“Oh, don’t keep on saying that, Brad. My father often helps promising young men—he gets a kick out of it. I don’t mean he doesn’t genuinely like you, but I wouldn’t want you to feel so terribly grateful…he enjoys it, just as he enjoyed it while Julian was baiting you the other night.”
“Baiting me?… Julian…?”
“That argument you had—about science and civilization, all that. Julian was trying to break down something you believed in.”
“That’s what your mother seemed to think.”
“Of course a good deal of what he said may be true. It doesn’t pay to be too idealistic. You said just now you weren’t as austere as some people imagined, and that’s a good thing—you used to be too austere. But you needn’t go to the other extreme.”
“Have you any idea what you’re talking about?”
“I think I have. Only you don’t help me to understand you. Perhaps you don’t want me to.”
“It isn’t that. I’m not sure that I properly understand myself.” We walked a few hundred yards, then he took my arm (the first time he had ever done so); he said quietly: “Let’s chuck the argument. Do you mind? I told you the secret—nobody knows yet that I’m not going…till I can wake the professor. I don’t think it’ll bother him much, that’s one thing.”
“The real secret is why you changed your mind.”
“You’re a persistent child.”
“I’m not a child at all, but that would make another argument.”
“Yes, let’s not have one. Not even a small one, from now on. Change the subject—talk of something else—anything else…. It is beautiful here, as you said. I didn’t somehow expect this sort of weather. Everyone in Dakota knows about London fogs, but this bright cold air…. Look at those boys—they’re optimists—they’ve brought sleds…or sledges, isn’t it?”
“Sledges over here. Sleds in America.”
He picked up the topic with grateful artificial enthusiasm. “Lots of words like that, aren’t there? Sidewalk, pavement—but in England pavement’s called roadway. And of course subway and tube. Though that’s not quite right, because there aren’t any real tubes in New York…. But the oddest of all, I think, is thumbtack and drawing pin…. Drawing pin.… Can you beat that?”
I tried to, and we kept it up till we reached the pond at the top of Heath Street. Then, as we were so near, I felt I wanted to go home. There was nothing else I could say, and nothing at all I could do. I asked him not to see me to the house and we separated at the tube station. “Oh, Brad,” I said, as he put coins into the ticket machine, “you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want, but I hope you aren’t going to make a hash of things.”
He gave me an empty look and my arm a final squeeze, then dashed for the elevator…lift, my mind checked, just as emptily, as I walked away.
My father had left for the City, John told me; also that my mother was out shopping and would not be in to lunch. So I lunched alone, then went to the library, listened to the radio (wireless), played phonograph (gramophone) records, then got out my history notes and tried to concentrate on Stubbs’s Select Charters. It wasn’t particularly easy.
My mother came home in time for tea, and I couldn’t help thinking how beautiful she looked, with her face flushed from the cold and her hair a little wind-blown. And there was a quality in her eyes, too elusive to describe, but “trancelike” occurred to me even though I had never seen anyone in a trance; a sort of serene observance which, if there is any difference between the words, must be a less active and more ritual thing than observation. She pulled off her gloves with long slow movements, gossiping meanwhile about her shopping and the special shortcakes she had been able to get at Fortnum and Mason’s, and the trouble Henry had had to avoid skidding on the slippery roads. “It wasn’t really a day for driving—more for taking a walk.”
That was my cue, if I had wanted one, to tell her about my own walk on the Heath with Brad and his change of mind about Vienna. But I wondered also if she had deliberately given me the cue, and that made me decide to say nothing. I just watched her, as she poured tea, and thought how close you can be to someone you love, so close that you dare not go closer lest you break that final shell of separateness that is your own as well as the other’s precious possession. Dusk came into the room; she went over to the fire to poke it into a blaze, and as she did so, carrying the poker and chattering all the time, she looked like a gay sleepwalker, if there ever has been such a person.
Presently she asked me what I thought of Framm.
I said: “He wasn’t a bit funny, as we thought, was he?”
“Darling, nobody is ever funny like that.”
“Did Brad listen to the radio with you?”
“Brad? Why?”
“I saw him come in from the hall just after you.”
“Perhaps he was in the billiard room.” She began to laugh. “I’ll ask him if you like.”
Ask him? I saw the flush on her face deepen as she caught my eye. She added: “I mean—when I see him—or write to him. Or don’t you think I’ll ever see him again?”
I said: “It was all settled he should leave London this evening.”
“I know, but things sometimes happen at the last minute. A most absurd rush, if you ask me. Why couldn’t he have more time? And so close to Christmas…. Maybe he just won’t go—I wouldn’t blame him.”
“Framm’s leaving tonight too, so it seemed a good idea for them to go together.”
“It seemed, it seemed. All so impersonal. People are human…or don’t scientists think so?” She lit a cigarette and offered me her case. Her hand was trembling. “Your father would worry about that.”
“You mean your hand trembling?”
“Darling, we really are in two different worlds today. I was cold in the car, I’m still a bit shivery…. No, I meant he’d say I oughtn’t to encourage you to smoke.”
“He lets me have drinks at parties.”
“But you don’t drink much, I’ve noticed. I’m very glad.”
“I don’t smoke much either.”
“I know. You don’t do anything to excess. And you’re truthful and decent and growing up charmingly. Really, I’m very happy about you, Jane.”
“I don’t always tell all the truth.”
“Who does?”
“I’d like to be able to, though.”
“One of these days you’ll fall in love, then we’ll see.”
“See what?”
“Whether you do that to excess…and also if you tell all the truth about it.”
“I wouldn’t want to fall half in love.”
“Wouldn’t you? It’s pleasanter sometimes.”
“Not if you’re in love with someone who’s in love with you.”
“Oh, don’t be too sure. That doesn’t always make it plain sailing. Or plain telling, either.”
John came in with the week-old New York Times that had just arrived. It reminded me to ask if there were any definite plans for her return to America with my father.
“We’ll spend Christmas here anyway. After that