"Rather think I may have got her back up a bit, though. You see, I asked her to coach me in American. It was before I knew that she, er well, that she-"
"That she was so very British?" said Weil.