“After my shameless correspondence, I shall probably be so shy that I’ll
insist on sitting eight feet away from you, staring at you with an
imbecilic look of content. . . . Let’s go for a week-end to the shore
where I can fall asleep on the sand in the sun with my head on your
shoulder. I shall feel that I’ve reached Ultimate Truth, like a Russian
at the end of seventy-two hours conversation.”
He wired:
“Arranged going straight through to New York stop expect to enter city
shouting love love nonstop reach Penn Station seven five P. M. Wednesday
stop might I be met.”
He was met.
We had days and weeks of high felicity. Sometimes, as I walked along the
street, remembrance of years when I had been unhappy, came to me; and
they seemed an infinite distance away, and altogether unreal, like
stories one hears about a friend of a friend of a friend.
He had a rather extraordinary offer made to him—to go to Yokohama as
head of a Far East news bureau. He would have liked to go. He had been a
foreign correspondent on the Continent, and he spoke Russian, which
would be useful in the Far East post, but he had never been to Asia.
He broached the project to his wife. Part of the terms on which they had
arranged their lives was that he was not to take a post outside New
York, because it would be too embarrassing for her to travel. She
refused to hear of the Asiatic scheme.
He spoke of it to me, and I was entirely willing to fling the
advertising business overboard, and go. We had often talked about the
places we’d see, and how I would occupy myself learning Japanese, while
he covered Chinese wars and Indian border uprisings. But neither Noel
nor I took the project very seriously. We did not expect that his wife
would let him go.
During the conversation, when he told her that it was an extraordinary
opportunity, and that he wanted very much to go, she told him that she
knew all about me. He was startled—and even more surprised to discover
that she had nothing more to say than that she knew about me.
He asked her to reconsider agreeing to let him go to Asia. (He had three
months in which to make up his mind—someone was filling out a term of
office in the meantime.) She said she would not agree to it, but that he
could ask her again in a few weeks, if he chose.
Noel was growing a little restless on the “Times.” He felt that, on the
New York staff, he’d gone about as far as he was likely to go, and he
didn’t contemplate with much joy, the probability that he would spend
the next twenty years, doing the same sort of stories, over and over.
Most of the time that we were together, though, we were too pleased with
the world in general to worry about things like that. I did have one
acute attack of wanting-to-be-made-an-honest-woman, and wrote him about
it, when he was upstate covering the campaign tour of a governor.
“NOEL DEAREST—
“The preface to this letter is—I am as binged as I ever was.
First time in a year. Nat and I fell off the wagon with the
loudest splash imaginable—that acquaintance of yours, Tony, who
has had the unreciprocated ‘glad’ on me for so long, caused it.
“Nat telephoned me to ask me to dine at seven, (You know he’s
been having an attack of wanting-to-get-away-from-it-all for
months. Poor child.) At ten to seven the bell rang. It was that
fool Tony. His yellow hair was combed four ways at once, as
usual; and he was drunk as usual, too. He had a flask, and I had
a drink. Then Nat came. He was tight, too, which is
extraordinary. It seems he’d just seen his father through one of
his attacks. So we all had more drinks.
“We went to Delano’s bar, and began drinking Manhattans. A wild
rainstorm developed outside, and no cabs were to be had, so we
had more drinks, and the bartenders cooked us eggs and things.
“I was feeling low, because I was tired—and Tony and Nat are a
God-awful combination, although they seem to go out together
frequently. I mean, Nat’s likely to get dismal, and Tony
amorous, simultaneously.
“They both got tighter and tighter on their drinks.
“Then Tony said to Nat: ‘You’re the boy Pat’ll marry in the end,
of course. One day she’ll look at herself in a mirror and know
she’s not going to be an apparently-sophisticated-twenty-two
eternally. Then she’ll marry you, and make you a swell wife,
that’s the funny part of it. I’ll send you a wedding present.’
“I said, ‘I don’t want to marry anybody.’
“Tony said: ‘You’ll get sense some day.’
“We had two more rounds of drinks, and I talked about the
Paramount Building.
“Then Tony said: ‘I shall “make” Pat, one day . . . not for a
couple of years, one day when she’s tired.’
“Nat said: ‘The hell you will. I’ll marry her some day when
she’s tired. You’re right . . . she ought to be married . . .
women need stability . . . I don’t care how she occupies herself
in the meantime.’
“I said, ‘Stop talking about me as if I were a car that must be
parked somewhere ultimately. If you want to know, I’m perfectly
happy at the moment.’
“They said, jointly: ‘Sure, but he can never marry you.’
“I said, ‘Talk about something else, please.’
“It’s all right, Noel, I probably wouldn’t write you about it,
if I weren’t tight myself. It was a pretty disgusting
evening—but not extraordinary. We are an unmannerly generation.
The best-brought up man you know is likely at any moment to
start shouting his sexual ambitions in a speakeasy. It doesn’t
mean anything.
“This means something, though. It’s damnably true that I shall
some day look at myself in a mirror, and know that—not in the
scarlet frock I wore tonight, or any other, shall I look like
twenty-two, any more. And wish that I had stability, meaning a
husband to pay for facial massages through all my middle-age.
But I shan’t take such a husband. It would be too great a waste
of you and me and dreams and love.
“I’m asking something of you, though. I probably wouldn’t ask it
if sober. Because the thought of growing old, alone, frightens
me, would you write me a letter and say, ‘I would marry you if I
could.’ I know you never can . . . but to have a two-line note
that said you would have married me, had things been otherwise,
would comfort me.
“Your affection for me is the loveliest thing I ever found, you
know, in a world-full of second rate solutions for everything,
and I should rather have the off-chance of permanence with you,
than nineteen gold-framed marriage certificates with anyone
else. Can you understand though, that a two-line note would be
comforting, because it _was_ a dismal evening?”
He wrote me a long letter. I looked for it among the other letters he
had written me. I read it, and put it aside. That would be the only
letter I would keep, because I didn’t believe the warmth could ever go
from it. It ended: “The thing that all men look for, I have found, with
you.”
* * * * *