“But you can only live once,” he protested—knowing, nevertheless, that what she said was, for him, right. His youth had been pointed to make him understand that exposition of superiority. He knew what it was to be the best, at home, at school, at Harvard. In his senior year he had known men to dodge behind a building and wait in order to walk with him across the Harvard Yard, not to be seen with him out of mere poor snobbishness, but to get something intangible, something he carried within him of the less obvious, less articulate experience of the race.
Several days later he went to see Mae and met her coming out of the flat. They sat on the stairs in the half darkness.
“Just think of these stairs,” he said huskily. “Think how many times you’ve kissed me on these stairs. At night when I’ve brought you home. On every landing. Last month when we walked up and down together five times before we could say good night.”
“I hate these stairs. I wish I never had to go up them any more.”
“Oh, Mae, what are we going to do?”
She didn’t answer for a moment. “I’ve been thinking a lot these last three days,” she said. “I don’t think it’s fair to myself to go on like this—or to Al.”
“To Al,” he said startled. “Have you been seeing Al?”
“We had a long talk last night.”
“All” he repeated incredulously.
“He wants to get married. He isn’t mad any more.”
Bill tried suddenly to face the situation he had been dodging for two months, but the situation, with practiced facility, slid around the corner. He moved up a step till he was beside Mae, and put his arm around her.
“Oh, let’s get married!” she cried desperately. “You can. If you want to, you can.”
“I do want to.”
“Then why can’t we?”
“We can, but not yet.”
“Oh, God, you’ve said that before.”
For a tragic week they quarreled and came together over the bodies of unresolved arguments and irreconcilable facts. They parted finally on a trivial question as to whether he had once kept her waiting half an hour.
Bill went to Europe on the first possible boat and enlisted in an ambulance unit. When America went into the war he transferred to the aviation and Mae’s pale face and burning lips faded off, faded out, against the wild dark background of the war.
III
In 1919 Bill fell romantically in love with a girl of his own set. He met her on the Lido and wooed her on golf courses and in fashionable speak-easies and in cars parked at night, loving her much more from the first than he had ever loved Mae. She was a better person, prettier and more intelligent and with a kindlier heart. She loved him; they had much the same tastes and more than ample money.
There was a child, after a while there were four children, then only three again. Bill grew a little stout after thirty, as athletes will. He was always going to take up something strenuous and get into real condition. He worked hard and drank a little too freely every weekend. Later he inherited the country house and lived there in the summer.
When he and Stella had been married eight years they felt safe for each other, safe from the catastrophes that had overtaken the majority of their friends. To Stella this brought relief; Bill, once he had accepted the idea of their safety, was conscious of a certain discontent, a sort of chemical restlessness. With a feeling of disloyalty to Stella, he shyly sounded his friends on the subject and found that in men of his age the symptoms were almost universal. Some blamed it on the war: “There’ll never be anything like the war.”
It was not variety of woman that he wanted. The mere idea appalled him. There were always women around. If he took a fancy to someone Stella invited her for a week-end, and men who liked Stella fraternally, or even somewhat sentimentally, were as often in the house. But the feeling persisted and grew stronger. Sometimes it would steal over him at dinner—a vast nostalgia—and the people at table would fade out and odd memories of his youth would come back to him. Sometimes a familiar taste or a smell would give him this sensation. Chiefly it had to do with the summer night.
One evening, walking down the lawn with Stella after dinner, the feeling seemed so close that he could almost grasp it. It was in the rustle of the pines, in the wind, in the gardener’s radio down behind the tennis court.
“Tomorrow,” Stella said; “there’ll be a full moon.”
She had stopped in a broad path of moonlight and was looking at him. Her hair was pale and lovely in the gentle light. She regarded him for a moment oddly, and he took a step forward as if to put his arms around her; then he stopped, unresponsive and dissatisfied. Stella’s expression changed slightly and they walked on.
“That’s too bad,” he said suddenly. “Because tomorrow I’ve got to go away.”
“Where?”
“To New York. Meeting of the trustees of school. Now that the kids are entered I feel I should.”
“You’ll be back Sunday?”
“Unless something comes up and I telephone.”
“Ad Haughton’s coming Sunday, and maybe the Ameses.”
“I’m glad you won’t be alone.”
Suddenly Bill had remembered the boat floating down the river and Mae Purley on the deck under the summer moon. The image became a symbol of his youth, his introduction to life. Not only did he remember the deep excitement of that night but felt it again, her face against his, the rush of air about them as they stood by the lifeboat and the feel of its canvas cover to his hand.
When his car dropped him at Wheatly Village next afternoon he experienced a sensation of fright. Eleven years—she might be dead; quite possibly she had moved away. Any moment he might pass her on the street, a tired, already faded woman pushing a baby carriage and leading an extra child.
“I’m looking for a Miss Mae Purley,” he said to a taxi driver. “It might be Fitzpatrick now.”
“Fitzpatrick up at the works?”
Inquiries within the station established the fact that Mae Purley was indeed Mrs. Fitzpatrick. They lived just outside of town.
Ten minutes later the taxi stopped before a white Colonial house.
“They made it over from a barn,” volunteered the taxi man. “There was a picture of it in one of them magazines.”
Bill saw that someone was regarding him from behind the screen door. It was Mae. The door opened slowly and she stood in the hall, unchanged, slender as of old. Instinctively he raised his arms and then, as he took another step forward, instinctively he lowered them.
“Mae.”
“Bill.”
She was there. For a moment he possessed her, her frailty, her thin smoldering beauty; then he had lost her again. He could no more have embraced her than he could have embraced a stranger.
On the sun porch they stared at each other. “You haven’t changed,” they said together.
It was gone from her. Words, casual, trivial, and insincere, poured from her mouth as if to fill the sudden vacancy in his heart:
“Imagine seeing you—know you anywhere—thought you’d forgotten me—talking about you only the other night.”
Suddenly he was without any inspiration. His mind became an utter blank, and try as he might, he could summon up no attitude to fill it.
“It’s a nice place you have here,” he said stupidly.
“We like it. You’d never guess it, but we made it out of an old barn.”
“The taxi driver told me.”
“——stood here for a hundred years empty—got it for almost nothing—pictures of it before and after in Home and Country Side.”
Without warning his mind went blank again. What was the matter? Was he sick? He had even forgotten why he was here.
He knew only that he was smiling benevolently and that he must hang on to that smile, for if it passed he could never re-create it. What did it mean when one’s mind went blank? He must see a doctor tomorrow.
“——since Al’s done so well. Of course Mr. Kohlsatt leans on him, so he don’t get away much. I get away to New York sometimes. Sometimes we both get away together.”
“Well, you certainly have a nice place here,” he said desperately. He must see a doctor in the morning. Doctor Flynn or Doctor Keyes or Doctor Given who was at Harvard with him. Or perhaps that specialist who was recommended to him by that woman at the Ameses’; or Doctor Gross or Doctor Studeford or Doctor de Martel——
“——I never touch it, but Al always keeps something in the house. Al’s gone to Boston, but I think I can find the key.”
——or Doctor Ramsay or old Doctor Ogden, who had brought him into the world. He hadn’t realized that he knew so many doctors. He must make a list.
“——you’re just exactly the same.”
Suddenly Bill put both hands on his stomach, gave a short coarse laugh and said “Not here.” His own act startled and surprised him, but it dissipated the blankness for a moment and he began to gather up the pieces of his afternoon. From her chatter he discovered her to be under the impression that in some vague and sentimental past she had thrown him over. Perhaps she was right. Who was she anyhow— this hard, commonplace article wearing Mae’s body
