The Golden Vanity (36 page)

Being what we are, we must each have a separate world.

They tell us we are going through enormous changes, that everything will be different. But it will last our time; it must, for you create and hold your own world around you, so it can end only when you die. And none of us can know what the other's world is or looks like. .. .

"How did you ever happen to hear the songs of Thomas Haynes Bailey?" Thea asked suddenly, for no reason.

"Oh, there was an old songbook that had belonged to my grandmother. And a parlor melodeon. She died before I was born; but Grandfather Brennan kept the things. The Young Ladies Album of Musical Selections."

"Was that the dance hall girl?" Jake asked.

"The dance hall girl? No, the dance hall girl was grandfather's first wife. Gina's grandmother. Georgie Gay. I don't suppose that was her real name; she was the family scandal. Gina was shocked pink when she found out who she'd been named for. My grandmother was a New England schoolteacher. I must have inherited my Puritan conscience from her." "Yes, you did," said Jake, cryptically. He wasn't in a position to argue the matter.

Thea went on with her accounts, Geraldine turned the page of her magazine. Jake continued to strum gently on the piano. Mysie leaned out of the open window with her elbows on the sill. It was November, but a lovely sunny day, steeped in an exquisite melancholy. Probably the last fine day of the year. . . .
The weary winds began to blow and the sea began to rout, And my love and his bonny ship, Turned withershins about
—Mysie thought, I daresay I'll never meet Arthur again. . . . His father and mother were drowned at sea. . . .

She was looking at the rise of land which gave the little house its individual charm. It was lovely in its bareness, with one small evergreen against the brown slope. And as she was absorbed in the scene and thinking of Arthur, she didn't see him drive up to the gate until he stopped and was stepping out of his roadster.

"I thought I'd stop by and make sure you were coming over this afternoon," he said.

"I am glad to assure you," said Mysie, "that we are not. You are witnessing the revolt of the middle classes. Come in."

"I can't stay," said Arthur; whereupon he came in and stayed half an hour. There you are, Mysie thought, smiling at him; and he smiled back. He doesn't know what amuses me, and I've no idea what is in his head. But I was just saying good-by forever to him, when he appeared at the gate; and he couldn't stay, but he walked in while he was saying it. We have to make the gestures, but they practically never coincide with the occasion; we say good-by ten thousand times, every time except the last, because we don't know it's the last, not till afterward.

She walked with him to the gate when he left. Returning to the livingroom, she broke into the middle of a story Jake was narrating to Geraldine. Some misadventure with a motor launch, floating in darkness and mist without direction; the motor had broken down. Icy water and darkness. "Where was this?" Mysie interrupted. She hadn't heard of his encountering any such perils of the deep. And what started him telling it now, chiming with her thoughts? Perhaps the song was what summoned the same images to both of them.

"In South Bay, last winter," Jake replied.

"How were you saved?" Mysie asked.

"By wading ashore," said Jake.

He gazed at Mysie with intense solemnity. "We bumped onto a sandbar," he amplified. "We must have been within a few yards of the beach all the time."

Mysie said: "You damn fool!" And shouted with mirth. She rocked to and fro, held her sides, and slid from her chair to the floor. Jake continued to regard her with deep sadness for about thirty seconds; then the spirit moved him also; they were disarmed, dissolved, destroyed with laughter.

But Mysie thought, we'll never touch our shore again. That landfall is lost forever, down under.

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