He kissed me in front of a whole battalion. I had never been kissed
before, and was so proud, and so worried lest the organdie dress would
be completely rain-soaked (I had left the raincoat in the car, of
course) and I would not look pretty. He kissed me again, as he went past
with his company to the train, and after that I could not see any of the
soldiers marching by because the rain splashed on my face and was mixed
with tears.
He was killed at Château-Thierry. I had not thought of him in years;
except for an instant, if, unexpectedly, I smelt the fragrance of
tea-roses. That made me remember him because I was opening a box of
tea-roses, sent me to wear to a Saturday night officers’ dance at Ayer,
when the telephone message came that he was dead.
“What are you remembering?” said Lucia, and I came back to the Algonquin
and the eggs Benedict on my plate, and the view of the Round Table that
had already seen its best days, and the golden-haired man who sat
between me and it.
I told Lucia about Roger, and then we talked about Boston and Portland,
Maine, where she was born, and agreed that one could not go back to
either place to live, at least while one was young, although they both
were pleasant cities. And Lucia said that New York’s a jail to which,
once committed, the sentence is for life; but that it is such a well
furnished jail, one does not mind much.
Intermittently, I continued to stare at the golden-haired man. When he
stood up, I remembered him. Roger brought him for a week-end’s swimming
on Cape Cod, on one of Roger’s last leaves. His name was Kenneth, and he
lived in Springfield, Massachusetts. My aunt had known his step-mother
and so she had liked him.
That week-end I had thought his golden hair was very wonderful with the
sun shining on it, but thought also that dark hair the shade of Roger’s
was really more distinguished, and that Roger was handsomer on the
whole, and I had wished this man would go away, so that Roger would have
more time to talk to me.
At the next table, Kenneth glanced at me, and then he stood talking to
someone for a minute.
I had heard things about him since the war. My aunt had said
something—story of his marrying a dancer in vaudeville, and then going
out to Hollywood to be an art director, much to the disgust of his
family who wanted him to be a lawyer in his father’s firm in
Springfield. They had been quite formal about disowning him.
He turned to leave, and looked at me again. He was very tall indeed, and
extraordinarily thin. He had forget-me-not blue eyes like a little boy’s
that looked strange in a face so dissipated. He would not remember me,
of course.
But he did.
He came over, and said, “You used to be a child in a scarlet bathing
suit; and besides, Roger carried half a dozen snapshots of you through
the war.” I had never known that.
“You’re Kenneth,” I said, and introduced him to Lucia. He sat
down. . . .
Once he read me three sentences of Galsworthy’s, from the Forsyte Saga.
They were, “All are under sentence of death: Jolyon, whose sentence was
but a little more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he
thought habitually, like other people, of other things.”
Kenneth had travelled a little too swiftly and too far from the tranquil
sort of life to which he had been born. Had the Love of his Life been a
serene-eyed New England débutante with a cool voice, as she might well
have been, Kenneth would be practising law in Boston, with the proper
connexions to do well at it, the next forty years, and satisfying his
interest in art by the purchase of a Sargent, occasionally.
But the Love of his Life turned out to be a little Hungarian dancer,
compounded of passion and beauty and viciousness in equal proportions.
She fled to him from the beatings of her dancing partner, and Kenneth
married her because she thought she was with child. In Paris, she left
him for an Argentine; and came back, because she had pneumonia (and a
more lasting illness, as it developed). She recovered from the
pneumonia. They went to Algiers. She had a relapse, and coughed out her
life against Kenneth’s shoulder, protesting bitterly to the end against
the necessity of dying—with no apologies for having sentenced him also
to death.
Whatever she was, he had endowed her with all the illusions of a
romantic young man. She was to him pure high romance. He said he would
not have missed it. When he spoke of her, as one speaks of a dead child,
gently, things young and ardent stirred behind his tired face, and I
remembered how alive he had looked that summer week-end nearly ten years
past.
He was to die, in two or three years, because to his illness was added
the complication of an old lung trouble caused by gas in the Argonne.
They told him that if he went West to live, that if he stopped drinking,
the two or three years might be prolonged to six or seven.
“But I should be so bored and lonely,” he said. And he stayed in New
York.
He knew no women, except me. He spoke to me that day only because I had
made him remember Roger, whom he had loved, too (“in another life,” he
said).
He asked me to dinner, because he had a sudden desire to talk to someone
once more about Roger and cool New England summers, and the sedate
streets of little Massachusetts towns.
But something in his unhappy face, that first night we dined, stirred me
to talk, not of Roger, dim figure on the far shore of youth, but of
Peter. I never spoke of Peter to any men I met, nowadays, usually.
Kenneth looked as if he would understand about Peter, and the men one
kissed to cure one of the memory of Peter, and the little hope one
cherished about Peter, in spite of judgment and the commonsense and the
well-meant advice of one’s friends. He looked as if he understood that
one did not love a man because he was worth loving, or because one felt
worthy of his love in return, or for any reason that one’s acquaintances
would think was sound.
I did tell Kenneth about Peter, not in one evening, but over many
evenings. He could not help me. I could not help him when he talked of
that girl dancing in the moonlight of a garden in Algiers. But we were
curiously happy together.
He had a little money; enough, he said, to last his lifetime, an
inheritance from an uncle who seemed to have felt that Hungarian dancers
are among men’s inescapable destinies.
He spent it on theatres and the merrier night-clubs. He went to every
new moving picture from Germany, and was fascinated by the technique of
their photography. That was a single interest surviving from the four
years he had dreamed, between the dancer’s kisses and their
consequences, of directing a moving picture that would be a really
significant contribution to modern art.
So near the end of dealing with things significant or not, done with
ambition and desire, he was sometimes completely gay.
Then we went to Harlem. Not the Harlem of the big Negro cabarets
frequented by whites, cabarets notable principally for good orchestras,
indifferent chow mein, a carefully sinister atmosphere, and a general
air of everyone self-conscious except those who are so drunk they should
go home, but the Harlem of the little unpretentious dance halls.
There, the very few white people who enter are ignored more or less, are
given service no better and sometimes slightly worse than the service
given negroes. Whites are not particularly wanted. But, if they are
unobtrusive, they can travel a thousand miles south in latitude and as
many years back in time, while a bass drummer remembers his ancestors
who rubbed the tomtoms calling the tribes to war, and a girl dancer
struts muscles no European woman’s used since Rome was old.
* * * * *
There, Kenneth woke to animation over absinthe, and discoursed on
Stravinsky’s music or Mussolini’s future, the style of Marcel Proust, or
the eyes of his lost dancer, or the meaning of love and death.
He bought his absinthe from an Italian boat. For a long time, he would
not let me drink it. Then one night, with him, across a theatre lobby I
saw Peter and Judith, looking happy, looking absorbed in each other, not
seeing me. Kenneth watched my face change.
That night, and on rare nights after, he gave me absinthe. At first, he
was dubious as to whether I was a type that would react happily to it. I
was.
Drinking it, I could summon to life and warmth days, incidents, moments
out of other years when Peter loved me. I could go farther back, and
summon the look and the voice and the laughter of Roger. Even live again
the gay breathlessness of tobogganing, and the exciting feeling of
skating along a shining river as the stars came out, while that child
who I had been knew guiltily that she should have started home an hour
before.
Sipping slowly, slowly, watching Kenneth’s gold head droop above his
glass, listening to saxophones and drums and shouting of dancers that
seemed very far away, there was neither pain nor regret nor weariness. I
sat wrapped in peace as in a Spanish shawl.
Kenneth asked me to promise not to drink absinthe except with him; a
long time afterward he asked me never to drink absinthe at all, because
I was not as nearly freed from life as he.