Tomorrow Is Forever (9 page)

“For Cherry, but I'm afraid there's another prospect for you.”

“For me? What?” he asked in alarm.

Elizabeth gave him an urgent smile. It was a relief to turn her attention to her ordinary day-by-day affairs, to observe her children as normal healthy youngsters hungry for their dinner, to reach for a cigarette and have both Dick and Pudge strike matches for her. She accepted the light from Pudge, and smiled across it at Dick as he blew out the match he had struck.

“Dick, our guest tomorrow night is a Mr. Kessler, from Germany. I've never met him, but he's working on the picture.”

“Another refugee?” inquired Cherry.

“Yes, but you'll both please remember not to call him that. Simply say ‘German,' if you have to call him anything.”

“I get it,” said Dick, “but what have I got to do about him?”

“He has a daughter—”

“Oh my Lord!”

“I'm sorry, Dick,” Elizabeth continued with sympathy. “But the boss wants to talk pictures with Mr. Kessler after dinner, and you'll have to take care of the girl.”

Cherry and the two guests were already beginning to laugh at Dick's woebegone face. Dick groaned.

“Can she talk?”

“I don't know, Dick, but there's a musical show downtown—”

“Mother, please! Honestly, I—what does she look like?”

Elizabeth started to say “I've never seen her,” when Cherry put in,

“I bet I know. Two yellow braids around her head—”

The others joined,

“Maybe you could play some Wagner records for her.”

“What about
Faust
?”

“Silly,
Faust
is sung in French.”

“I bet she's fat and has apple-cheeks.”

“She's probably intellectual. Lots of refugees are.”

“Talk to her about food. They all like to eat.”

“I can't talk to her about anything,” stormed Dick. “Mother, I've got a date! Why can't the boss tell Mr. Thingum to leave his daughter at home? Why do I have to—and shut up, all of you. I think you're being unsympathetic and awful.”

“Dick, please be a good sport,” Elizabeth urged. “This doesn't happen often.”

“It does too. You remember that horrible girl from New York who was all teeth that I had to take out when her family had dinner here? But this is worse. A foreigner who can't even talk except to say glub-glub!”

“How do you know she can't talk? Her father speaks English.”

Dick groaned.

“Be nice about it, Dick,” pled Elizabeth. “She'll probably have a very good time if you'll let her. Remember she's in a strange country, and most of those refugees have had some very unpleasant experiences. Can't you be sorry for them at all?”

“It's easy to be sorry for refugees,” said Dick, “when you don't have to put up with them.”

Torn between a desire to laugh and tell him he needn't do it, and a realization that Mr. Kessler's daughter must be taken care of somehow if he and Spratt were to have a chance to talk business, Elizabeth did not answer immediately. She was glad to hear the sound of a key in the front door.

“There's the boss,” said Cherry, getting up.

“Now we can eat!” Dick exclaimed as though glad to have something to rejoice about. He got up to pour a cocktail for his father.

Spratt came in and greeted them all. “You've no idea what a comfortable picture you make around the fire,” he remarked as Elizabeth took his coat and Dick gave him the Martini. “Where's Brian?”

“Having dinner with Peter Stern. Cherry, go to the kitchen and tell them the boss is here.”

“What have you been doing?” asked Spratt. “Listening to the radio?”

“No, what's going on?”

“The same, only worse. All hell's loose in Russia. Come on upstairs with me while I get cleaned up,” he invited Elizabeth. “Cherry, tell them I'll be ready in fifteen minutes.”

“Wait a minute, boss,” exclaimed Dick. “I've got something important to ask you. Do I have to take that refugee girl on a date tomorrow night?”

“What refugee girl?”

“The one who's coming here to dinner-with her old man. Can't she possibly—”

Spratt drew a long breath and started to laugh. “I forgot to tell you. Kessler's daughter,” he said, “is eight years old.”

The four youngsters gave long simultaneous whistles. “Oh joy, oh rapture unconfined!” sang Dick. “My life is renewed. I don't have to! Did you hear, everybody? She's eight years old! Why didn't you tell me? What were you doing talking about Russia when all the time you knew that girl was eight years old? Me sitting up here dying and you've got to bring up
Russia
!”

Elizabeth got out of the room ahead of Spratt and ran up the stairs. He followed her. When he came into his bedroom he found her crumpled up in his reading chair. She was laughing uncontrollably.

Spratt stood watching her in amazement. “Elizabeth, what in the world is the matter with you?”

For a moment she could not answer. With an effort she caught her breath, saying, “N—nothing. Only I think—I think that for the first time in my life I've nearly had hysterics.”

“Elizabeth,
what—
”

“Please don't pay any attention to me. I'm behaving like a moron. But it is funny, Spratt. We're sitting on the edge of a volcano dangling our legs over the crater, and Dick knows it—I've just heard him talking, so grim and hard he frightened me, and in fifteen minutes nothing was important to him except that that German girl was eight years old and he didn't have to take her out. Oh, that resilience! Did I ever have it, I wonder?” She began to laugh again, this time more softly. Spratt shrugged, went into the bathroom and turned on the water. When he came out Elizabeth, having made herself be quiet, was wiping her eyes.

Spratt stood over her, shaking his head in confusion. “Did anything happen this afternoon, Elizabeth? You can tell me.”

“Not a thing. I came home and got dressed for dinner and lay on the chaise-longue in my room till it was time to get out the cocktails.” She stood up. “I'm sorry for being so foolish, Spratt. But every now and then—well, maybe sometimes you've got to laugh so you won't scream.”

“All right,” said Spratt, “leave it at that.” He never pressed her for explanations, knowing if there was anything she intended to explain he would get it eventually without asking. “You'd better go and do something to your face. You've laughed and cried it streaky.”

“All right, I will.” Slipping her hands into his, she stood up. “And thank you for being such a calm person. Most men would either have called me a fool or asked a thousand questions.”

With an expression of mingled sympathy and amusement, Spratt kissed her. “You're not a fool. Incidentally, you look mighty well in that outfit.”

“It's the hostess-gown you gave me,” Elizabeth reminded him as she went into her room to obliterate the tracks on her face.

Spratt was waiting at the head of the stairs. She smiled at him reassuringly and they started down, and he smiled back. They went in to dinner with the others.

“Oh boy,” said Dick as they sat down. “Shrimps to start with. I love 'em.”

“So do I,” said Spratt, and ate the first one. “Quite a sauce, Elizabeth,” he observed. “A decent writer on that picture for a change, and a good dinner—” He grinned at his offspring. “What have the millionaires got that we haven't got?”

“Dyspepsia,” said Dick.

5

A
t half-past four the following afternoon, Spratt was winding up another conference with the new writer who had come from Germany. Spratt pushed his chair back from his desk and grinned at his colleague.

“That's all for the present, Kessler. We can go into more detail tonight after dinner. And you'll start writing the story treatment in the morning?”

“Yes, Mr. Herlong.” The new writer smiled back, and though his heavy dark beard emphasized his foreignness to this American office and his customary dignity was such that his smile, unlike Spratt's, could hardly be called a grin, he conveyed his acknowledgment of the comradeship that springs up swiftly when two workers discover they can work together. “When you read the synopsis—I am sorry, the treatment—you will forgive my awkwardness with the language?”

Spratt chuckled. “In the first place, your language is very rarely awkward, and in the second place I can get a dozen writers who know English grammar for one who can tell a story. I don't mind saying, Kessler, you took a load off my shoulders in our conference yesterday. You understand stories—I wish you could tell me how to make all these English grammar writers understand them.”

“Perhaps it is only sometimes viewing situations as other people would view them, and not entirely from the unchanging viewpoint of one's self.”

“Am I supposed to tell
that
to the inhabitants of this ego-ridden capital?” Spratt laughed ruefully and shook his head. “Yes, Lydia?” he said as his secretary came in.

“The art department has sent down the sketches of the bedroom and living room sets. Do you want to see them now or are you and Mr. Kessler still in conference?” She glanced toward Spratt's visitor with the respect she gave anybody whose ideas came to the rescue of a befuddled script.

Spratt's visitor answered for him. “He wants to see the sketches, and we are no longer in conference, Miss Fraser.” He moved forward in his chair, placed his heavy hand on the head of his heavy cane, and pushed himself into a standing position. It was not an easy movement, but he accomplished it with the skill of long practice. Lydia opened the door for him. A clever girl, she managed to make it look like a gesture of deference instead of necessary aid. Their new writer could not stand without the support of his cane, and since he had only his right hand this made it impossible for him to open a door without pushing a chair toward it so he could sit down. Spratt had risen too, and walked over to the entrance.

“Then I'll pick you up at your office this evening, as close to six-thirty as I can, and we'll go to my home for dinner.”

“Thank you, Mr. Herlong.” He smiled courteously at Lydia. “And thank you, Miss Fraser.”

Lydia went with him to the outer door of the bungalow, then returned to Spratt's inner office with the set sketches in her hand. “A remarkable man, Kessler,” Spratt observed as he took the sketches.

“Isn't he? To sink into that script forty-eight hours and come up with a solution. And him half dead, too. Did the Nazis beat him up, or was he in the war, or what?”

“I've no idea. You don't ask about those things, though you can't help wondering. Maybe nothing but an auto accident.”

“He does manage to bow from the waist in spite of it. Do you suppose he's going to continue forever calling everybody around here Mr. and Miss?”

Spratt laughed a little, and shrugged. “Probably. Germans are very formal. Never mind. I like him.”

“So do I,” said Lydia.

Meanwhile the subject of their conversation walked to his own bungalow, which was conveniently located next door, since his power of walking was limited to very short distances. Explaining to his secretary that Mr. Herlong was to call for him later, he went through the reception room into his private office beyond.

Alone, he glanced around the room with approval. It was furnished with only the necessities of his work—a desk with pencils and stacks of paper, a working-chair and an easy-chair, a case holding reference books, a typewriter that wrote only capital letters and required no shift key. He had taught himself years ago to operate such a machine with his one hand. Bare as the room was, he liked it, for it had wide windows bringing in abundant light, and giving a view of the vast hills beyond the studio lot. A mirror on the wall reflected the hills, producing an impression of space and peace. Space and peace, he reflected as he looked around; this was what he wanted now, this was what they still had in America. The Americans took them both for granted. Even now there were some Americans who did not realize how precious they were, and how rare.

This reflection came to him of itself whenever he looked around. It occurred to him now, but he paid hardly any attention to it; he had another concern to occupy his attention. Tonight he was going to see Elizabeth. He was going into her home and see her there, surrounded by all the things she had ever wanted, and the prospect of it gave him a pleasure that was warm and tender, and none the less intense because while she had all these things she would never know that he had given them to her.

He went over to the mirror on the wall and stood there looking at his reflection. It was not possible that she could recognize him. Between them lay not merely twenty-four years, but the wreckage made by that shell at Chateau-Thierry, which had destroyed him so terribly that it had taken one of the greatest surgeons in Germany five years to put together the semblance of a body that he now possessed. A makeshift that had been uncertain enough in normal times, this frame of his could hardly, after the effort to which it had been forced when he had to get out of Germany, be expected to last much longer. It was only because he was sure he could not last much longer that he was willing now to let himself see Elizabeth. He had never expected to see her again. In those frightful days in the German hospital, he had not wanted to. He had wanted her to be rid of him, as desperately as he had wanted to be rid of himself. Even now he trembled when he remembered that slow, tortured rebuilding, insertion of metal strips to replace shattered bones, stretching of shrunken muscles, inadequate food and inadequate anesthetics, his own screams and curses at the man who persisted in keeping him alive when he wanted to die.

How that doctor had kept at him, with implacable hands that he himself could see only as instruments of horror, forcing into him the life he did not want, and slowly, through all of it, giving him against his will life that was really life—not mere physical existence, but a personality and a will, a recreation so profound that it seemed quite natural, when he began to realize what was being given him, that along with all the rest he had a new name. Kessler—thank heaven, he had thought then, it was easy to say, for in those days the new language had seemed very difficult, though now it was so much his own that when he first came back to the United States he found that he had half forgotten the old. The doctor's name was not so easy. Jacoby. How he had dreaded that man at first!

He remembered Jacoby, in the days when he himself did not know a word of German, struggling through a scanty knowledge of English to make him understand what was being done to him, which he did not understand and hated Jacoby for doing, never dreaming then that he was meeting the greatest man he was ever to know in his life. He shivered with a cold gust of hate whenever he remembered how the Nazis had hounded that great man to his death for no crime but the unforgivable iniquity of having been born a Jew, and of being so rockbound in his own goodness that he was incapable of accepting the evil of mankind until it had crushed him beyond escape. There had been little he could do in his love for Jacoby's memory, nothing but get to the United States while there was still time to save Jacoby's child.

His grief and rage at what had happened to his friend, and his terror lest he not be able to bring Jacoby's little girl to safety, had been so great that not until he was on the westbound steamer did he realize that when he got to America he was probably going to see Elizabeth. He knew her husband's name was Spratt Herlong and that he was employed by Vertex Studio, and in his own luggage was a contract signed in the Paris office of Vertex. He would be virtually sure to meet Herlong some day, and it might follow as a matter of course that he would meet Elizabeth. He went into his cabin and looked at himself a long time in the glass, as he was doing now. If there was a chance of her knowing him he would break his contract and make a living as a translator, a clerk, anything that would provide little Margaret with three meals a day without destroying Elizabeth's peace of mind.

But a long scrutiny satisfied him that there was no chance of it. In no sense, except the memory of her behind all that had happened since that explosion at Chateau-Thierry, could he believe he had any trace of the Arthur Kittredge she had known. He was Erich Kessler, dear friend of the late Dr. Gustav Jacoby, author of books based on case-histories of Dr. Jacoby's patients, and the change in his personality was as thorough as the change in his name. No man who had endured what he had endured in body and spirit could have much left in common with a happy, arrogant youth who did not know what it was to want anything he could not get.

He looked thoughtfully at his image in the glass. Crippled as he was, his appearance was not repulsive. One could see that in spite of his uncertain legs he had been meant for a tall man, and since his torso had to carry his weight the muscles there were powerfully developed. The effect was inevitably one-sided, since his left sleeve had been empty so long, but his right arm was like that of an athlete, and the hand which for twenty years had supported him upon a cane, was strong enough to break a china cup between the thumb and fingers. His face had no visible trace of the wound there except a scar that went upward from beneath his beard in a thin curving line. His hair was still thick, gray like steel; his beard was heavy too, and darker. He had let it grow with no thought of disguise, but to cover the scars that all Jacoby's careful-skin gratfing had not been able to eliminate. Now he was glad he had it and was so used to it, for in spite of having seen thousands of Hitler's pictures most Americans still thought of Germans as being professors in dark beards.

She would not know him, but he would know her, as readily as he had known the picture standing on Spratt Herlong's desk. To be sure, he had been looking for it, but he would have recognized it anyway as Elizabeth. She had changed in those years, of course, but her alteration had been nothing more than the well-ordered development from youth into the maturity that could have been foreseen by anyone who had been as intimately acquainted with her as he had. Elizabeth had always known what she wanted out of life, because she was so eminently fit to have it. Physically and spiritually, she had wanted love, marriage, children, a home in which she would be no petted darling, but a versatile and devoted creator. From the beginning she had instinctively known herself capable of bringing all this into being, and so she had looked forward to it with the eagerness of those who have no doubt of their destiny. When he met Spratt, and saw the pictures of Elizabeth in Spratt's office, he felt that the change time had made in her appearance had been no more than the change one observes in the achievement of something of which one has seen the beginning. Now that he could think of her without the pain of the earlier years, he was glad he had been wise enough to step aside so that she could have it.

He saw the pictures last week, on the first day he went into Spratt's office. Spratt had been talking for some time about the script, and if Kessler's attention had wandered it was no matter, since he was going to read the script tomorrow anyway. When Spratt had finished, and he himself had risen to leave, he glanced at the photograph on the desk, saying with the casualness born of years of self-command, “Your wife, Mr. Herlong?”

Spratt said, “Why yes,” taking up the picture and handing it to Kessler with the proud smile of a man showing his friend a treasure. “But that's not very good of her—at least, I never did think those formal portraits were as good as candid shots, too smooth and pressed-out, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I understand and agree with you.” Kessler was looking at her face. “But this is very charming.”

“Oh yes, so it is, but this one on the wall looks more like her. Over here by the door. Those are the children with her.”

Kessler followed Spratt and looked at the picture on the wall. “Yes, yes,” he said with involuntary eagerness, “that, I am sure, is more like her.”

For it was like her, he knew that without having seen the original in so long. The picture had been taken somewhere outdoors, perhaps on a ranch. Either Elizabeth and her children did not know they were being photographed, or the photographer was a genius at creating an unposed effect. Dressed in a sweater and skirt, her hair blowing, Elizabeth sat on a fence beyond which grew an orange tree; a young girl leaned on the fence near by, while a tall youth who looked very much like Elizabeth was standing by the tree, pulling its branches forward between his mother and sister so they could pick off the fruit, and a little boy, sitting on the ground in front of the fence, was already peeling the skin off an orange. By accident or design, all the children were looking at their mother, and they were all four laughing. It was a group of healthy people who loved one another and were very happy about it. No wonder Spratt preferred it to the studio portrait on his desk. That was Elizabeth as she appeared to other people, her private life discreetly concealed behind a pleasant tranquillity of eyes and lips, but this was Spratt's wife as he loved her. Looking at the group, the outsider from Germany knew more profoundly than he had ever known before how much he had given Elizabeth when he had made up his mind to leave her free of his own wreckage. He glanced at Spratt, who was looking not at him but at the picture of his family, and for a moment he hated Spratt so fiercely that he could have killed him. But that passed quickly; long discipline had steadied his emotions as much as his conduct, and after that moment of hatred he felt nothing but gladness that his gift to her had been as great as he had meant it to be.