“Just a secret.” (Perhaps it wasn’t their jargon.)
“I see.”
I smiled back and walked towards the door. He overtook me, yet somehow without hurry, before I reached it; turning the handle, he put himself with me in the doorway. “Nice of you to come so promptly. I hope you didn’t make a special trip—any time within a few days would have been all right.”
“Oh, I go downtown quite a lot.”
“Your father’s office?”
“Oftener the Village. More in my line than Wall Street.”
“Ah yes, of course. Writers and artists.” He cupped my elbow with his hand. “I’ll have to think over your request for Brad’s address. Might be able to oblige you, though of course we’re not a bureau of missing persons…. Well, thanks again…. Good-by.”
“But he isn’t exactly missing if you know his address, is he?… Good-by, Mr. Small.”
In the elevator going down I thought I had done rather well. Or had I?… Suddenly I realized that he had called him Brad. Was that to test me? But of course I would have admitted readily enough that I used to call him Brad. Nothing significant about that. It was probably their technique—to leave you with a feeling that they know more than you think they know, so that you can chew it all over and work up a fine state of nerves afterwards.
* * * *
I took a taxi uptown and had early dinner alone at the house. There were plenty of friends I could have called up, but I didn’t feel like making a date with anyone, or even going to a movie later on by myself. The weather was probably the last cold spell of the winter; a bitter wind swept in from the north, and ice crackled where there had been any water in the gutters. Even after a couple of cocktails the dining room looked so big and dreary I was glad to have coffee upstairs and turn on all the lights in my personal rooms. It’s a cheerful suite on the fifth floor—bedroom, bathroom, dressing room, and den; I was allotted them as a child, and have never wanted anything bigger, even when the rest of the house was free for me to choose from. The furniture is good solid stuff from either New or Old England; my mother probably bought it at the auctions she liked to frequent. And the heating vents are built in the window sills, so that you lean on them and burn your elbows if you want to look down and see what’s going on in the street. Nothing much, as a rule; those middle sixties between Park and Fifth keep pretty quiet. That evening, as I looked down, I saw the familiar steam curling out of the manholes, and from the look of it as it scurried I knew the temperature had dropped a good deal since I left the downtown office. The low sky held captive the glow of the city; anglewise across Park Avenue I could see the Rockefeller buildings lost in clouds about the thirtieth floor. John came in to pull the blinds; I told him not to bother, I would do it myself later.
“There’s still supposed to be some rule about lights,” he said.
“All right, then, pull them down.” At that stage of the war New York didn’t bother much about the partial blackout, but John’s a stickler about such things. We’ve been real friends from my childhood. My father enticed him from a duke about twenty years ago, since when he’s become naturalized, but he still calls himself English except when English visitors ask him if he is, then he says he’s American or, if further pressed, a Scot.
“Are you going out again, Miss Jane?”
“Not me, I’m off to bed soon with a good book.”
“Not Forever Amber, I hope?” He has a corny humor, unchanged from the time I was young enough to appreciate nothing else.
“No. I take my history straight. Always did, ever since I studied it in London.”
I don’t know what made me bring that up, but I realized it was the second time that day I had mentioned something that I often go months without even thinking about.
He said, as he pulled the blinds and then the curtains: “I’d like to see London again sometime.”
“You probably could, when the war’s over.”
“They say it’s considerably changed.”
“I’ll bet our part hasn’t. Hampstead Heath and round about there.”
“Several bombs fell near the house, I’ve been told,” he said thoughtfully. It was still “the house” to us both. “Can I get you anything?”
“No thanks—I’ll be asleep very soon, I’m terribly tired. Good-night, John.”
After he had gone I stood at the window, pulling aside the blinds just enough to see that it had begun to snow. The two great cities, each with its own flavor, hold you like rival suitors, perversely when you are with the other; and that night, as I watched the pavement whitening, I thought of those other pavements that were called roadways, and the subways tubes, and the whole long list of equivalents Brad and I once compiled as we tramped across Hampstead Heath on a day when other things were in our minds.
* * * *
I first met him at Professor Byfleet’s house in Chelsea, but I didn’t catch his name when we were introduced, or perhaps we weren’t—the English are apt to be slack about that sort of thing, they are civil but not solicitous to strangers, and when you visit one of their houses for the first time it’s hard not to feel you are among a family of initiates, or else a dues-paying but nonvoting member of a very closed-shop union.
This dinner at the Byfleets’ wasn’t anything important, at least by comparison with many we went to; Byfleet was an anthropologist who wanted my father to finance an expedition to New Guinea, so he doubtless thought he’d have us meet his friends. I suppose they’d all been told we were rich Americans, with the blow softened by adding that my mother was English. My father never did finance the expedition, anyhow.
As I said, I don’t remember actually meeting Brad, but when we got to the table I noticed him some way further down on the other side, next to my mother. Now and again I glanced at him, and with a rather odd feeling that I had seen him somewhere before, though I couldn’t be sure; he was good-looking in a restrained way, with dark, deep-sunken eyes, a long straight nose, and a chin that was firm without being aggressive. There was also a mood of gravity over him, tempered by a sort of intermittent nervousness as if he were waiting for a chance to say something, not because he wanted to, or had anything to say, but because he thought everyone must be wondering why up to halfway through dinner he hadn’t spoken a word. I hoped my mother would soon take pity on him, but his other partner moved first, and I could see that the more she tried to draw him out the more he drew himself in. She was one of those voluble unkempt Englishwomen who invade a conversation rather than take part in it, and have a conspiratorial smile for the maid or butler, just to show they’ve been to the house before.
I missed what was happening across the table for a while, for my own neighbor engaged me, a hearty professor of biology who mentioned, apropos of the veal cutlets, that man had only scratched the surface of his possible gastronomic repertoire, that practically the entire insect world was an untapped storehouse of taste novelties, that dried locusts made an excellent sandwich, that there were many edible caterpillars fancied by the Chinese, and that native tribes in the Andean foothills pick lice from each other’s heads and eat them with gusto. He seemed surprised when I wasn’t upset, and after I had accepted another cutlet he confessed that he often opened up like that to jeunes filles whom he found himself next to at dinners, because in the event that they were bores their distress at least made them momentarily entertaining; but he could see I was not a bore, so perhaps I would now talk about something serious. I said I could never talk seriously to any man with one of those bristly little toothbrush mustaches, and was it true that in certain crack regiments of the British Army men were compelled to have them? He answered, Good God, how should he know, better ask our host, who was a recognized authority on totem and taboo. After that we got along fairly well, and presently he paid me what many Englishmen think is the supreme compliment; he said he wouldn’t have