You Can't Go Home Again (32 page)

He had taken off his top-coat and his silk hat and given them to the maid, and then had come wearily into the room towards Mrs. Jack. He was evidently very fond of her. While she had been talking to Mary Hook he had remained silent and had brooded above her like a benevolent vulture. He smiled beneath his great nose and kept his eyes intently on her face; then he took her small hand in his weary old clasp and began to stroke her smooth arm. It was a gesture frankly old and sensual, jaded, and yet strangely fatherly and gentle. It was the gesture of a man who had known and possessed many pretty women and who still knew how to admire and appreciate them, but whose stronger passions had now passed over into a paternal benevolence.

And in the same way he now spoke to her.

“You’re looking nice!” he said. “You’re looking pretty!” He kept smiling vulturesquely at her and stroking her arm. “Just like a rose she is!” the old man said, and never took his weary eyes from her face.

“Oh, Jake!” she cried excitedly and in a surprised tone, as if she had not known before that he was there. “How nice of you to come! I didn’t know you were back. I thought you were still in Europe.”

“I’ve been and went,” he declared humorously.

“You’re looking awfully well, Jake,” she said. “The trip did you lots of good. You’ve lost weight. You took the cure at Carlsbad, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t take the cure,” the old man solemnly declared, “I took the die-ett.” Deliberately he mispronounced the word.

Instantly Mrs. Jack’s face was suffused with crimson and her shoulders began to shake hysterically. She turned to Roberta Heilprinn, seized her helplessly by the arm, and clung to her, shrieking faintly:

“God! Did you hear him? He’s been on a diet! I bet it almost killed him! The way he loves to eat!”

Miss Heilprinn chuckled fruitily and her oil-smooth features widened in such a large grin that her eyes contracted to closed slits.

“I’ve been die-etting ever since I went away,” said Jake. “I was sick when I went away—and I came back on an English boat,” the old man said with a melancholy and significant leer that drew a scream of laughter from the two women.

“Oh, Jake!” cried Mrs. Jack hilariously. “How you must have suffered! I know what you used to think of English food!”

“I think the same as I always did,” the old man said with resigned sadness—“only ten times more!”

She shrieked again, then gasped out, “Brussels sprouts?”

“They still got ‘em,” said old Jake solemnly. “They still got the same ones they had ten years ago. I saw Brussels sprouts this last trip that ought to be in the British Museum…And they still got that good fish,” he went on with a suggestive leer.

Roberta Heilprinn, her bland features grinning like a Buddha, gurgled: “The Dead Sea fruit?”

“No,” said old Jake sadly, “not the Dead Sea fruit—that ain’t dead enough. They got boiled flannel now,” he said, “and that good sauce!...You remember that
good
sauce they used to make?” He leered at Mrs. Jack with an air of such insinuation that she was again set off in a fit of shuddering hysteria:

“You mean that awful…tasteless…pasty…
goo
...about the colour of a dead lemon?”

“You got it,” the old man nodded his wise and tired old head in weary agreement. “You got it…That’s it…They still make it…So I’ve been die-etting all the way back!” For the first time his tired old voice showed a trace of animation. “Carlsbad wasn’t in it compared to the die-etting I had to do on the English boat!” He paused, then with a glint of cynic humour in his weary eyes, he said: “It was fit for nothing but a bunch of goys!”

This reference to unchosen tribes, with its evocation of humorous contempt, now snapped a connection between these three people, and suddenly one saw them in a new way. The old man was smiling thinly, with a cynical intelligence, and the two women were shaken utterly by a paroxysm of understanding mirth. One saw now that they really were
together
, able, ancient, immensely knowing, and outside the world, regardant, tribal, communitied in derision and contempt for the unhallowed, unsuspecting tribes of lesser men who were not party to their knowing, who were not folded to their seal. It passed—the instant showing of their ancient sign. The women just smiled now, quietly: they were citizens of the world again.

“But Jake! You poor fellow!” Mrs. Jack said sympathetically. “You must have hated it!” Then she cried suddenly and enthusiastically as she remembered: “Isn’t Carlsbad just too beautiful?...Did you know that Bert and I were there one time?” As she uttered these words she slipped her hand affectionately through the arm of her friend, Roberta, then went on vigorously, with a jolly laugh and a merry face: “Didn’t I ever tell you about that time, Jake?...Really, it was the most wonderful experience!...But God!” she laughed almost explosively—“Will you ever forget the first three or four days, Bert?” She appealed to her smiling friend. “Do you remember how hungry we got? How we thought we couldn’t possibly hold out? Wasn’t it dreadful?” she said, and then went on with a serious and rather puzzled air as she tried to explain it: “But then—I don’t know—it’s funny—but somehow you get used to it, don’t you, Bert? The first few days are pretty awful, but after that you don’t seem to mind. I guess you get too weak, or something…I know Bert and I stayed in bed three weeks—and really it wasn’t bad after the first few days.” She laughed suddenly, richly. “We used to try to torture each other by making up enormous menus of the most delicious food we knew. We had it all planned out to go to a swell restaurant the moment our cure was over and order the biggest meal we could think of!...Well!” she laughed—“would you believe it?—the day the cure was finished and the doctor told us it would be all right for us to get up and eat—I know we both lay there for hours thinking of all the things we were going to have. It was simply wonderful!” she said, laughing and making a fine little movement with her finger and her thumb to indicate great delicacy, her voice squeaking like a child’s and her eyes wrinkling up to dancing points. “In all your life you never heard of such delicious food as Bert and I were going to devour! We resolved to do everything in the greatest style!...Well, at last we got up and dressed. And God!” she cried. “We were so weak we could hardly stand up, but we wore the prettiest clothes we had, and we had chartered a Rolls Royce for the occasion and a chauffeur in livery! In all your
days
,” she cried with her eyes twinkling, “you’ve never seen such swank! We got into the car and were driven away like a couple of queens. We told the man to drive us to the swellest, most expensive restaurant he knew. He took us to a beautiful place outside of town. It looked like a chateau!” She beamed rosily round her. “And when they saw us coming they must have thought we were royalty from the way they acted. The flunkies were lined up, bowing and scraping, for half a block. Oh, it was thrilling! Everything we’d gone through and endured in taking the cure seemed worth it…Well!” she looked round her and the breath left her body audibly in a sigh of complete frustration—“would you believe it?—when we got in there and tried to eat we could hardly swallow a bite! We had looked forward to it so long—we had planned it all so carefully—and all we could eat was a soft-boiled egg—and we couldn’t even finish that! It filled us up right to here—” she put a small hand level with her chin. “It was so tragic that we almost wept!...Isn’t it a strange thing? I guess it must be that your stomach shrinks up while you’re on the diet. You lie there day after day and think of the enormous meal you are going to devour just as soon as you get up—and then when you try it you’re not even able to finish a soft-boiled egg!”

As she finished, Mrs. Jack shrugged her shoulders and lifted her hands questioningly, with such a comical look on her face that everybody round her laughed. Even weary and jaded old Jake Abramson, who had really paid no attention to what she was saying but had just been regarding her with his fixed smile during the whole course of her animated dialogue, now smiled a little more warmly as he turned away to speak to other friends.

Miss Heilprinn and Mrs. Jack, left standing together in the centre of the big room, offered an instructive comparison in the capacities of their sex. Each woman was perfectly cast in her own role. Each had found the perfect adaptive means by which she could utilise her full talents with the least waste and friction.

Miss Heilprinn looked the very distinguished woman that she was. Hers was the talent of the administrator, the ability to get things done, and one knew at a glance that in the rough and tumble of practical affairs this bland lady was more than a match for any man. She suggested oil—smooth oil, oil of tremendous driving power and generating force.

Along Broadway she had reigned for years as the governing brain of a celebrated art theatre, and her business acuity had wrung homage even from her enemies. It had been her function to promote, to direct, to control, and in the tenuous and uncertain speculations of the theatre to take care not to be fleeced by the wolves of Broadway. The brilliance of her success, the power of her will, and the superior quality of her metal were written plain upon her. It took no very experienced observer to see that in the unequal contest between Miss Heilprinn and the wolves of Broadway it had been the wolves who had been worsted.

In that savage and unremitting warfare, which arouses such bitter passions and undying hatreds that eyes become jaundiced and lips so twisted that they are never afterwards able to do anything but writhe like yellowed scars on haggard faces, had Miss Heilprinn’s face grown hard? Had her mouth contracted to a grim line? Had her jaw out-jutted like a granite crag? Were the marks of the wars visible anywhere upon her? Not at all. The more murderous the fight, the blander her face. The more treacherous the intrigues in which Broadway’s life involved her, the more mellow became the fruity lilt of her good-humoured chuckle. She had actually thriven on it. Indeed, as one of her colleagues said: “Roberta never seems so happy and so unconsciously herself as when she is playing about in a nest of rattlesnakes.”

So, now, as she stood there talking to Mrs. Jack, she presented a very handsome and striking appearance. Her grey hair was combed in a pompadour, and her suave and splendid gown gave the finishing touch to her general air of imperturbable assurance. Her face was almost impossibly bland, but it was a blandness without hypocrisy. Nevertheless, one saw that her twinkling eyes, which narrowed into such jolly slits when she smiled, were sharp as flint and missed nothing.

In a curious way, Mrs. Jack was a more complex person than her smooth companion. She was essentially not less shrewd, not less accomplished, not less subtle, and not less determined to secure her own ends in this hard world, but her strategy had been different.

Most people thought her “such a romantic person”. As her friends said, she was “so beautiful”, she was “such a child”, she was “so good”. Yes, she was all these things. For she had early learned the advantages of possessing a rosy, jolly little face and a manner of slightly bewildered surprise and naive innocence. When she smiled doubtfully yet good-naturedly at her friends, it was as if to say: “Now I know you’re laughing at me, aren’t you? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what I’ve done or said now. Of course I’m not clever the way you are—all of you are so frightfully smart—but anyway I have a good time, and I like you all.”

To many people that was the essential Mrs. Jack. Only a few knew that there was a great deal more to her than met the eye. The bland lady who now stood talking to her was one of these. Miss Roberta Heilprinn missed no artifice of that almost unconsciously deceptive innocence. And perhaps that is why, when Mrs. Jack finished her anecdote and looked at old Jake Abramson so comically and questioningly, Miss Heilprinn’s eye twinkled a little brighter, her Buddhistic smile became a little smoother, and her yolky chuckle grew a trifle more infectious. Perhaps that is also why, with a sudden impulse of understanding and genuine affection, Miss Heilprinn bent and kissed the glowing little cheek.

And the object of this caress, although she never changed her expression of surprised and delighted innocence, knew full well all that was going on in the other woman’s mind. For just a moment, almost imperceptibly, the eyes of the two women, stripped bare of all concealing artifice, met each other. And in that moment there was matter for Olympian laughter.

While Mrs. Jack welcomed her friends and beamed with happiness, one part of her mind remained aloof and preoccupied. For someone was still absent, and she kept thinking of him.

“I wonder where he is,” she thought. “Why doesn’t he come? I hope he hasn’t been drinking.” She looked quickly over the brilliant gathering with a troubled eye and thought impatiently: “If only he liked parties more! If only he enjoyed meeting people—going out in the evening! Oh, well—he’s the way he is. It’s no use trying to change him. I wouldn’t have him any different.”

And then he arrived.

“Here he is!” she thought excitedly, looking at him with instant relief. “And he’s all right!”

George Webber had, in fact, taken two or three stiff drinks before he left his rooms, in preparation for the ordeal. The raw odour of cheap gin hung on his breath, his eyes were slightly bright and wild, and his manner was quick and a trifle more feverish than was his wont. Just the same he was, as Esther had phrased it to herself, “all right”.

“If only people—my friends—everyone I know—didn’t affect him so,” she thought. “Why is it, I wonder. Last night when he telephoned me he talked so strange! Nothing he said made any sense! What could have been wrong with him? Oh, well—it doesn’t matter now. He’s here. I love him!”

Her face warmed and softened, her pulse beat quicker, and she went to meet him.

“Oh, hello, darling,” she said fondly. “I’m so glad you’re here at last. I was beginning to be afraid you were going to fail me after all.”

He greeted her half fondly and half truculently, with a mixture of diffidence and pugnacity, of arrogance and humility, of pride, of hope, of love, of suspicion, of eagerness, of doubt.