“Do you know how you make me feel?” she demanded. “Like one day in London during a caterpillar plague when a hot furry thing dropped in my mouth.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh please wake up,” she begged. “I want to see you. I can’t explain things on the phone. It was no fun for me either, you understand.”
“I’m very busy. There’s a sneak preview in Glendale tonight.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“George Boxley, the English writer, is going with me.” He surprised himself. “Do you want to come along?”
“How could we talk?”
She considered. “Why don’t you call for me afterwards,” she suggested. “We could ride around.”
Miss Doolan on the huge Dictograph was trying to cut in a shooting director—the only interruption ever permitted. He flipped the button and called “wait” impatiently into the machine.
“About eleven?” Kathleen was saying confidently. The idea of “Riding around” seemed so unwise that if he could have thought of the words to refuse her he would have spoken them but he did not want to be the caterpillar. Suddenly he had no attitude left except the sense that the day, at least, was complete. It had an evening—a beginning, a middle and an end.
He rapped on the screen door, heard her call from inside, and stood waiting where the level fell away. From below came the whir of a lawn mower—a man was cutting his grass at midnight. The moon was so bright that Stahr could see him plainly a hundred feet off and down as he stopped and rested on the handle before pushing it back across his garden. There was a midsummer restlessness abroad—early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer one tried anxiously to live in the present—or, if there was no present, to invent one.
She came at last. She was all different and delighted. She wore a suit with a skirt that she kept hitching up as they walked down to the car with a brave gay, stimulating reckless air of “Tighten up your belt, baby. Let’s get going—to any pole.” Stahr had brought his limousine with the chauffeur, and the intimacy of the four walls whisking them along a new curve in the dark took away any strangeness at once. In its way the little trip they made was one of the best times he had ever had in life. It was certainly one of the times when, if he knew he was going to die, it was not tonight.
She told him her story. She sat beside him cool and gleaming for a while, spinning on excitedly, carrying him to far places with her, meeting and knowing the people she had known. The story was vague at first. “This Man” was the one she had loved and lived with. “This American” was the one who had rescued her when she was sinking into a quicksand.
“Who is he—the American?”
Oh, names—what did they matter? No one important like Stahr, not rich. He had lived in London and now they would live out here. She was going to be a good wife, a real person. He was getting a divorce—not just on account of her—but that was the delay.
“But the first man?” asked Stahr. “How did you get into that?”
Oh, that was a blessing at first. From sixteen to twenty-one the thing was to eat. The day her stepmother presented her at Court they had one shilling to eat with so as not to feel faint. Sixpence apiece but the stepmother watched while she ate. After a few months the stepmother died and she would have sold out for that shilling but she was too weak to go into the streets. London can be harsh—oh quite.
Was there nobody?
There were friends in Ireland who sent butter. There was a soup kitchen. There was a visit to an uncle who made advances to her when she had a full stomach, and she held out and got fifty pounds out of him for not telling his wife.
“Couldn’t you work?” Stahr asked.
“I worked. I sold cars. Once I sold a car.”
“But couldn’t you get a regular job?”
“It’s hard—it’s different. There was a feeling that people like me forced other people out of jobs. A woman struck me when I tried to get a job as chambermaid in a hotel.”
“But you were presented at Court?”
“That was my stepmother who did that—on an off chance. I was nobody. My father was shot by the Black and Tans in twenty-two when I was a child. He wrote a book called ’Last Blessing.’ Did you ever read it?”
“I don’t read.”
“I wish you’d buy it for the movies. It’s a good little book. I still get a royalty from it—ten shillings a year.”
Then she met “The Man” and they travelled the world around. She had been to all the places that Stahr made movies of, and lived in cities whose names he had never heard. Then The Man went to seed, drinking and sleeping with the housemaids and trying to force her off on his friends. They all tried to make her stick with him. They said she had saved him and should cleave to him longer now, indefinitely, to the end. It was her duty. They brought enormous pressure to bear. But she had met The American, and so finally she ran away.
“You should have run away before.”
“Well, you see it was difficult.” She hesitated, and plunged. “You see I ran away from a king.”
His moralities somehow collapsed—she had managed to top him. A confusion of thoughts raced through his head—one of them a faint old credo that all royalty was diseased.
“It wasn’t the King of England,” she said. “My king was out of job as he used to say. There are lots of kings in London.” She laughed—then added almost defiantly, “He was very attractive until he began drinking and raising hell.”
“What was he king of?”
She told him—and Stahr visualized the face out of old newsreels.
“He was a very learned man,” she said. “He could have taught all sorts of subjects. But he wasn’t much like a king. Not nearly as much as you. None of them were.”
This time Stahr laughed.
“They were the standard article,” he said.
“You know what I mean. They all felt old fashioned. Most of them tried so hard to keep up with things. They were always advised to keep up with things. One was a Syndicalist for instance. And one used to carry around a couple of clippings about a tennis tournament when he was in the semi-finals. I saw those clippings a dozen times.”
They rode through Griffith Park and out past the dark studios of Burbank, past the airports and along the way to Pasadena past the neon signs of roadside cabarets. Up in his head he wanted her but it was late and just the ride was an overwhelming joy. They held hands and once she came close in to his arms saying, “Oh you’re so nice. I do like to be with you.” But her mind was divided—this was not his night as the Sunday afternoon had been his. She was absorbed in herself, stung into excitement by telling of her own adventures; he could not help wondering if he was getting the story she had saved up for The American.
“How long have you known The American?” he asked.
“Oh I knew him for several months. We used to meet. We understand each other. He used to say ’It looks like a cinch from now on.’”
“Then why did you call me up?”
She hesitated.
“I wanted to see you once more. Then too—he was supposed to arrive today but last night he wired that he’d be another week. I wanted to talk to a friend—after all you are my friend.”
He wanted her very much now but one part of his mind was cold and kept saying: she wants to see if I’m in love with her, if I want to marry her. Then she’d consider whether or not to throw this man over. She won’t consider it till I’ve committed myself. “Are you in love with The American?” he asked. “Oh yes. It’s absolutely arranged. He saved my life and my reason. He’s moving half way around the world for me. I insisted on that.”
“But are you in love with him?” “Oh yes, I’m in love with him.”
The “Oh yes” told him she was not—told him to speak for himself—that she would see. He took her in his arms and kissed her deliberately on the mouth and held her for a long time. It was so warm.
“Not tonight,” she whispered.
“All right.”
They passed over suicide bridge with the high new wire.
“I know what it is,” she said, “but how stupid. English people don’t kill themselves when they don’t get what they want.”
They turned around in the driveway of a hotel and started back. It was a dark night with no moon. The wave of desire had passed and neither spoke for a while. Her talk of kings had carried him oddly back in flashes to the pearly White Way of Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania when he was fifteen. There was a restaurant with lobsters in the window and green weeds and bright light on a shell cavern and behind a red curtain the terribly strange brooding mystery of people and violin music. That was just before he left for New York. This girl reminded him of the fresh iced fish and lobsters in the window. She was Beautiful Doll. Minna had never been
