XVII

There remained no reason now for me to breakfast at eleven, instead of eight o’clock. I gave up my noon-to-seven o’clock job, and found one from nine to five, at a better salary.

Before beginning at the new place, I went to Bermuda for a fortnight. Bermuda—because a letter from Bill came along, while I was trying to think of somewhere that I wanted to go.

The letter read:

“My Dear Patricia,

“Over brandy flips in the morning and champagne cup at night, I wish you were here. The climate and the scenery and the absence of automobiles make me able to believe that the last twenty years haven’t happened. Except when I look at the women’s clothes.

“Can’t you take a vacation? If you turn up, I’ll take you to the damn fool race-track that reminds me of county fairs in Maryland when I was young. All your generation should go to the tropics for ten years anyway, and watch roses blooming under palm trees. You’d all come back languid enough to be ladylike.

“I don’t suppose you’ll leave your silly job, but if you would I’d take you driving in a carriage, and you could pretend you were one of your own aunts, exhibiting gentle alarm at my recklessness if I went around a corner at a gallop.”

I thought it might be pleasant to contemplate Bill’s contented old age for a couple of weeks, so I cabled him and sailed. But I stayed at a hotel about a mile from Bill’s, lest contemplation of contented old age through all my waking hours, should grow monotonous.

In the mornings I swam before breakfast, and dressed and had breakfast, and sat about languidly on the hotel terrace, looking at the palm trees and thinking about nothing, until Bill’s wide sturdy figure rose over the brow of the hill.

“Well, well, let’s do a bit of pub-crawling before luncheon. Cheer you up. You look as if you needed a bit of cheering up. . . . God knows why . . . you’re young.” Something like that was his invariable greeting. Then we walked down to the landing and took a launch for Hamilton, while Bill told me I wore white, or blue, or yellow, or whatever I was wearing, well.

In the Bermudiana bar, Bill sat with a brandy flip in front of him, his wide red kind face beaming, explaining that all I needed was a husband, and considering, in his strong loud voice, those of his contemporaries who might qualify.

“We’re all too damn old for you, Pat, though. Wish I knew some younger men; wish I’d had sons.” And he sighed briefly for the sons whose non-existence was the only apparent regret of his life.

Then he trotted me about Hamilton, every day, muttering, “Women like trinkets; always cheers a woman up to buy her trinkets.” At intervals he vanished, briefly, into some little shop, to reappear with coral necklaces or earrings or brooches, that were not suitable for wear with anything I owned, but that I wore, with everything.

In the afternoons he played golf with men of his age.

I went alone and sat on unbelievably pink sands, and watched incredibly blue and white waves come curling in to shore, and read “The World of William Clissold.”

Through long afternoons, while the shadows of the palm trees lengthened across the sands, and a small breeze fragrant of sea and palms and roses, blew gaily along the shore, I read and re-read that section of the second volume where Mr. Wells considers the relationship of men and women.

I found therein solace for my resentment against the stupid jest I had long called secretly this damn freedom for women. There were sentences by Mr. Wells:

“We live sexually in a world of mixed and broken codes, and irregular and extravagant experiments and defiances. . . . Our ways of living are more provisional now than our governments. . . .

“One finds the companion-mate as a dream in the hearts of a few people here and there, as an experiment, an almost hopeless experiment, like a match lit in a high wind, or a swimmer borne away by a stream.”

I read that, and looked at the shadows of the palm trees on the sand, and thought: “Noel, Noel . . . a dream made real, an experiment achieved—and a dream lost, an experiment ended for ever. But it did not end in shabbiness and recriminations—so there remains, something. . . . Something . . . perhaps very much . . . a fire to warm my hands at all the days of my life.”

And I was able even to make a jest to myself, about Noel and me. It was not a very gay jest. It was, “Well, we both were destined to see palm trees, but not in the same country.”

I went back from these solitary afternoons to dine and drink champagne cup with Bill, and to listen to Bill’s stories of the early nineteen hundreds, feeling as serene as I used to feel, on coming home from afternoons of sailing in a breeze that was strong and exciting, when I was a very young girl.

And if sometimes, I waked at night, and listened to the warm steady wind sweeping through the palm trees outside, and ached, rather horribly, for Noel whom I would not ever see again—still, I knew that ache would pass, and was quite sure, this time, that remembrance of lovely things we had shared, would long outlast the ache that they were ended.

I went back to New York, feeling that I had been away a long time.

Lucia met me at the dock. It was a great comfort to see her. I said “Thank heaven, darling, you aren’t likely to dash off to Asia or South America or elsewhere, permanently, ever. I look forward to spending week-ends with you in Westchester when we’re both doddering.”

“Thanks,” she said. “You are looking all beautifully rested. But tell me, are you convalescing?”

“I think so.”

I got my baggage through the customs, and we started uptown in Lucia’s car. I hauled a bottle of Crême Yvette out of my blouse, for Lucia, and said: “I’ve been wearing corsets all day for your sake, to keep this from falling through. I hope you are appreciative.”

“Oh darling, my favourite liqueur,” she said. “But I don’t know whether I can drink it. I’m going to have a baby . . . I think I’m very pleased and Sam is of course radiant . . . I’m dieting like mad, though, so that I shan’t permanently ruin what figure I have . . . they give you a funny diet.”

“That’s grand about the baby if you want it,” I said.

Lucia’s conversation was noticeably circuitous; her usual method of approaching some news that might be distressing in effect.

She looked out of the car window. “It always seems to rain in New York when people come back from cruises, I’ve noticed,” she said. “Peter and Judith have a daughter, I hear.”

I was not glad or sorry or especially interested. I said: “Everyone seems to be doing something about the next generation, except me.”

“You’re young yet, Patricia. . . . Listen, Nathaniel’s staying with us. His father finally died, and left Nat all his money, with a note, saying that he appreciated the years Nat gave up to looking after him. Nat is taking it very hard . . . the note seems to have made him feel that he never was nice to his father . . . was impatient with him and so on. All that sort of thing is so dreadfully futile. . . . But Nat is in something of a state.”

“I know,” I said, “Nathaniel is such a dear.”

Lucia looked at me for an instant, speculatively.

“No, darling,” I said, “All I want is peace. I feel as old as Time, no matter how perennial I look.”

“I know,” said Lucia, “A comfortable fact about all of us, though, is that we have got through so much, so fast, there can’t be much left. I doubt if this will be a long-lived generation. We shall reach sedateness via emotional exhaustion, by forty—and die of senility at forty-eight. . . . I was afraid that the news about Nathaniel would disturb you.”

“Or was it the news about Pete you were afraid of?” I asked. “Nothing is ever going to disturb me much, again.”

“That’s grand,” said Lucia. She looked very preoccupied. Then: “Pat, would you think me a horribly greedy woman, if I got the chauffeur to open this bottle somehow, and stop for glasses somewhere, and we drank some of the Crême Yvette, now? I do adore it . . . and I’m so afraid the doctor will forbid it. If I had a little, before I asked him, it couldn’t hurt me, much.”

We drank Crême Yvette all the way to Lucia’s house, and were unable to eat dinner, but the Crême Yvette had tasted so good that we did not care.

Nathaniel seemed very glad to see me. He was looking unhappy. “He’s lost his occupation in life,” Lucia said, later. “He has been devoted to his father for the eight or nine years since he was twenty, and feels lost with no responsibility, now. I am going to suggest that he adopt an orphan, poor darling.”

Nevertheless, Sam and Lucia and Nat and I had a pleasant enough week-end, and then I went to work.

January went by slushily and drearily, so did February. I worked very hard, and missed Noel very badly, and hunted through the “Times” for his stories as they appeared. They were not signed, and I was never quite sure whether they were his, or someone else’s. They were written from so very far away.

One rainy March day, I found Nathaniel waiting for me in my hallway, when I came home from work. He was looking more cheerful than I had seen him, all Winter. When I brought him upstairs, he began flinging bright-coloured booklets, from an envelope he carried, all across a couch. They were travel booklets.

His voice was jubilant. “Pat, the doctor says I should leave the business in the hands of the office-manager—he knows more about it than I do, anyway—and go on a trip. Do you know, I haven’t been anywhere for so many years, I didn’t realize that I could go, now.”

I took off my hat, and laid it on a table, and smoothed my hair. I should miss Nat, too, but it was nice that he should go places . . . he had wanted to, for so long.

“Where are you going, Nat?”

He began picking up booklets and waving them at me. “I don’t know. Bermuda, Cuba, Florida, New Orleans.”

“You blessed idiot,” I said. “Why not around the world?”

He looked at me as if I had produced two full sized rabbits from the small hat on the table.

“My God,” he said, “I could go ’round the world.”

“Wait a moment, darling, and I’ll mix you a drink to help you get used to the idea,” I said. “You must promise to send me postcards of mosques and things.”

I was tired, and had a cold, and wished I could summon more enthusiasm about it, because Nat was such a pleasant person.

“Don’t mix a drink yet,” he said. “I want to tell you something . . . I want you to come along with me.”

I stared at him. He began to talk very fast. “I want you to marry me, I mean. Oh, I know you’ve never thought of that—I mentioned it just once when I was tight, I think. Perhaps I am not passionately in love with you, but if you don’t mind that, we might have fun. You are very gay to go places with . . . it would be lovely to have you along on a trip ’round the world, and I should be very lonely, by myself. I am fond of you, you know.”

I still stared at him. I said: “I am fond of you, too . . . I suppose I like you better than any man I know, nowadays.”

His voice was more confident than it had been. “Better come along then, Pat. And that’ll be that.”

I remembered having heard someone say that his father made decisions fast.

“Nat, dear, just a minute.” I felt very tired.

I wanted to say—to God or Noel or someone who would understand: “I have travelled such a long way, all the way through youth, I think, and I am so tired. You must not blame me too much, for taking what shelter offers, now.”

I smiled at Nathaniel and I said, “I’ll be able to talk in an instant, darling. Is that all right?”

“Of course, Pat, child,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

I looked at my hat, lying on the table, beside an unread copy of the “Times.” I looked at the dark outside the windows. Rain was splashing hard against the panes. I wished that I were not too tired to think.

And a wave of remembrance of Noel swept over me. Vividly, as if I had seen him an hour before, I could remember his smile, and the exact shade of his hair, and the way his mouth felt when he bent down to kiss me. Noel—who had lifted me, for a while, to the level of his strength. . . . Remembrances enfolded me warmly—ebbed, ebbed and were gone. I stood alone, in a room with Nathaniel.

I said, “Nat, how about my gaudy past? I am supposed to have had one, you know.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“Would have had one myself, if I’d been you, no doubt. That doesn’t bother me. I’d as soon not know the details, though.”

I said: “All right. I’ll marry you, Nat dear. Thank you for asking me.” We both laughed; he kissed me; and we went to dinner.

Lucia was very pleased.

We were married one April afternoon at the Municipal Building, where, long ago, someone with the same name as I, had married Peter. A phrase in the ceremony seemed vaguely familiar.

“Do you promise—to cleave to him only, forsaking all others, as long as you both shall live?” Well, this time, it might be true.

Because Nathaniel’s father had died so recently, we had no other celebration.

We were sailing that midnight—going around the world.

All our friends came to the boat, to wish us bon voyage. I said appropriate things, in answer to their felicitations, until my throat hurt from talking and talking.

Bill was ill and could not come to the boat, but he sent us a case of champagne, by his own bootlegger, a very large Italian who appeared suddenly, made a flowery speech wishing us long life, and gave us a detailed account of his difficulties in getting the champagne aboard. It was excellent champagne.

We began to drink it immediately—when it was almost all gone, people began saying “good-bye.”

Lucia drew me aside, and said: “Do you like your ermine wrap? I helped Nathaniel choose it for you.”

I said: “It’s a beautiful one. Why did he want to get me an ermine wrap?”

“Ever since he read ‘The Green Hat,’ Nat thinks ermine wraps are robes of romance. Pat, he’s a grand person.” She hesitated, then. . . . “It’s none of my affair, Pat, but are you thinking that Asia is a large place, or a small one?”

We regarded each other. I said: “It is a large place, Lucia. Still one never knows. . . .”

Lucia said: “That’ll be all right, I suppose.” She ran her finger down the ermine cloak. “It might be labelled ‘Success in the American edition,’ Patricia.”

We smiled at each other. She went away. Everyone else was gone, except Nathaniel.

He said, “Patricia, I’m going upstairs to send a wire or radio or whatever one sends at the last minute, to Bill, to thank him for the wine. Then I’ll come back to take you on deck, so that we can watch New York go by.”

“All right, darling. I want to put on some fresh make-up, anyway.”

The steward was clearing away the champagne bottles and glasses from our livingroom. I went into our bedroom. Champagne bottles and glasses were all over the place. I put on fresh lipstick and powder and perfume. I felt warm with champagne, and interested in going around the world.

There was a long mirror on the door of the bedroom. I walked toward it, and stood still.

In the mirror, a small, slim young woman stood. She had black straight shining hair, grey eyes, and a curved red mouth. Around her eyes, there were faint shadows, that would be lines in ten years, but not for ten years. She wore a rose-coloured net dress. One side of its ruffled skirt swung out like a half-opened fan. She wore an ermine wrap, negligently, over her shoulders. They were creamy shoulders—that many men had kissed—and that now, only one man would kiss, probably.

She did not look happy or unhappy. She looked a little tired and a little amused.

I wondered what she was like, underneath her attitudes. But I knew now, that neither I nor anyone else would ever be sure as to that.

She and I bowed to each other gravely, and I went to join Nathaniel.

Nathaniel and I stood silent. The ship moved smoothly down the river, and we watched New York move past. Nathaniel put a friendly hand on my shoulder.

Slipping past, slipping past, the lights of city skyscrapers, and with them all my life. Peter, Patrick, Kenneth, Lucia, Noel—voices and sounds of people and things I used to know.

Nathaniel spoke. “You won’t be lonely, Patricia?”

“No, my dear.”

He flung his arms out toward that fantastic skyline.

“We shall come back, Patricia, and build a skyscraper or two . . . then we’ll go on again . . . I want to see all the cities of the world. Capetown, and Budapest and Moscow,—Canton and Calcutta and Yokohama . . . I love the sounds of their names.”

His voice grew graver.

“I mean to be very good to you, Patricia.”

It was easy to slip an arm through his, it would be easy to be very good to Nathaniel, always.

“What are you thinking, Patricia?”

“That I mean to make you a perfect wife, Nathaniel.”

He smiled down at me, happily.

I did mean it.

Yet I shall hope, through all my youth, through all my life, that in some far city I shall find my love again.

New York lights blurred behind us. . . . That was a shining city.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.