Tomorrow Is Forever (4 page)

She went down into the water again and came up, pausing an instant to shake the drops out of her eyes before she struck out for the edge of the pool. Her face half submerged, she swam quickly. As her fingertips touched the edge she lifted her head and laughed from sheer joy of being healthy. She was not looking at anything when she put out her hand to raise herself out of the water, and was astonished and for an instant embarrassed to feel her fingertips closing on somebody's leg.

Elizabeth started back, about to make an apology. But before she could speak the young man had grasped her arms and lifted her to the edge of the pool by him, and he was begging her, “There now, do it again!”

“What?” she exclaimed, moving back a step, but he insisted.

“I've been watching you. Honestly, that's the most beautiful swan dive I ever saw—please do it again!”

She looked up at him, and in that first moment she liked him because he looked just the way she felt—young, joyous, alive with an extraordinary vitality. He was instantly so vivid to her that Elizabeth exclaimed, “Do you often come here? Why haven't I met you before?”

“I don't know. I was wondering the same thing myself. I come here a lot Saturdays and Sundays, when I'm not working. My name is Arthur Kittredge. Will you let me see you do that dive just once more?”

“Of course,” she said, and ran back to the ladder leading up to the high diving board. At the top she looked down at Arthur. He lay stretched out, his eyes on her. As she saw him he smiled, raising his hand in a little gesture of praise, and it was as though everybody else in the pool had become invisible. Elizabeth ran forward and arched her body into the air, and as her hands touched the water she knew it had been the most graceful dive she had ever made. “That's what it does for you,” she thought under the water, “to have somebody like that to dive
for
.”

Arthur sprang into the pool to meet her. Though he was a big young man who gave an impression of great physical strength, he moved with the grace of one long accustomed to rhythmic exercise. They swam up and down together, trying to ride a rubber swan and falling off with shouts of laughter, till Elizabeth lost her cap and Arthur had to dive to find it for her, though by that time her hair was down her back, as soaked as though she had never worn any cap at all. “Now I look simply awful,” she said, treading water while she wrung out her hair, but he retorted, “You do not, you look like a mermaid, tawny skin and sea-green eyes and your hair floating.” They came out to sit in the sun, and while she shook out her hair to dry they talked without any sense of strangeness.

Arthur told her he was a research chemist. He was employed by an oil company to conduct laboratory investigations leading to additional practical uses for petroleum, and he had published several pamphlets describing his work. To Elizabeth the profession sounded erudite and cloistered, not at all the sort to engross a beautiful young athlete. But chemistry, he told her, was the most exciting subject on earth, though physics ran it a close second, or maybe he should give that place to biology—though it didn't matter, they were all divisions of the same subject, which was the fascinating way the various bodies of creation were made. “Even a smattering of it,” he said, “makes you see things you never saw before, you feel as if you've been walking around blind.” Pulling a leaf off the nearest plant, he called her attention to how glossy it was on top and how velvety beneath, and told her the tiny tufts on the velvet side were clusters of little nostrils through which the leaf breathed the air.

She was interested, so he went on, telling her how the leaf used air and water and the energy from the sun to make food for the plant. “Then animals eat the plants,” he said, “and we eat the animals and the plants both, so we stay alive. But we don't know how to use the sun; nobody understands how that's accomplished, only the green leaves can do it. It's the fundamental life-process of the world. Our bodies can't do it. Only the green leaves know how, and if they should forget we'd die, all the life on earth would end, because we've never learned their secret.”

Elizabeth was delighted. “But that's wonderful!” she cried. “Why didn't anybody ever tell me that before? Now whenever I walk across the grass or look at a tree, I'll remember it. What a lot you know.”

“Oh no I don't,” he assured her laughing. “I don't know anything, but I like finding out.”

As they talked she discovered that his outstanding characteristic was a profound curiosity about how the universe and its inhabitants were put together. Everything from babies to planets interested him. He wanted to take them all apart and see what made them behave as they did. He told Elizabeth that before choosing his specialty he had hesitated before the attractions of becoming a chemist, a surgeon, a biologist, an astronomer—not because he did not know what he liked, but because he liked so many fields of study that he could not decide which one would be most interesting to enter. It was lucky he had his living to make, he remarked, as otherwise he might have turned into one of those scholarly recluses, a suggestion that provoked her mirth, at the notion that anybody who loved life as much as he evidently did should imagine it possible for himself to withdraw from it. “No, I guess not,” he admitted, laughing too. “I love people. I can't imagine anybody's actually
liking
to live alone, can you?”

“I don't imagine you've ever been alone very much, have you?” she asked.

“Why no, I haven't. I always meet somebody.”

“Have you been in Tulsa long?” asked Elizabeth.

“About three years.”

“Where did you live before that?”

“Chicago.”

Elizabeth began to laugh again and said, “That's where you were born, isn't it?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“Because people born in Chicago always call it
Chicawgo
,
and everybody from other places call it
Chicahgo.
Why is that?”

“Chicawgo,” he said thoughtfully, and laughed at himself. “Why, I do. What do you call it?”

“Chicahgo,” said Elizabeth.

“Chicawgo,” repeated Arthur. “I can't seem to say it any other way. It's like a birth certificate, isn't it?”

She nodded.

“Did you ever hear anybody from England say it?” Arthur asked.

“No, what do they say?”

“Tchicago,” said Arthur. “The Ch like in church. You can tell them a thousand times that it's like the Ch in machine, but they can't seem to change.”

“Any more than you can.”

“Chicawgo,” Arthur repeated. “Chicawgo,” as though trying to change, and shook his head in amusement. “No, I can't. Shall we go swimming again?”

“Yes, let's.” She rolled up her damp hair and tucked it under her cap. They caught hands and dived in together.

Elizabeth thought she had never had such a good time. Arthur was a magnificent swimmer. He moved with such beautiful control that when they came out of the water again she exclaimed, “I bet you're a wonderful dancer.”

“Want to find out?” he asked instantly. “This evening?”

“Good heavens!” she protested. “I wasn't hinting for a date.”

“Well, I am,” Arthur retorted. “Only I'm not hinting.”

Elizabeth had a date for that evening, but the young man was not nearly as attractive as Arthur so she reflected she could get out of it somehow. “All right,” she said.

“I'll come for you,” said Arthur, “if you'll give me the address. And by the way—”

“Yes?”

“What's your name?”

“Good Lord! Didn't I tell you?”

“No. It doesn't matter, except that they might think it a bit odd if I just rang the bell and said, ‘I'm calling for the green-eyed sunburnt young woman who lives here, please.'”

“You'll say nothing of the sort. My name is Elizabeth McPherson. And something else—my aunt, the one I live with, thinks a great deal of being proper, so you'd better tell me just where you work and all that and we'll see if we don't know some of the same people, so she won't guess I picked up a perfect stranger.”

He agreed and they sat down on the grass again. Like herself he had no immediate family, he told her. His parents had died long ago, and he had worked his way through the University of what he could still call nothing else but Chicawgo. After a few moments' conversation they found that Elizabeth's uncle, who was also in the oil business, knew several members of the company where Arthur was employed, so they justified their acquaintance by that. They went dancing that night, and as the next day was Sunday they went swimming again. A week later Elizabeth was refusing to undertake the projected trip to Canada. A month later she was refusing to go back to college. In September they were married.

There was no use in anybody's saying eighteen was too young to be married, she hadn't known him long enough, she would never have another chance to go to college, Arthur couldn't support her in the style to which she was accustomed, or giving any of the other sensible advice older people like to give young girls in love. She and Arthur wanted each other and nobody could keep them apart. Elizabeth found there was still some of her father's property left, so with what had been intended for the rest of her expensive schooling they furnished their home. That it was a very modest little place troubled them not at all. It was a place of peace and ecstasy. Elizabeth was tremulous with joy at finding out what it was like to be loved. She had always had plenty of friends, her masculine acquaintances had let her know she was desirable, and her aunt and uncle had done their dutiful best to be affectionate, but nobody had ever loved her. Arthur loved her.

She was not very good at expressing it. But in the evenings while he read, or worked on the pamphlets he wrote describing his researches for the benefit of other oil chemists, she would sit with the mending and look up to watch the line of light down his profile, and every now and then Arthur would glance up and smile at her and she would be unutterably happy. Sometimes when they went out together and did something quite ordinary like seeing a movie or playing tennis, she would say, “I never knew any two people could have as much fun together as we do,” and he would grin at her and answer, “It's great finding out, isn't it?” That was all they really needed to say to each other about it. But Arthur had more talent for words than she had, and now and then he would make it articulate.

One night when she was nearly asleep he turned over and said, “Elizabeth, if you're still awake, I was just thinking about us, and how I get such a thrill every time I see you, and I remembered an old myth I read in the university library one day.”

“Tell me,” said Elizabeth. She moved closer to him and he slipped his arm around her as he went on.

“I don't know who thought it up, the Persians or Greeks or somebody. They said that in the beginning everybody in the world was happy. Then they sinned, and to punish them the gods decreed that every soul should be split in half. Since then each of us is born incomplete, and has to wander over the earth looking for the other half of himself, and nobody can be happy unless he finds it. But if you're very lucky you find it, and unite with the one who's really the other half of you, and then you're right with the universe because you're complete.”

She drew a long joyful breath. “Arthur, how beautiful! And how right—I think I felt like that the first time I saw you.”

“So did I. You came down off the diving board and I pulled you out of the water, and you were there, it was right. Funny to think back now—there was so much I wanted to do, so much I wanted to learn, about oil and plants and people and stars—I still want to do everything like that as much as ever, but it's so different now. You've no idea how different it is.”

“Yes I have. Everything is different now that we're together. I do love you so!” she said.

Arthur kissed her shoulder in the dark.

They both wanted to have children. Elizabeth loved babies. Ever since she was a little girl playing with her dolls she had looked forward to the time when she could have a real baby of her own. They talked about it eagerly. But Arthur, who had a deep sense of protection, thought they should wait a year or two. Elizabeth was so young. Besides, they had been married in the fall of 1916, and by spring it was evident that the United States was about to enter the war. “Suppose I should be called into the army,” he said, “and have to leave you here alone.”

Elizabeth shivered. Now that she had found Arthur, the idea of living without him was more than she could bear to contemplate. “The war won't last much longer,” she said. “I'm sure it won't. We don't have to have children right now—we've got years and years before us, but you do want them, don't you?”

Arthur grinned at her with tender eagerness. “You're mighty right I do.”

Then the United States was in the war, and there was no keeping Arthur back from it. Arthur loved people. The people of France and Belgium and Great Britain, cloudy masses to Elizabeth because she had never seen them except on one or two schoolgirl tours of Europe, were as real to Arthur as the people of Tulsa, though he had never been to Europe at all. While she had been seeing the war in terms of newspaper accounts he was seeing it as human beings starving and bleeding before a force of evil that decent men must stop. Arthur had registered for the draft, though he had been deferred because he was married; but he wanted to go. Terrified, Elizabeth pled with him.

“Arthur, have mercy on me! Suppose I wanted to go out to France or Flanders—don't you understand?”

He doubled up his fists. “Yes, I understand.”

“Have you thought about it? I mean
thought
about it?”

“A lot of times. While you were asleep. I'd look at you in the dark. You looked so trusting.”