Читать книгу The Rash Act - Ford Madox Ford - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Hugh Monckton Allard Smith had strolled across the floor of the little dancing to where Henry Martin had sat beside the silent and depressed poule. Hugh Monckton, who had been rolling a cigarette as he walked, looked down on them from his considerable height, and, still rolling, had remarked nonchalantly to Henry Martin:

'Met you somewhere, haven't I? Know your face. Because it's damn like my own.' He added: 'Would you pay for my drinks? I find I've left my note-case at home.'

Enviable!...That was what he was. He seemed to have no shadow of a doubt that Henry Martin would produce the money for his bill.

'If I were that fellow!' Henry Martin had said to himself with a sigh...He had been wishing for a couple of hours that he were—that he could actually become—that easy fellow.

Hugh Monckton had been all evening with Gloria Sorenson and her glorious back. When she had strolled away from him every half hour or so to take her turn in the Casino next door they would hear the applause. She would be back beside the fellow before it had quite ceased. He had gone on sitting easily in his place. He had the air of a graceful bridegroom.

He had sat, when she was there, with his brown hair mixed in the golden waves of hers. They had gone on talking ceaselessly, her glorious bare shoulders against his admirable polychromatic tweeds. Occasionally, as if enclosed within a sphere of their own, they had got up and walked between the tables to the floor. At once the crashing of the Russian Orchestra died to nothing.

There were four fellows, always laughing, at a table in the corner of the floor. Two had violins, one a ukulele. He was a high yellow. And one had a miniature saxophone. He was pure negro. The violinists were white, but black haired. They laughed all the time and all the time inaudibly played with their instruments. Only, when Gloria Sorenson went to take her turn, they strolled after her, still laughing. And when she stood up with Hugh Monckton you suddenly heard their incredible music which had been going on all the time beneath the coarser noises of the Russians. These became as suddenly almost mute.

No wonder that fellow could dance. Those two moved in each other's arms with rapt expressions, as if a transparent sphere surrounded them. To the measure of those extraordinary, laughing players.

Henry Martin thought: 'I dare say I dance as well as that fellow.' But he had never had such music. Those two moved about with their own musicians, ready to play to them at any moment, with that little, low, lilting, exciting music that in no way interfered with your talking. Except that it seemed of itself to lift your feet off the floor. He couldn't keep his own feet still. He wanted to kick his legs about like a nigger at a barn dance.

The little poule beside him made desultory and mournful remarks about Gloria Sorenson when she danced. She deprecated her gleaming shoulders, the great expanse of her white back. She suggested that anybody could be Gloria Sorenson—if only they had the chance to be born une étrangère...In a foreign country. No one had any use for French women in France nowadays...

Decidedly the conversation of the young woman had not been exciting.

She seemed to be suffering from the world depression as badly as anyone between there and Wall Street. She had drunk two gin fizzes in the course of the evening. The only spark they seemed to elicit from her had been the surprising information that an unpresentable figure who sat motionless the whole evening at a little table next that of the glorious couple was Gloria Sorenson's husband.

Henry Martin had combated this idea. It seemed to him unthinkable. But the girl had insisted on it with vehemence...almost as if with vindictive pleasure. Gloria Sorenson might be an étrangère. Her contemptible dancing and exaggerated legs, her shamelessly bare back and the imbecility of men might, in combination, have made her the cynosure of half the world. But that was her husband. All the city knew it.

The man was unbelievable. He was bullet-headed, immensely obese, with an expression of lachrymose despair. He sat over the table, humped on one supporting elbow as if he had been a sack-like marionette that someone had thrown down there. From time to time, when Gloria Sorenson had been away, the glorious young man had addressed smiling remarks to him. Before him was an immense beer glass. That from time to time the young man would fill—half from a champagne bottle and half from a bottle of stout. Neither the young man nor Gloria had drunk anything all through the evening. Yet there were three empty champagne bottles and three empty stout bottles on the table in front of them. The old fellow gulped off his liquor with extraordinary velocity, humping down in the same attitude between chair and table as soon as he had finished it.

The presence of the husband—if it was indeed the husband—seemed in no way to depress the young man. Nor did it make Henry Martin in the least less inclined to wish that he and that fellow could exchange idendties.

It occurred to him as odd that, hitherto, when he had wanted intensely to be someone else that someone had always been of ignoble position, or apparently rather unfortunate. At the time of the Magdalen-Balliol rag he had wanted to be a Japanese; once he had desired to be a French policeman; once, a man selling papers outside the Metropolitan Opera...These obsessions had always come to him vividly at times of immense depression. During the Oxford rag, apart from the noise and confusion of the moment, he had been worried by his tutor, by the thought that Oxford was bad for his psychology, by his position in regard to the World War. He had wished to be a Paris policeman at a time when he had made simultaneously two disastrous discoveries. One had been that he was not suited for the career of a writer, the other that Alice was insupportable for vulgarity of mind, manners and elegance. The newspaper seller had synchronized with the eighth or ninth month of the Wall Street Crash...

In each of these cases he had desired to become someone presumably humbler than himself...Now he found himself intensely wishing that he were a lord of the earth...Why?

That was simple. Whilst he had possessed anything at all or any hope of a future he had been willing to make a pact with Providence. He had been ready to surrender his possessions and future in exchange for fewer possessions and hopes. On condition that he could be released...from the worry of the World War, of Alice, and of the financial perplexities of the Stock Market crashes and eddies...But now that he had nothing and no hopes there was nothing left but to pray to Providence to give him something for nothing. It was as easy for Omnipotence to make him a lord of the earth as a crossing-sweeper...

He tried to lose himself in imagining what it would be like if he became actually that fellow...There would be a feeling of physical lightness...The numbing sensation of the brain and eyelids would not be there. It came with worries connected with finance and women. This fellow was undoubtedly immensely wealthy. In the gossip of the town—as reflected by the little poule at his side—the fellow was said to be negotiating the purchase of Madame Hauvrant's celebrated Le Secret—the famous yacht whose very tall spars and black hull were such a feature of those seas. Possessed of that vessel he was going to assume final control of the blazing Gloria and detaching her from both her contracts and her husband, to sail away towards endless bliss and idleness. In tropical seas...

Physical lightness...You could stretch your limbs. You could command things to happen at a distance. You could feel as if you possessed the wings...the wings of a dove, to flee away, flee away, and be at rest!

No wonder you could give pleasure with your dancing...There was not a thin, numbing stream of lead within all your limbs.

Who the fellow was Henry Martin did not then know. The inhabitants of the city—the poules, waiters, commissionaires, chasseurs knew him as Smeez, un américain—which was no doubt 'Smith' phonetically rendered. Like all bearers of that unfortunate name Henry Martin was sensitive to the extent of tracking out distinguished 'Smiths.' There were Smiths in America who were distinguished in all trades and occupations. But he could not think of any that was overwhelmingly distinguished. This fellow seemed to have the consciousness of overwhelming distinction in every gesture.

Yet, ironically, Henry Martin imagined that they must be physically very much alike. They must have been both almost exactly six feet in height. They were both loose-limbed and erect. They could both be said to have broad, as it were, frank brows, earnest, slightly frowning, brownish eyes: brown hair waved slightly over the foreheads and they had rather short-clipped brownish moustaches...

Henry Martin had never had any but a vague idea of what he himself would look like to an outsider. He was little given to looking at himself in glasses though at times when he had still considered himself as a 'writer' he had consciously scrutinized his reflection to see if it showed any traces of genius or talent. Or even of intelligence! He had never been able to discover any. But when you look into mirrors you stiffen your features. When you think you discover expressions of genius in others their faces are usually in motion.

It occurred to him to consider that if he hadn't had the idea of being a writer he would not be there. He would never otherwise have settled in Paris. Alice would have had no excuse for urging him to that step. It had seemed to offer to her unlimited chances of highballs, exhibiting herself, and exchanging dubious stories with dubious companions...And of embroiling him still more deeply with his father...Pisto-Brittle was one of the few things that seemed to have flourished all the more because of the Wall Street Crash. The inhabitants of Springfield and the surrounding territory had by chewing more candy consoled themselves for having to do without more costly pleasures...

In any case, it had frequently in the old days occurred to him that if he met himself in the street he might well not recognize himself. On the other hand, if he met that other fellow he might very well imagine it was himself he was meeting.

There was nothing very remarkable in that. They were both ordinary—in the sense that they were of not unusual types and had undergone identical trimmings and parings. They had probably sat under the same manicurists, barbers, tailors, tutors and preachers. He seemed certainly to have met the other sometime, somewhere...That fellow was probably Princeton—a product that much resembled what Dartmouth turned out...Princeton and then very possibly Oxford, too. With just a touch of the World War...There was certainly a slight look of the soldier about him. Indeed, vaguely, Henry Martin found himself connecting him with the associations of the short, troublesome period he had passed before being turned out of the English Army...He had been perpetually in trouble with the sergeants on parade. He had been in those days stubborn and it had not seemed to him as of infinite importance in the winning of the World War that a free born American citizen—free, male, and twenty-one—should stand motionless with his feet at an angle of forty-five degrees, his thumbs exactly in contact with the seams of his trousers...until someone entirely uneducated barked a noise that meant you to jump to it!

Fortunately it had been discovered that he wrote an excellent hand, could add correctly, was sober, cleanly and athletic. So he had gone little on parade but had been kept in what they called orderly room, sitting on wooden benches covered with horse blankets, making out endless returns. He had considered that that in itself was a symptom of the way Fate was inexorably determined to display him as ineffectual. He had enlisted in the British Army with the idea of showing that America though officially neutral was, at heart, just as ardently determined as anyone else to make this a world fit for free men...But Fate decreed that he should be put to almost exactly the same ignominious sort of job as that offered him by his father.

He tried to take it out of Fate by being as undisciplined as he could. But undiscipline had been difficult to exhibit. If he didn't there call officers 'Sir,' they didn't bother about it. If he got out of his bed late no one bothered as long as he did his returns all right...and he did not get his breakfast. His buttons and kit were always irreproachable because, at the very beginning of his service, he offered a poor devil a dollar a week to look after them. The poor devil had had an aged Welsh grandmother whom he helped to support, so Henry Martin had never had the heart to take away his employment. And as he was by a long chalk the most redoubtable half-back of the battalion's football team and was indeed spotted as quite likely to play for the Welsh against England in the Army team, officers taking orderly room would merely shake their heads at him if he were charged with being late returning to barracks.

He had in those days—for the only time in his life!—been something of a hero. The low-class scum who were his comrades considered him a devil of a fellow—lawless, desperate—and as wealthy as Croesus...He could at least say for himself that during those months—saltaverat...he had jumped, in the football field had given pleasure...to scum!...You could translate saltavit by 'jumped' as well as 'danced.' The Roman youth had no doubt done both.

He didn't know why, at that moment, these associations should come so strongly over him...What was that absurd period of five months to him...now? He was at the end of his trivial tether. If he were going to commit suicide on the morrow it was as much perhaps because of the dread of the French police as for any other reason. Yet he was merely at the end of his money. And humiliated. He was no kind of criminal. He did not suppose he would mind being a criminal. He simply wasn't one!

In his army career—when he had won fame!—he had certainly arrived at being a military criminal. He had been absent for a whole night which he had passed in a hotel in Newport, Mon. The military police had taken him back to his battalion under escort and he had passed a week-end in cells—the bloody clink, as they called it.

He had discovered that he had not liked that...And the discovery had humiliated him. At the beginning of the exploit—whilst throwing his money about in the Newport bars—he had been inclined to regard himself as resembling his ancestor—by his mother's account—Robin Hood, Earl of Huntingdon. He had imagined himself defending the poor, bloody Welsh Tommies against the ignorant brutal oppression of their English superiors. He could not see why men should be made martyrs to spit and polish or why they should have to jump to it when an English n.c.o." barked. That seemed no way to make the world free for Democracy. It had appeared to be merely aping the Enemy Nation. He imagined that if the United States had entered it they would have gone into it heads down, waving guns and swearing...as Colonel Roosevelt's Rough Riders had done with satisfactory results, at Guantamarro...or perhaps it was not Guantamarro...At any rate in the war for the liberation of Cuba from tyranny...He had boasted a good deal about that in the Newport saloons. And he had boasted about it still more to the Red Caps—the regimental military police—He had even said that he being an American citizen they could do nothing to him.

But in the bloody clink he had got cold feet. The clink was merely a perfectly impassive, clean, cube of space enclosed in three-ply boarding. There was no cruelty about it: it was merely impassive. The lightlybarred windows gave on to a green park where the men did exercises. When they didn't, the white peacocks of the Marquess of Bute walked about there. The Marquess had been a rather nervous Tommy, employed like himself over accounts in the battalion orderly room. He had been accustomed in secret to think it was some orderly room. It employed not only the heir to Pisto-Brittle but the premier Marquess of England.

Then, in the clink, looking at the white peacocks with their mincing gait, he had suddenly had a revulsion of feeling...after all, this system employed in its lowest jobs the great of the earth...No doubt, since they were intelligent, sober, and since noblesse oblige they ought to prove disciplined. Then they should surely be given opportunities of distinction: of proving themselves useful on a larger scale...His thought of that day had of course been youthful. But he was already a little ashamed of himself. He had arrived at the conclusion that the Ruling Classes should stick together wherever they found themselves. After all it was they who controlled the bloody clinks, whether in Springfield, Ohio, or South Wales.

The orderly officer's usual round, inspecting prisoners, had rather confirmed than interrupted his train of thought. He had marched, he remembered, up the cinder path and had stood before him at attention, a great deal more smartly than he had ever stood before. The officer had looked at him rather sorrowfully after he had asked him if he had any complaint. He had said, slightly shaking his head:

'You're an American citizen, it appears...you allege it.'

Henry Martin had enlisted as a Canadian to account for his accent.

'Then,' the officer had said, 'you're obviously White Man Smith of Magdalen.' He had added that he had been instructing the Balliol O.T.C. at the time the rag had occurred. He said he would speak to the colonel about it.

He remembered having envied the young officer—who nevertheless appeared sad. He was also called Smith...Lieutenant Smith. He had envied him—he had not wished to exchange identities with him. The young fellow—just his own age—had had an ease, an assurance, he himself appearing gawky and raw!...In the orderly room when he pushed his hair back, puzzling over some return, you saw he had a scar on his right temple—and some medals...

In front of the clink the fellow had talked to him sadly. Henry Martin, he had said, was a man of some intelligence. Why did he behave like this? He gave trouble to the officers who had enough, God knew, on their hands. He gave trouble to the men, setting a bad example...He was doing the work of the Enemy Nations...Every case of insubordination that he put up might be said to make the Enemy Nations or their sympathizers rejoice. He didn't suppose that Henry Martin wanted that...

Henry Martin hadn't wanted that! The thought of the Teutonic sympathizers of Springfield, Ohio, patting him on the back when they heard of his exploits was remarkably distasteful to him...Disagreeable old spectacled ladies and harsh-voiced Lutheran novices...They would do that...The people who had proposed to run his old Aunt Hedwig out of town on a rail...They were the great majority in the city...He had not liked his old Aunt. She smelt of brandy...Still...

He had said to the officer in front of clink that he certainly did not want enemy sympathizers to rejoice.

Some of his emotion in those days was even then very vivid in his memory. He sat in a little dancing room of the Cote d'Azur, with tinsel decorations and a Russian orchestra in white smocks with scarlet embroidery. But he saw the green boughs of the trees over the lightly barred windows of clink!

It had been a confused time...That was no doubt what was the matter with him. He was perhaps one of the génération perdue that the French talked of. The Lost Generation...They were said to have been so disturbed in their equilibrium by the distortions of the late war that they had no sense of the values of life...That might of course be the case. But he could not see why he should have been affected. He certainly had not taken the war hard. He had shuffled, really, through it. Not of his own will. He had not asked for easy jobs. They had just been given to him.

It came back to him as a period of fever. After fevers you do not remember what has happened. Or you remember most things only dimly. Then some things with great clearness...You wake up in the night with an unbearable headache. The water glass is at a great distance. You cannot get at it.

That had been just his case in the war. He could, he supposed, disentangle its chronology if he tried. But he had never bothered to try. He remembered the declaration of war in Springfield. Or rather he didn't—because he had been recovering from a dull carouse with some girl. Shut up in her father's house and afraid to stir out in daylight for fear the neighbours saw him...And he remembered the end of the war...Hearing of it in a mountain valley in the Cevennes where he had been in charge of a saw mill and a canning factory. Why should they have set up a canning factory in the Cevennes? There was no knowing. Perhaps because of water power. Most likely it was just a piece of graft. But why should he have been in charge of it?...Well, that was because he had made for his Captain a portrait that his Captain had found satisfactory...A fat man with a blue grey walrus moustache—bulging out above and below his new belt...The Captain had detailed him to look after the saw mill and the cans...He had taken up Art by that time.

That had been to please Wanda...Or to please the memory of Wanda. Because, of course, Wanda had given him up by then. At the request of his father and her husband...Still he had gone on making watercolours. Without enthusiasm...

There had not been any vividness about Armistice Day in the Cevennes. Snow had already begun to fall up where the saw mill was. One of the men had broken his leg and he had gone up with the syphilis inspector to see about it. The saw mill had been higher up in the mountains than the canning factory...Félicité had raised Cain about his going up. Because of the snow and because he had promised to take her in to Valence. She had raised Cain. She had been certain he would fall down a ravine and be hidden by the snow until next May. Then what would become of her if, as she suspected?...

What in the world did they want with a U.S. Inspector of Syphilis in Troops in a lost valley in the Cevennes? There weren't any troops. Henry Martin had a corporal in charge of the saw mill. That was the fellow who had broken his leg. And an artillery quartermaster at the canning factory...Why artillery? Were they going to use canned salmon for shells?...In the Argonne?...

The syphilis inspector had turned out to have no medical qualifications. He was a poet by profession. Stoutish and chuckling. He turned out doggerel about the local legends by the hundred lines an hour...Legends about the religious wars of the district...

'And so the battle this and that way goes...

Hurrah for something in the mantling snows...'

The Inspector said that he had been marooned there because he had discovered things that the Great Medical Staff had not wanted spoken about. Henry Martin had strongly suspected they had put him there because they could not bear his verse...

Anyhow their arts had done them proud...They had lived warm, quartered in a good farm, low down. They had written verses and made water-colour sketches and played craps and spit in the ocean day after day. Félicité—who was well educated—would recite Victor Hugo in her pink robe de chambre at bedtime.

'Enfant si j'étais roi je donnerais l'Empire

Et mes flottes et mes something et mes something et mes something...

Pour un baiser de toi...

Enfant si j'étais Dieu...'

He would give something else...It was Félicité's way of suggesting that he did not requite her kisses with sufficient passion. She wasn't mercenary. But her old mother would have coerced him into marrying her if he hadn't kept his head. Or course she hadn't been with child...

What had become of Félicité? A little clean browneyed filly. Or the Syphilis Inspector? Or the Captain? Or all the crowd?...Hundreds and hundreds with whom he had rubbed shoulders. Friendly nearly all. Loud voiced. Roistering...Or even Wanda? She did not appear to have made good. At Hollywood or anywhere else. Yet undoubtedly she had talent...This Gloria Sorenson reminded him of her—deep chested with luminous flesh, large nostrils and wide mouth. She might have made a man of him if father hadn't butted in.

Of all of them he had only kept track of Leopold Kuhn and, God, he wished he hadn't...Though if it hadn't been Anacondus and Kennecotts it would have been something else...As corporal in charge of the Y.M.C.A. canteen in that accursed White Star transport Kuhn had seemed a mighty potentate.

A hell of a ship with all those starving thousands on board! He didn't even know whether it had been the fault of the shipping company or merely of the grafters. He had had indignant ideas of exposing the affair—but they had died away. He couldn't be said to have suffered himself. His art had saved him. He had passed the voyage on the poop—painting, in water-colour, portraits of the officers of his regiment. That had cured him of ever wanting to paint again. The sight of a tumbler of discoloured water still made him inclined to vomit.

But his occupation had assured him of the right of access to the canteen and the society of Mr. Leopold Kuhn when he wanted it. Kuhn struck him as the calmest person and one of the greatest savoir-faire that he had ever met. He cleaned his canteen-zinc with great masterstrokes whilst talking of continental literature. The impassivity with which he had his canteen cleared of the starving, yelling soldiery by the Marines was enough to make you respect him permanently. His canteen would be packed with the upper parts of the poor doughboys six deep. They yelled and gesticulated, their faces convulsed. Mr. Kuhn served them with extreme deliberation in complete silence for the ten minutes that the canteen was open. Then he would make a half-visible sign to the Marine corporals and those pugilists would fall on the miserable doughboys and heave them out of the confined space, down the pitch black companion.

He would remove his great spectacles, close and open his eyes a great many times, readjust his spectacles and begin throwing craps with the Marines for who should cook the corned beef-hash or chile con carne whilst the others played spoil five and drank cocktails made from the applejack of which Mr. Kuhn had a couple of casks beneath the zinc.

It wasn't till the vessel had been some days out that Henry Martin had discovered the real state of affairs. Mr. Kuhn saw that the Marine corporals who were detailed to help him and that Henry Martin and one or two other fellows who were officially scheduled to him as helpers but who really did odd jobs for the officers—Mr. Kuhn saw that these were lavishly fed by the canteen. But there were no stores at all on board for the soldiers. The holds were completely filled with typewriters and sewing machines. Even some of the cabins were occupied with that merchandise.

So that the men were actually starving. They had for dinner a piece of bread—begged by the cooks from the British sailors—of about the size and not much more than the thickness of a playing card, and watergruel made with coarsely ground corn that the cooks stole from the mangers of the horses on board. For supper they had a couple of spoonsful of the same gruel.

The ships had been driven up north of Scotland in the evasion of enemy submarines so even those rations had been halved. And when Henry Martin had pleaded with Mr. Leopold Kuhn to let the canteen be open a little more than for the two periods of ten minutes which was all that he allowed, Mr. Kuhn answered phlegmatically that it was forbidden by all the articles of his association and the Secretary of State. Mr. Kuhn admitted that it seemed a shame. But a deputation of the Women's Clubs of—Mr. Kuhn thought—Ohio, Missouri and North Dakota—had waited on the department and extracted that promise in the interests of the poor boys themselves. The canteens were of course bone dry. But they purveyed cigarettes. Some ladies of these states considered that cigarettes were nearly as pernicious as drink...

The effect of that voyage, Henry Martin was now aware, had been to cure him of all respect for the louder virtues...Perhaps for all virtues! It—and all the enterprises connected with it—seemed to be like a vast smudge across the landscape of his life...He could almost mark the very moment when the sunshine of virtue—and of vice—had gone out of it. That was of course unsophisticated. But it had marked the last glow of conscious patriotism in him. Of patriotism as a glow—and even of adultery as a glow!

It had been very shortly before his going out to France. He had been sent as clerk to an officer who was supposed to arrange for the embarkation of Ohio and Middle Western troops. At New York. As the officer had not given more than half an hour a day to his duties—which had been taken over obligingly by an officer once a partner in the firm which belonged to the family to which Mr. Leopold Kuhn belonged—Henry Martin had had the whole inside of a week to himself. He had been very flush of money and having hired a car had amused himself with exploring the State of New York.

It had occurred in a dilapidated village below Redding Ridge—rather towards Danbury, Conn., than the other way. He had persuaded Wanda to spend three days—and two nights—with him in a summer boarding place on the Ridge. They had been waited on by the most perfectly elegant coloured girl with a most amazing head of unkinked hair. All around them at separate tables had sat elderly ladies overflowing with sentiments of goodwill to the young hero and his war bride. It had not been his first adultery. It had certainly been his most glorious. Wanda had given to his nights raptures that could only be read into the ends of fairy tales.

By day, a rather faded, blue woollen Norwegian garment masking the extraordinary glow of her glorious flesh and most of her amazing hair being hidden by a knitted purple cap like a tarn o'shanter, she had resembled a bird of Paradise before it dressed up for a party. She had a good, Scandinavian, utilitarian tinge to her daytime personality. She believed in employing the shining hours. Henry Martin had been compelled to paint in water-colours the decayed villages that were sprinkled over the countryside, whilst Wanda sat on a tree stump beside him and memorized a new part in which she was understudying Miss.—— But Henry Martin could not remember the name!...That gave to the last shining days of his youth a feeling of duration and domesticity as well as of glory.

He couldn't remember, either, the name of the village. It had not been far from the Mark Twain homestead. They had smashed the car up on the extraordinarily bad sunken road that ran along under the ridge—near a pile of stones in a ragged little wood where a huge bunch of rattlesnakes were sunning themselves. You might have expected Norwegian Wanda to be scared of rattlesnakes. But she hadn't been. She had pelted them with small rocks, leaning forward to see where they fell and opening her large, healthy, rosy mouth in great gusts of laughter when the sinister, dry, churning sounds answered her efforts...She had been glorious, with her large mouth and shining eyes that were in her moments of merriment, like those of a fine dog that laughs when you wave a bit of stick as if you were going to throw it...

They had walked on until they came to the village. They found a farmer who agreed to take a couple of horses and tug the car after them. Henry Martin had carried his colour and sketching board, Wanda the bluepaper covered parts. The village had consisted of a broad street of dust with, on each side of it, a border of grass and then, beneath very tall, thin-leaved elms, the unusually high gables of brown-shingled, dilapidated houses. As far as he could remember the village had once been much more prosperous. It had been the centre of a cotton-spinning industry that had long since died. Or perhaps it had not been cotton. It might have been wool—or lumber—or chair-making...But there were the high, mournful, shadowed gables, suggesting very old European villages. And Henry Martin remembered thinking that, if your prosperity had departed, it was all one whether that had happened forty years ago or four hundred. You were a relic of the past. There must, however, have still been some inhabitants. In the street were a general store, a drug store and a little one-windowed store where 'Miss Twisden, Dressmaker,' manufactured and showed for sale, baby linen, or at least crocheted caps.

Henry Martin wondered idly whether Pisto-Brittle could be bought in either of the stores. But he remembered to have heard his father say that he had never been able to penetrate into New England. And they were just across the border of New York State—in Connecticut.

An ice-cream wagon had come lumbering through the flat dust of the road to the steps of the drug store. It had been then that Henry Martin had felt his glow of patriotism. He did not believe that any of the other nations taking part in the war had ice-cream delivered daily in its remotest villages. This seemed to him the high-water mark of civilization. The starving millions of Europe could not any one of them show the like of that. Let alone the other continents.

The episode remained among his other memories like a bright spot.

Thunder had descended on his head immediately afterwards. One of the old ladies at the boarding house had written to father to congratulate him on his daughter in-law. The old man had stormed down to war-time New York, seeming to add new noises to that already sufficiently noisy city. He had however relapsed into his wild boarish good humour as soon as he learned that Henry Martin was not married to Wanda.

Henry Martin could not see what it mattered to his father whom he married. Father let him go roaming about the world—or necking in Springfield. He even appeared to have no views on masculine sexual morality. His character did not hang together. When it came to this marriage he got raging on to his hind legs. Why?

He blinked at Henry Martin with his inflexible little eyes and said over and over again:

'No, sonny. It isn't this star that you're going to hitch your wagon to. Not this star! You go find another...

Henry Martin had treated his father with cold indifference. He did not see what his father could do about it. He was free, male and still twenty-one. He imagined that, when the war was over, he would be perfectly capable of supporting Wanda. In the meantime she would be quietly getting her divorce. Her husband was a frank undesirable—a possibly Norwegian violinist who led an unspeakable life in Paris.

Two days later the troopship had sailed.

His father had seemed to get busy pretty soon. For quite a time Wanda had written to Henry Martin every day. He had got her letters in bundles in various odd corners of England and France to which his military jobs had taken him. They were always connected, ingloriously, with commissariat or supplies. He had never come within two hundred miles of the enemy forces.

It had been difficult, even at first, to gather much about the state of Wanda's feelings. She wrote singularly foreign English considering that in her small parts on the stage she had no noticeable accent. Her endearments which were unusually phrased might have meant the deepest of passions; her assurances of fidelity might have meant equally the deepest of passions...But they might have meant nothing of the sort.

Gradually her letters began to mention his father. The old man seemed to have gone to Detroit to see her company play. They must have become as thick as thieves. After all, they were both European. It became a European sort of an intrigue. Father had gradually persuaded her that the marriage could not possibly be a success. Henry Martin had no means. He was a trifler. He was, moreover, several years younger than the girl...

The effect of these conversations penetrated gradually to Henry Martin in his Cevennes valley. They had driven him nearly mad. He had written: he had cabled—two or three times a day...It was an infamous lie to say that he was without means. Being of age he had come into a third part of his mother's property. It consisted of the drug store of her father and a small piece of real estate. The drug store which was managed by a company was by now a good property. He expected to draw from it as much as four or even five thousand a year. On that they ought to be able to live comfortably when these troubles were over...

Wanda's letters could not be said to grow colder. But they did begin to allow weight to his father's arguments. She was certainly three—nearly four—years older than he. At the time that seemed a small matter. But as the years went by the difference would be more perceptible. A young man of twenty-five married to a woman of thirty was considerably handicapped.

Henry Martin had answered everything he could think of.

He remembered he had written frantically' and had indeed gone almost out of his mind, shut up in the valley with his saw mill. At the same time he was living with Félicité...If you had told him that it was possible to be in love with one girl and live with another he would have said that you lied. Yet the books were wrong. Indeed when Wanda had come over to Paris definitely to break with him he was already living with Alice.

Wanda had walked into the apartment on the Rue des Saints Pères while Alice was laying the table for lunch. She had left her almost incapable husband propped up against the wall outside, drumming a tattoo with his hands behind him. The sun had shone into the apartment and on the white, orange and blue of the Breton crockery on the table.

A little, as he remembered, to his mortification she had hardly taken any notice of the presence of Alice...though Alice was not altogether unnoticeable. But Wanda had talked to him as if the other did not exist. That was partly due to her stage habit of mind, partly to her Scandinavian earnestness. She had not only ignored the existence of all women who were not on the stage, she ignored the existence of all human beings who did not practise one or other of the arts. That point of view as a pious expression of opinion was not unknown to Henry Martin. He had heard it at Dartmouth amongst young men who intended to 'write' and at Magdalen from a small clique who had called themselves the Ten, but were better known as the Yellow Pants. These choice souls had all expressed the opinion that a person who did not practise one of the arts belonged to the outer darkness and was merely stuff to fill graveyards. All these young men, however, had either gone into their fathers' businesses or one or other trade or calling that they would once have called bourgeois. So that, with the exception of two who had stuck together and become reporters on a Brooklyn paper, Henry Martin was the only one who had so much as used the Arts as an excuse for a purposeless life.

It was upon that that Wanda had pitched as an excuse for breaking with him. She had said that if he had followed the writing career he had first professed to desire, or that of a painter into which she had tried to urge him, the idea of breaking with him would never have occurred to her. Henry Martin had reminded her that there had been a war and that he had been a soldier. The war indeed was still in being and he still in the service. It was the period of the Armistice and he was doing commissariat work for such American troops as remained in Paris, escort work for funerals or at state appearances of diplomats. It was not glorious employment, but, such as it was, it was his duty to see it through. He was at the moment engaged on a laborious correspondence between the Army Department and the French Authorities as to payment for the sewing machines and typewriters that had filled the hold and cabins of the transport in which he had come over. Mr. Leopold Kuhn had indeed turned up again looking extraordinarily slim, athletic and graceful in a handsome, modified, staff-officer's uniform. It had by now reached Henry Martin's intelligence that his presence on board that vessel had been far more connected with seeing these munitions of war through the European Customs Houses—where, of course, they paid no duty—than with the supply of cigarettes and coca cola and stationery to the unfortunate troops. He was now interested in making the French authorities pay for them, but in the meantime found plenty of leisure for compiling a work on copper as employed in German industries...

To the various excuses that he got out of his present occupations, Wanda blazing in the bright room had replied merely that she had been shocked...She pronounced it: 'Stchocked!' from which he gathered that she was actually feeling some emotion. When she was quite calm she watched her English accent very carefully.

She had been shocked by the nature of his arguments in his letters. When he had replied to his father's statements that he would be unable to support her properly he had never once mentioned his pen or his brush. He had proposed to keep her out of his four or five thousand dollars a year. For what did he take her? She was an actress in demand. Perfectly well able to support herself with considerable luxury, but perfectly ready to leave the stage had Henry Martin's career as either artist or writer needed that she should remain beside him. But she was not ready to sit at his side in an apartment in the Bronx or a suburb of Christiania. Nor yet whilst he pursued the career of a stockbroker.

She had gone out several times during her long harangue or his interruptions to place her husband in different positions—against the wall, against the banisters, or on the stairs.

She said that if Henry Martin had proposed to follow an artist's life—in a garret, a cottage in the wood or beside a glacier—she would contentedly have followed him. She would even, if the necessaries of life had proved lacking, have returned temporarily to the stage to keep them going for a period.

She broke off to go and fetch in her husband whom she deposited in a roundbacked armchair. He was an extraordinarily emaciated fellow. He came back to Henry Martin as having had whitish rings round sootblack eyes. He stood apparently for the arts and looked very nasty, sunk down in his chair, his hands incessantly drumming on its legs as they drooped beside them. A violinist he was. A marvellous violinist. And doped to the eyelids.

She appeared to have brought him there as an exhibit. Exhibit A. The sort of man a woman ought to devote herself to. He, Henry Martin, was Exhibit B—the sort of man to whom a woman ought not to devote herself.

It seemed queer to Henry Martin. There he was: free, male and twenty-one. Six feet in his stockings. The picture of health and moderation. He had indeed been thinking of taking up athletics again and had lately visited several training places in Paris.

The other fellow just gibbered, leaning forward in his chair, smiling as if with intense friendliness at the rest and making gay remarks in an entirely unknown tongue.

It was no doubt the mothering instinct in Wanda.

She had eventually removed her husband and Henry Martin had understood that the separation was to be final.

He had not even had time to make a remark to the completely silent Alice. She had gone on laying and relaying the table. During the intervals of Wanda's apostrophes he had been conscious of her moving a tablespoon or putting the jug of yellow flowers in another place on the table. With an abstracted manner, as if she had been reflecting deeply upon the pattern made by the table service or weighing in her mind the arguments put forward by Wanda.

They would no doubt have talked. But before the sound of Wanda's voice was quite out of Henry Martin's ears the door which she had left ajar was pushed open by the shoulder of Henry Martin's father.

He stood in the doorway, a round, Dutch-looking pillow of tightly encased flesh. His eyes rolled. He was exceedingly out of breath. At last he brought out triumphantly the words:

'Another star!'

Henry Martin had never made up his mind whether by that father had meant that Henry Martin would now be pressed to find another star or that in Alice he had found one...He stayed to lunch, lumping down into the chair that had been vacated by Wanda's husband and wolfing down great quantities of the blanquette de veau à l'ancienne that had been admirably made by the femme de ménage...Henry Martin had to attend a parade at the Arc de Triomphe at two. He went, leaving the old man with Alice.

He had by then been promoted to the rank of topsergeant, but, since he had great difficulty in remembering which was his right hand and which was his left, appearances on parades—which at that time were rather frequent as A.E.F. troops were returned home—were rather disagreeable to him.

The old man spent nearly two months in Paris. He had seemed to have the time of his life which, for a Luxemburger in Paris, was not difficult. There he had a rustic air which was not noticeable in Springfield, Ohio. He looked like an enriched farmer from one of the French northern departments and he showed—for a gentleman who had not seen Europe for over thirty years—an astonishing knowledge of how to amuse himself in Paris.

The mainsprings of his character had remained enigmatic to Henry Martin in spite of that period during which they were together for large parts of the day. His father and Alice were alone together even more often, but Henry Martin never quite knew, either, how they got on. They visited museums, galleries, theatres, operas, variety shows. When Henry Martin could get leave for sufficiently long they hired motors and visited such of the battlefields as were then visible. Those of the Argonne where the A.E.F. had been so mercilessly hammered were not available, Henry Martin believing till the present moment that the French wanted to clear up those spots a little so that Americans should not too plainly discern how remorselessly Mangin had used up their troops. So Henry Martin never saw scenes of patriotic interest to him. But they got once as far as Luxemburg, a queer, suburban principality that very little stirred the pulses of Henry Martin. His father—and indeed Alice—had nevertheless what his father called a high old time there amongst the friends of his boyhood and their sons and daughters.

Sister Carrie came into the town to see them. Her husband, because of a presumably too great toleration of the occupation of the Grand Duchy by the late enemy, was not encouraged to visit the capital of a state that was now enthusiastically pro-Ally. On the other hand, as an American, Sister Carrie did not seem to have had too good a time, at any rate after the United States had declared war. She appeared worried, or at least abstracted. But, if she confided in her father, he did not transfer her confidences to Henry Martin. She was beginning to acquire the European veneer of the great lady that was afterwards for a time to make her seem disagreeable to Henry Martin.

In the Grand Duchy Alice was accepted as—or at any rate presumed to be—the fiancee of Henry Martin.

What the old man thought about it there was no knowing. After his first visit to the apartment in the rue des Saints Peres he had never come there again. They on the other hand never penetrated further than the entrance hall of a magnificent hotel in the Champs Élysées where the old man installed himself. It was rather presumed by Alice and Henry Martin that he had there found some sort of feminine companionship. There seemed to be no reason why he should not have. He led a lonely enough life in Springfield. Once, from the promenade of the Folies Bergeres they saw him in a box in company with a platinum-haired blonde who was covered with diamonds. He began to grow obviously tired and to talk of Springfield with some complacency...