Edward R. Williams was not listening. He was studying a tailor’s
advertisement in the _Saturday Evening Post_ showing a group of
high-colored, high-bosomed young men discussing a dog whose skin had
obviously been bought from the same tailor as the young men’s clothes.
Edward Williams turned to a story which showed how a good young clerk
served one millionaire by overreaching another and in the end became a
millionaire himself, thus winning the affections of “the Right Girl.”
Edward Williams felt intelligent and contemptuous—a rare feeling for him.
“Makes one thank God one’s English,” he thought and then, because he was
in the habit of refuting morbidly every statement he himself made, he
thought of certain guides to British taste in periodical literature and
his mind fell sheepishly silent. He looked out of the window.
I do not know how many hills lift up the dramatic city of San Francisco
from the level of her sea and her bay. To the precipitous shoulder of one
of these hills clung the house in which Edward sat. It was night-time
and the great California stars hung out of a thick dark sky. Perhaps the
stars gave the waters of the bay and of the Golden Gate their luminous
look, as if there were light set in the floor of the world, a great light
overlaid by fathoms of dark vivid water. Lights were spread like a veil
over the hills on the near side of the bay and, on the far side, the
mountains stood ankle deep in stars.
The music began again in the room. Music to Edward Williams had no
connection with words or rules or understanding. He could not have been
at all musical, for he never thought of saying: “You know Scriabine is
clean, my dear, clean like a scrubbed olive,” or, “It has been wittily
said that Moussorgski is the spiritual son of Ouida and Charlemagne,”
or any of the things sounding rather like that, that we expect to hear
from musical people as the Victrola falls silent. Edward Williams was
a person of no facts at all; probably he was the only person in the
world so afflicted, or at any rate the only man. Music to him was always
anticipation even when it was over. Now, listening, he thought vaguely,
“If the treble echoes the bass the way I hope it will, that will be
too good to bear—indeed it will be as good as I expected, and that, of
course, is impossible....” The treble did that very thing and Edward was
blind with delight for several seconds; he breathed in pleasure; there
was a sense of actual contraction in the roots of his hair.
The music paled like a candle and went out, and Edward said, “What was
that?” for he was anxious to pursue that pursuing theme again across a
world of scant opportunity. He would not have remembered the name even
had he been told it, but at any rate nobody heard him. In America this
often happened to Edward Williams.
A woman’s sharp voice said, “Well say listen, what was that? It was a
dandy piece.” And Edward heard the man with a cocktail shaker between his
knees reply, “That was the song of the twelve eagles after the emeralds
of the South Sea lost their fragrance.” Someone added, “They were crushed
the day the love-tinker died on a hill of violets in Vienna.” Edward
Williams was pleased with this conversation, although, of course, he knew
that it had not taken place. He knew well that he was more than half deaf
and in many moods he welcomed the insight that his infirmity gave him
into matters that did not exist. His two friends had been telling each
other facts that both knew and that Edward did not wish to know. Neither
would, of course, dream of mentioning emeralds or hills of violets except
when it was really necessary and helpful to do so. Edward did not care.
He felt that his mind’s eye had acquired one picture the more without the
trouble of acquiring a fact.
Some music that did not interest Edward began and Edward thought, “I wish
I were really musical, but if I wear this grave half-shut expression
everybody will think I am very musical indeed.” Nobody looked at him, but
he persisted in his selected expression.
Miss Rhoda Romero’s pictures hung all round the room. Of these Edward
thought, “If I am asked I will look at them in silence with a chin-down,
eye-up sort of look, as if the sun were in my eyes and then say ‘A-ha’
once slowly. Then people will think I know how good they are—if they
are good.” But he never had had a chance to do this, because nobody had
ever formally introduced him to the pictures. Rhoda Romero never asked
people what they thought of her pictures. She thought she knew. They
were mostly studies of assorted fruits in magenta and mustard-colour
running violently down steep slopes into the sea. They were all called
still life, curiously enough. Rhoda Romero also, I need hardly say, wrote
poetry. It was, of course, unrhymed and so delicately scanned that often
there was not room in a line for a word unless it were spelt in the
newest American manner; the poems were usually about dirt or disease, and
were believed in Chicago to have an international reputation.
Rhoda Romero herself was insolent, handsome, and contented. Almost the
only thing that she regretted about herself was that she had a great deal
of money. Her grandfather, a Mexican forty-niner, had been so wise as to
buy land all round one of those cities of California whose motto—“Watch
us Grow”—had not been an idle boast. Many of these cities have so far
clamored for an audience under false pretenses, and now try to justify
themselves by hanging signboards—“Drive Slowly, Congested Business
District”—on every gum-tree in the vicinity of the lonely real-estate
office. Rhoda Romero’s city could have paved her studio with gold, and
this, she felt, was a blot upon an artist’s reputation. She thought that
an artist ought to be “Of the People” and, though she had been to a very
ladylike school in Virginia and had later graduated from a still more
ladylike college in Pennsylvania, she used what she called “the speech of
the people” whenever she remembered to do so. For much the same reason
she shared a flat with Mr. Avery Bird, a transformed Russian Jew with
high upward hair. They had once married in a moment of inconsistency but
had since divorced each other in order that they might live together with
a quiet conscience.
Mrs. Melsie Stone Ponting, tired of music, had suddenly started an
argument about Art and Sex. You could tell it was an argument because now
and then a little hole in the close-knit fabric of her voice occurred
which was presumably filled up by some man’s voice. In the United States
you become used to hearing only women. Men speak guiltily in small
suffocated voices. Yet arguments often seem just as spirited as though
the opponent were audible. Before each clause of Mrs. Ponting’s argument
she opened her mouth for several seconds very widely, showing the whole
of her tongue. Sometimes Mr. Avery Bird rudely took advantage of this
necessity to give voice to an epigram of his own which nobody could
follow.
The argument provided cover for Miss Romero to say to her friend, Mr.
Banner Hope, who was trying to make his empty cocktail glass look as
conspicuously wistful as possible:
“Say, listen, Banner, I want to talk to you about You Know Whom. We’ll
mention no names....”
Mr. Hope looked doubtfully at Edward Williams, who was about ten feet
away.
“He’s good and deaf,” said Miss Romero; “he can’t hear.” And indeed,
beyond a preliminary impression that Rhoda had begun a dramatic but
elusive conversation about Steel Men in the Flames, Edward Williams did
not hear. His protesting ears were filled with the voice of Mrs. Ponting.
“Well, say, listen, Banner, have you heard the latest?” continued Miss
Romero.
Mr. Hope would have liked to be known as the wickedest man in San
Francisco. He therefore could not possibly admit in so many words that
he did not know the latest—(the latest sounds too wicked to miss)—so he
moved his head ambiguously with a wise groan.
“Of course, I’d be the last to pick on anyone for being Bolshevik,” said
Miss Romero. “Bolshevism, as I said to the ‘What is Liberty’ Association
only the other day, is the only encouraging sane reaction to a crazy
world. But, you know, Our Friend here can’t approach even Bolshevism
sanely....”
“He drinks,” said Mr. Hope thirstily.
“There was a most discouraging scene in Alcatraz Prison last visitors’
day. He and I went together to try and say a few encouraging words to
Bisley, the C. O. Edward wouldn’t speak to Bisley when he got there—he
said there were too many Christians banked up around him; and surely
there was a considerable crowd of rather discouraging dames telling
Bisley that Christ was coming—he’s a religious objector, classed as
Lunatic, so he has to suffer for his reputation. But I stayed in the
group by way of comic relief, and Edward went glooming and snooping
around. Next I saw of him he was sitting interlocked with Smith, the man
who got twelve years for writing _If Abraham Lincoln Returned_. Poor
Smith had a nerve-storm, you know, after he got beaten up in prison
for the third time; he spends most of his time in solitary now—so
discouraging. Anyway I looked around and saw Smith and Edward fairly
clamped together. I forgot about them for a while until I heard a hell
of an uproar, and I told Bisley, Fur Goodness sake—where’s that darned
Britisher?—my dear, it surely was a presentiment. For there was Edward
crying—believe me, Banner, crying—that kid’s got no more poise than a
snake’s got hips—all het up and trying to pull the hair off the prison
officer in charge of the gate—one of the warders was holding both his
arms.”
“Why, why, why, what d’you know about that. He was stoo-ed, I guess,”
said Mr. Banner Hope, profoundly; but his heart was not in the matter.
He began moving his empty glass about so as to catch the light, hoping,
with this bait, to catch in addition his hostess’s eye.
“Stoo-ed, you said it. He was crazy drunk. My dear, believe me, it took
me down thirty dollars to get them to O.K. that lad’s exit from the
prison. I told them how he was only a Britisher and had gotten himself
shell shocked in the service of the Allies.”
“Did he so?” asked Mr. Hope with a certain sympathy, for, before he
had met Miss Romero, grown a beard, and thrown in his lot with the
‘advance-guard of a freer America,’ he too had risked his life for
his country in the course of a month in a training camp in Texas.
“Shellshock? What d’you know about that?”
“Air-raids, my dear,” said Miss Romero intensely. “Edward R. Williams
survived three air-raids in his home-city—London. I’ll say he’s no
stranger to War....”
Mr. Hope occasionally felt that he could make a more genuinely wicked
impression if he could think of something to say. “What d’you know about
that?” he said, a little doubtfully.
“Well, say, listen, Banner,” continued Miss Romero, becoming now aware of
the empty cocktail glass as her rival for his attention. “Although, of
course, personally I’m just crazy about Edward Williams, what with one
thing and another it looks like it’s up to me to get busy moving him some
place else. I’ll say the Bay Cities’ll get discouraged with him soon.
Avery and me are through with him. I talked to him about him drinking so
much and it seemed he’d gotten around to thinking himself an interesting
rebellious kinda guy, but I’ll say all his stunts look just maudlin to
me; he most always cries, and he always quits before he can put over the
interesting rebellious thing he wants to say. Say listen Banner——”
Mr. Hope started to attention.
“I’m planning to send Edward Williams to China.”
“China.... Why, why, why?...”
“No, but listen, Banner, do you remember Mr. Leung—Leung Tok Ngo—who
was so encouraging about the future of American art in the Orient? He
said the Chinese just didn’t begin to appreciate the occidental artistic
ideals of today; the man in the street in the Orient, he said, would
gape at you if you talked of Cezanne or Pizarro. Of course he took back
Benstead’s Portrait of a Naked Broker to his home in Shanghai; but that’s
only one, my dear, to a population of four hundred million. Now listen,
Banner, I kinda think I’ll make a genuine United States drummer out of
this Britisher ... a drummer of ideals, if you get me. Edward Williams
is so darn glum—he surely must be an idealist. No real artist that I
know has anything on Edward for real bad manners, and bad manners always
gets the dilettante. I’m going to send Edward to China with two or three
dozen of those studies of mine that didn’t sell at the Rebel’s Show.
Leung is in Shanghai and can help him. I tell you I’m through with him.
The Orient’s gotter take its turn at him now. I’ll give him expenses one
way and commission, and then I quit.... Not that, as I say, I’m not just
crazy about Edward Williams personally.”
She was very direct. She left Banner Hope and approached Edward. He sat
slackly on an arm-chair, arms forward, palms up, as though asking for
something.
“Say, listen, Edward, what’s your opinion of my pictures?”
This much too general opening left no room for the convention of
appreciation that the careful Edward had prepared. After some thought he
therefore answered, “I think they’re very nice.”
Miss Romero shrieked, “Very nice! Oh, Edward, you’re so discouragingly
British.” She proceeded to convey to him the politer aspects of his
banishment to China. The illusion of usefulness and a certain silliness
about the plan attracted Edward, who would have refused an offer of solid
travelling employment with a fixed salary. Even before he heard of the
commission he said, “Right you are, Rhoda. There’s nothing in the world
to stop me going whenever you say.”
Emily came in. She had made friends with Avery Bird without introduction
at an Italian eating-house. Mr. Bird’s lively yet—if the truth must be
told—quite innocent friendships with women were part of the game he and
Rhoda were playing. Rhoda offset them by discussing passion with all the
men who came to the studio.
In picking up Emily Mr. Bird felt that he was unusually well justified.
She was, of course, English, but, on the other hand, she was beautiful.
Emily had fierce, almost agonised, eyes under up-slanting brows. She had
brushed her dark hair rather flatly to a smoothly wrought Chinese puzzle
at the back of her head and, in the middle of her brow, her hair grew
down to a little point which was consistent with the fact that every line
in her face was rather keen and curious and very definite.
When Edward Williams saw Emily he thought at once, “What a miracle,” and
as his heart went to his throat the cocktail that he was drinking met it,
so that he choked without reserve or dignity. When he recovered he found
with delight that he could hear every word she said. But after his third
cocktail he could always hear well. He thought, “I wish I had reminded
Rhoda that I wish to be called Reynald in future instead of Edward. Rhoda
always forgets the things I want. That girl would surely look round at me
if she heard somebody call out Reynald.”
One of the guests had already asked Emily for a summary of British
opinion on the subject of British atrocities in Ireland, Egypt and India.
Emily said “You may well ask, you may well ask ...” with great energy.
She was only three days old in Californian ways, but the newcomer in
the Western States becomes at once almost pathetically precocious. Yet
nothing—not even self-restraint—can save him from reproach. Speech may be
only silver in America, but silence is not in currency at all.
“Yes, indeed; yes, indeed....” said Emily, looking round nervously. Her
audience noticed with displeasure that she had not yet said anything
to suggest that she disliked being British. To be satisfied with an
alien status implies—in the United States—criticism of the Constitution
or George Washington or something. The word criticism is of course
synonymous with insult. Aliens have to be very careful.
Everyone looked at Emily and looked forward to telling anecdotes later
about the superciliousness of the British. But after all she had only
just come into the room. Mr. Bird felt that his triumph was going wrong.
“Emily is here as secretary to a very eminent Englishman, travelling
with his wife to study conditions in the United States. You all know the
French philosopher Moriband de Morthomme on the subject of totems and
barbarians, and you’ll agree with me that it applies here.”
That may not have been quite the name he mentioned. It does not matter.
Everyone in the room was accustomed to not knowing what Avery Bird was
talking about.
“I am secretary to a saint,” said Emily. She was rather vehement because
she was afraid.
“Indeed,” said Miss Romero with a characteristic swing of her hair, which
was like a frilled red ballet-skirt round her head. “What an encouraging
job. What kind of saint? There are saints and saints.”
“Yes,” said Emily. “Mine is both.” She added after a pause, “I don’t use
the word in the ordinary sense which would just mean—a man I am in love
with. I mean a real saint who works miracles.”
“Why, how interesting,” said Miss Romero. “Tell me, is he recognised by
the Authorities?”
“I believe they have definitely made his reservation in the flaming
chariot,” said Emily. “And—oh, I do hope his cloak will fall on me.”
“A bit chilly ... flying....” Edward was suddenly understood to murmur
into his cocktail glass.
“Explain yourself, Edward,” said Rhoda Romero maternally.
Edward had just finished his fourth cocktail on an empty stomach.
The blaze of Emily’s eyes seemed like searchlights on his lips. “Ou,
I dunno....” he said, delighted, “I often used to think ... Elijah
must have regretted dropping his coat like that.... Probably quite
inadvertent.... Of course ... central heating in the machine and all
that.... Still....”
“Aeronauts say there’s nothing so warm as leather,” said Mrs. Melsie
Stone Ponting. “An old beau of mine....”
But Emily still looked kindly at Edward. He had rarely been so fortunate.
Everything in the room seemed to him to be brightly outlined and,
though his hearing and his wit seemed to him happily alert, he could not
remember from one moment to another the subject of the remarks he heard.
Mr. Banner Hope was laughing almost continuously. His laughter was like
something running helplessly down a slope, stumbling at every breath.
Emily’s saint was spoken of in the same breath as mushrooms. A miracle
in connection with mushrooms at once seemed to Edward quite inevitable.
Mushrooms were not logical; in fact they were made by fairies. Fairies
were little saints.
“I mayn’t be able to say much,” thought Edward. “But I do have beautiful
thoughts.”
But it appeared that Emily was now talking about ducks. How enchantingly
confusing.
“It was caught in the break of the waves,” said Emily. “We saw it crash
on the sand and struggle. They are, after a storm. So awful to have your
own world turn against you like that. Usen’t you to have nightmares that
your mother had turned into a lion and bit you when you ran to her? I was
far behind, finding out how much alike the edges of all seas are—if you
pat the wet sand with your bare foot at Clacton-on-Sea or at Monte Carlo
or at Bombay, it turns into a sort of trembling junket and here it was
the same in the wake of a Pacific roller. Anyway when I caught up with
Tam he was sitting by a broken duck. He had made it a little pillow of
sand. He was holding its poor throbbing web in his hand. We waited till
it died. You would never have thought a duck’s beak could have assumed an
expression of such utter peace.”
“Say, listen,” said Mrs. Ponting, “are all these tales true?”
“Not particularly,” replied Emily. She added after a moment, “Well, to
change the subject, what do you think of the Haiti question, the negro
question, and the question of the Philippines?” There was no immediate
answer to her question, so she went on rather hastily, “Well, well,
fiction is much more fun than truth, isn’t it? Atrocities are delicious
to make up. And everyone with a great enthusiasm or a grievance lies.
I met a negro called Erle Takka, who said that United States Marines
strip the houses of Haitian widows and orphans and then, while they
starve, stand around and prick them with bayonets to make them dance.
Too frightful, don’t you think, and too interesting, but—at least to a
prosaic European ear—hardly likely. Up to now not a single deputation to
Washington on the subject of Haiti has crossed my lips. Perhaps all this
is rather superfluous....”
“It is rather,” said Rhoda.
“It is very,” said Mrs. Ponting. “I never heard such talk. Haiti
indeed.... Whoever heard of atrocities in Haiti?”
Emily was standing now and, with a feeling of desolation, Edward Williams
watched her putting on a hat rather like Napoleon’s. She was nervously
arranging her clothes. She felt that she had been talking too much. She
had a curious lapse into humility and talked in a little frightened
undertone to herself. “I expect my hair needs tidying awfully ... it’s a
tragedy that all lockets hang face downward ... my bag ... her name is
Esther.”
It had been a silly party. Everybody felt that—even Edward, though the
party had left him a changed man. No room could be anything but dramatic
to him after seven cocktails, but he realised now that the party had been
silly, and that a pillar of thin air against a background of Rhoda’s
pictures was an inadequate substitute for Emily. For Emily was gone.
Edward reminded himself that he could walk perfectly straight if he
concentrated. He reached Rhoda successfully.
“Must home,” he said first by mistake and then concentrated again. “I
must be going home. By the way, I may change my mind about the Orient.
Too far. Too sudden. I’ll think it over.” His own voice sounded to him
very indefinite and he seemed to himself to have been talking for a
long time without getting anything said. “I’ll tell you what,” he added
intensely, “I’ll think it over.”
One of the most fascinating results of seven Gin-Old-Fashioneds is the
disappearance of intervals between events. Before Edward R. Williams had
time to think another thought, there he was looking down a precipice of
street at a deliciously small Emily a hundred feet below. San Francisco
streets often nose-dive like this. The grass grows between their
cobblestones because nobody dares to use them except pulley cars and
persons with very strong ankles. Emily was walking gingerly down. Beside
her, plucking protectively but ineffectually at her sleeve, was Banner
Hope.
Edward followed. If he should let himself run nothing could save him from
falling like a stone into Chinatown and bouncing thence into the bay. He
concentrated sternly on the alpine formation of the sidewalk, and when he
reached Emily she was alone.
“Wez Bope gone?” asked Edward.
“His tram came first,” replied Emily. “I’m waiting for a Ferry tram.”
“Tram,” triumphed Edward, who had been long exiled among mere
street-cars. “That’s the stuff to give ’em.... Tram.... Do ’em good by
Gosh....”
There was no Ferry car in sight.
“Would-nibby fun,” remarked Edward, “if we had supper at Jove Pinelli’s.
Night yet young....”
Emily paused a minute. “Yes, would-nib,” she agreed.
Emily, though born in Kensington, had no ladylike instincts. And of
course her mother had never actually warned her not to go to unrefined
Italian dives late at night with young men fortified by cocktails to the
seventh degree.
When Edward, carefully following Emily, reached a table in Jove Pinelli’s
sanded room he sat down, put his elbows on the table and buried his face
in his hands.
“I’m too tired,” he said, concentrating no longer. “You order supper.” He
was so tired that every channel in his brain felt sore. He thought, “I
am going to die soon. If I were in a book and my present feelings were
described, readers would say, Our Hero is going to die quite soon.... It
would be luck to die in love.” He suffocated with some regret his intense
sympathy for himself. He looked slackly about the room and thought,
“At least it is fun being so wicked. Our Hero drunk and in love on the
Barbary Coast.”
The room was meant for people who felt like this. Most of its occupants
were simple excellent “steady beaux” from respectable homes showing their
girls “Life.” One young man, who no doubt had a good mother in Oakland
and hid no thought from her, was singing to some friends a song which he
and they believed to be very daring. “Picked it up in Paris,” he said,
and so indeed he had—from the Victrola in the Y. M. C. A. there. There
were a few moody artists giving supper to ladies, who, though painted,
looked disappointingly safe. The walls of the room, however, were
decorated with scarlet devils and there were several screened grottos
representing, apparently, private cubicles in Hell.
Presently Edward found that he had roused himself to say, “You know,
Emily, I love you....”
“I know it,” said Emily sadly. “I know it.”
One of them would no doubt have said more, but at that moment a matchbox
hit Emily on the back of her Napoleonic hat.
“Oh, hang it all,” said Emily, putting down her fork and spoon. “Don’t
let’s disappoint anyone. Let’s save the Barbary Coast’s reputation.”
She picked up the matchbox. It was from a hotel and bore the legend—A
Room and a Bath for a Dollar and a Half. “Did you see who threw it?” she
asked.
“The little cad with horn glasses who hasn’t shaved.”
“Shall I show you what one does next?”
Edward grunted. Emily turned and smiled intensely at the thrower of
the matchbox. Edward could not see the smile, but he noticed idly how
prettily her hair gathered itself together for the knot, just above the
nape of her neck. The thrower of the matchbox, who had been sitting with
two women and three bottles, rose and came over to the table of Emily and
Edward. He brought one of the bottles, but neither of the women. He said
to Edward, “Say, mister, may I have the pleasure of speaking to your lady
friend?”
Edward grunted.
“My name is Charlie,” said the visitor, sitting down and hospitably
filling first Emily’s glass and then Edward’s from his bottle. “Are you
located in San Fran? My home-city’s Seattle.”
“Mine is London (Eng.),” replied Emily briskly. “I’m doing a stunt.
Round the World on a Motor Scooter.”
“Gee....” exclaimed Charlie. “An auto-scooter! Mine’s a bum job—selling
Bindloss’s Suspenders. An auto-scooter round the world.... Holy Gee! And
where does your husband climb on?”
Emily interrupted herself. She had already begun to answer the expected
question—And how do you like America?
“Not my husband, my advance agent,” she said. “He doesn’t climb on
anywhere. He runs behind.”
“Gee!” exclaimed Charlie. “Well, say, listen. I belong to the Welcoming
Committee of Seattle. I’ll tell the world it’d be highly appreciated if
you could put Seattle someway on your skedule and say a few words in the
Wesleyan Hall. We don’t get too many auto-scooter experts on this side;
no ma-am, believe me.”
“I’d be delighted,” replied Emily. “I’ll have to go to Seattle to get to
Alaska, won’t I? I did give a lecture once before by mistake. I was going
round the world then on a Caterpillar Tractor—demonstrating it, you know.
I had a mechanic and a friend on board. We passed sounds of shouting in
a saloon in Dryville, Mo. My friend went in to enquire the reason and
he came out presently with the chairman, having by some mistake led him
to understand that we were each prepared to give a short address to the
meeting. I gave rather a clever word picture of Piccadilly (Eng.) during
an air-raid. It was unfortunate that the English accent had never before
been heard in Dryville, Mo., so I believe the meeting took my address for
a farmyard imitation. My friend, a Philadelphian, spoke lucidly on the
Mating of Canaries in Captivity. The mechanic was very shy; when he was
finally pulled from behind the bar and placed on the platform he said
nothing but ‘My God.’ Nobody thought to tell us until we were leaving
that the meeting was really supposed to be about Seventeen Year Locusts.”
“Is that right?” asked Charlie with a confused look on his face. “Say
listen, ma’am. You’re not married?”
“I know it,” said Emily plaintively. “I know it.... My mother often
points that out to me. To my mother I am the prodigal daughter and
the fatted calf is getting absolutely apoplectic waiting for me. But,
personally, I love swine and they love me. Did you ever think of the
Prodigal Son from the swine’s point of view? They missing him so
dreadfully and looking for him everywhere with little whining grunts....
And him gone for ever. No, as you say, I am not married. Engaged two or
three deep, if you like, but not married. Why?”
“Well, say, don’t you want to dance?”
While they danced Edward sat and felt relieved. Always when he was alone
he felt relieved. To have no effort to make was blessed to him. If anyone
were with him he thought constantly, “I am surely doing something
wrong.” His trust in himself was always on the point of collapse. Now he
thought, “For the moment I need do nothing. No one can blame me now for
doing nothing. No one can laugh at me now.”
He was smothering a suspicion that Emily talked too much. Would Jimmy
have said, “Good Lord, the woman’s a bore?” Edward would not listen to
this thought.
Emily came back saying, “Well, so long, Charlie. See you in Seattle.”
“You betcher,” replied Charlie. He kissed her hand and returned to his
naturally irritated ladies.
“Does that surprise you?” asked Emily.
Edward awoke from his moment of blasphemy. “You are so very beautiful. It
did not surprise me that he came.”
“No. But did it surprise you that he went?”
“I suppose he saw how absolutely furious I was getting.”
“No. He danced with me. I dance very badly. I once broke a bone in my
left foot and it doesn’t steer very well. It’s an unromantic disability,
to dance badly....”
“It doesn’t seem so to me.”
Their supper was cold and tasteless now.
“I wish I could tell you how much I love you, Emily.”
“You have, dear,” said Emily kindly. Her fierce wide eyes were fixed upon
him. They were deep set, and Edward looked with a feeling of terrifying
intimacy at the shadows about them and at the diagonal prolonged dimple
that led from the inner corner of her eye to her cheek. He felt he could
see her thinking, “I have been rather brazen and silly tonight. You
mustn’t forgive me, you must love me all the better for it....”
“I haven’t told you. I couldn’t. To say anything that I could say would
just make you think I loved you—just like that—that I was just one of a
lot of lovers....”
“You don’t know me,” said Emily. “You only know what I look like. You
have heard almost nothing but lies from me. I have only room for one true
thing in my life.”
“You must make room for me. When can I see you again?”
“We are going to Yosemite on Thursday. Isn’t it fun? Two Ford-loads of
us. Tam and Lucy and I and Avery and Miss Romero and Mrs. Ponting and
Banner Hope. Now I have to catch the last Ferry.”
Emily was always much affected by the skins and shapes of men and women.
The last hour had been made almost unbearable to her by the fact that
Edward had red spots all over his forehead and chin. I think Edward would
have killed himself had he known this. As a rule he thought of those
spots whenever he found himself being looked at. But tonight he was
tremulously uplifted. He really forgot that Emily could see him; he knew
only that he could see Emily. If he were in a book, he thought, the spots
would not be mentioned. If the book were well written the reader would
now be saying, “Our hero is surely more in love than ever man was before.”
He took her over to Berkeley on the Ferry. They stood on the deck in
the brilliant moonlight as the boat ran out of her little cubicle under
the bright eye of the Ferry Tower. The funnels and masts of other ships
stuck out of similar cubicles all along the edge of the city. The ships
looked like tall coy ladies in inadequate bathing tents. The moonlight
was most fiercely bright. It seemed that the hills, disguised in sunlight
all day, had at last unmasked. A long light cloud followed the summits of
the hills so that the horizon looked like an enormous breaking wave. The
air was full of lights and stars, but the water remained sombre except
for a white strip spun across the bay by the moon. The noise of the water
growling at the bows of the ferry so slightly occupied the silence that
the screams of the trains on the Oakland side were clear to the ear.
Clear to the sight were the trains themselves, little swift snakes of
light pursuing one another about the bay’s edge and out on to the distant
piers.