“It probably is.” Her voice sounded dry and uninterested.
“It looks like an old-fashioned monoplane to me.”
“Oh, I guess he can fly anything. He was picked to make some flight to Brazil that they called off. It was in the papers before you came—”
She broke off because of a sudden change of the situation in the sky. After passing over them the plane had begun to circle back, and in a moment its flight resolved itself into a slowly graduated spiral which was undoubtedly intended to center over the road a quarter of a mile ahead of them.
“What’s he trying to do?” exclaimed Tom. “Drop flowers on us?”
She didn’t answer. During what must have been less than a minute of time, the car and plane approached the same spot. Tom stopped the car.
“If this is one of his tricks, let’s get out.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t—”
“But look!”
The plane had come out of its dive, straightened out and was headed straight for them. Tom caught at Tudy’s hand, trying to pull her from the car, but he had misjudged the time and the plane was already upon them, with a roaring din—then suddenly it was over them and away.
“The fool!” Tom cried.
“He’s a wonderful flier.” Her face was still and calm. “He might have killed himself.”
Tom got back in the car and sat looking at her for a moment. Then he turned the car around and started back the way they had come.
For a long time they drove in silence. Then she asked:
“What are you going to do—send me home to America?”
The simplicity of her question confused him; it was impossible to punish her for an episode that was no fault of her own, yet he had intended just that when he turned the car around.
“What do you want to do?” he asked, stalling.
Her face had that fatalistic helplessness that he had seen on it one day ten months before when he broke the news to her that her husband had left nothing. And the same wave of protective love that had swept over him then swept over him again now. In the same moment he realized that the tragedy of her marriage—which had come so quickly she scarcely knew what had happened—had not really matured her. And by protecting her from its consequences he had aided the retardation.
“You’re just a girl,” he said aloud. “I suppose it’s my fault.”
In that case his responsibility was not over, and deep in his heart he knew that in spite of her inopportune coquetry so obvious under her thin denials, he did not want it to be over. On the contrary he seized upon it as a reason for holding her to him.
“You’re making a little trip,” he said as they neared town. “But not to America. I want you to go up to Paris for three or four days and shop a little. Meanwhile I’ll go down to Marseilles and meet Mother.”
Tudy cheered up at the suggestion.
“I’ll get my graduation dress and my trousseau at the same time.”
“All right, but I want you to leave this afternoon. So pack your bags right away.”
An hour later they stood together in the station.
“I miss my exam tomorrow,” she said.
“But it’ll give you a chance to come down to earth.”
He hated the phrase even as it left his lips: To come down to earth—was that an appealing prospect to hold out to any woman?
“Goodbye, dearest, dearest Tom.”
As the train started off he ran beside it a moment, throwing into her window a packet of two bright handkerchiefs she had liked in a bazaar.
“Thanks—oh, thanks.”
It was a long platform—when he came out at its end into the sunlight he stopped. There was his heart in motion with the train; he could feel the rip when the shadow of the last car broke from under the station roof.
She wrote immediately from Paris.
Oh, I miss you so, Tom. And I miss Provence, too. (Then a lot of erasing.) I miss everything that I’ve grown so fond of this last year. But I don’t miss any person but you!
There are no Americans in the streets—maybe we belong at home now and always did. They have a life they never take us into. They plan their lives so differently. But our American lives are so strange that we can never figure things out ahead. Like the hurricanes in Florida and the tornadoes and floods. All of a sudden things happen to us and we hardly know what hit us.
But I guess we must like that sort of thing or our ancestors wouldn’t have come to America. Does this make sense? There is a man knocking on the door with a package. More later.
Later:
Darling, it is my wedding dress and I cried on it just a little in the corner where I can wash it out. And darling, it makes me think of my other wedding dress and of how kind you have been to me and how I love you.
It is blue—oh, the frailest blue. I’m getting afraid I won’t be able to get the tears out of the corner.
Later:
I did—and it is so lovely, hanging now in the closet with the door open. It’s now eight o’clock—you know l’heure bleu—when everything is really blue—and I’m going to walk up to the Opera along the Avenue de l’Opera and then back to the hotel.
Before I go to sleep I’ll think of you and thank you for the dress and the lovely year and the new life you’re giving me.
Your devoted, your loving,
TUDY.
P.S. I still think I should have stayed and gone with you to meet your mother in Marseilles. She—
Tom broke off and went back to the signature: “Your devoted, your loving.” Which was she? He read back over the letter pausing at any erasure, for an erasure often means an evasion, a second thought. And a love letter should come like a fresh stream from the heart, with no leaf on its current.
Then a second the next morning:
I’m so glad for your telegram—this will reach you just before you start down to Marseilles. Give your mother my dearest love and tell her how much I hate missing her and how I wish I could welcome her to Provence. (There were two lines crossed out and rewritten.) I will be starting back day after tomorrow. How funny it is to be buying things, when I never had any money like this to spend before—$225.00—that’s what it was, after I’d figured the hotel bill and even thought of keeping enough cash in hand so I won’t arrive absolutely penniless.
I’ve bought two presents, I hope you won’t mind, one for your mother and one for somebody else and that’s you. And don’t think I’ve stinted myself and that I won’t be a pretty bride for you! In fact I haven’t waited until my wedding day to find out. I’ve dressed all up half a dozen times and stood in front of the mirror.
I’ll be glad when it’s over. Won’t you, darling? I mean I’ll be glad when it’s begun—won’t you, darling?
Meanwhile, on the morning after she left, Tom had run into Riccard in the street. He nodded to him coldly, still angry about the airplane stunt, but Riccard seemed so unconscious of any guilt, seemed to think of it merely as a trick as innocuous as the bulb under the plate, that Tom waived the matter and stood talking with him a while under the freckled poplar shadows.
“So you decided not to go,” he remarked.
“Oh, I shall go, but not until tomorrow after all. And how is Madame—I mean Tudy?”
“She’s gone up to Paris to do some shopping.”
He felt a malicious satisfaction in seeing Riccard’s face fall.
“Where does she stay there? I would like to send her a telegram of goodbye.”
No, you don’t, Tom thought. Aloud he lied:
“I’m not sure—the hotel where she was going to stay is full.”
“When does she come back?”
“She gets here day after tomorrow morning. I’m going to meet her with the car at Avignon.”
“I see.” Riccard hesitated for a moment. “I hope you will be very happy,” he said.
His face was sad and bright at once; he was a gallant and charming young man, and Tom was sorry for a moment that they had not met under other circumstances.
But next day, driving to Marseilles, a very different idea came to him. Suppose instead of going to the air base at Toulon today, Riccard should go to Paris. There were not an infinite number of good hotels and in a morning’s search he might find out which was Tudy’s. And in the inevitable emotion of a “last meeting,” who could tell what might happen.
The worry so possessed him that when he reached Marseilles he put in a telephone call for the Naval Aviation Depot at Toulon.
“I’m calling Lieutenant Riccard,” he said.
“I do not understand.”
“Lieutenant Riccard.”
“This is not Lieutenant Riccard, surely?”
“No. I want to speak to Lieutenant Riccard.”
“Ah.”
“Is he there?”
“Riccard—wait till I look in the orderly room book… Yes… he is here—or at least he was here.”
Tom’s heart turned over as he waited.
“He is here,” said the voice. “He is in the mess room. One minute.”
Tom put the receiver very gently on the hook. His first instinct was relief—Riccard could not make it now; then he felt ashamed of his suspicions. Strolling that morning around a seaport where so many graver things had happened, he thought again of Tudy in a key above jealousy. He knew, though, that love should be a simpler, kinder thing; but every man loves out of something in himself that cannot be changed, and if
