Theophilus North (49 page)

The corporal swept up the dummies and said to the sergeant, “Let's get out of here before they start asking questions.”

The barman must have pressed a button summoning the night watchman. The two approached the table where Toinette and I were sitting.

“What was that fracas that was goin' on over here?”

“Oh, you mean
that!
” I said laughing. “One of the passengers played a schoolboy's joke. Had a black bat made of rubber. Tried to scare the ladies.—Barman, can I have two soda-water set-ups?”

“Every night something crazy,” said the watchman and left.

So there we sat, face to face, over that table, looking into each other's eyes. I can go out of my mind about a pair of fine eyes. Mrs. Wills's were unusual in several ways. Firstly there was a slight “cast”—so mistakenly called a “flaw”—in her right eye; in the second place you couldn't tell what color they were; thirdly, they were deep and calm and amused. When I go swimming in a pair of eyes I am not fully master of what I may say.

“Please, what color are your eyes?”

“Some people say they're blue in the morning and hazel at night.”

My attention is almost as consumedly drawn to hands. I was to learn later that Toinette was five years older than I. I now saw that her hands gave evidence that in earlier life they had been engaged in hard manual labor—scullery work, maybe—probably accompanied by malnutrition and harsh treatment. She had suffered and in all other aspects of her mind (and body) she had surmounted those trials; she had come through. To the eyes of friendship and love the coarseness of her hands had become spiritualized. She did not attempt to hide them.

“Excuse me asking questions.—Are you English?”

“I think so. I was found.”

“Found?”

“Yes, found in a basket.”

I was so filled up with delight that I laughed at the good fortune. “Do you have any idea—?”

“Theodore, do come to your senses. I was less than a week old. Do you know Soho?”

“It's a part of London where there are foreign restaurants and where artists live. I've never been there.” I was bewildered. I could see the orphanage; I could see the scullery. Like Henry Simmons she had risen from the hardest stratum of London life, but—unlike Henry—her accent had been consciously schooled. She spoke the English of a “lady” with the faint suggestion of speaking a foreign language. (My conjecture was an apprenticeship in a hairdresser's establishment, perhaps in the theater . . . she had known what it was to be a protégée here and there—just long enough to confirm her outstanding trait of independence; a quick learner.)

A fine gold wire was strung between our eyes and some kind of energy was passing back and forth. Our hands were clasped before us on the table as though we were good children at school. But my hands were moving toward hers—without pushing, as on a Ouija board.

“I think I'm part Jewish and part Irish.”

Again I overflowed with laughter. “That's a great situation for an orphan; you get all the good of it without having to listen to the advice.” The golden wire went zingazingaling. “The blight of family life is advice.” Who was making generalizations now? “Can I ask what new work you're going into?”

“I'm going to open a shop in New York—and maybe in Newport later. Things for ladies to wear, not dresses, not hats, but just pretty things. It will be a great success.” She did not stress the word “great”; it would be a great success and that was that. I learned that mark of maturity from her, then and there.

“What are you going to call it?”

My finger tips had reached one of her knuckles.

“I don't know. I'm going to change my name. Maybe I'll choose a simple name like Jenny. Everything in the shop is going to be simple but perfect. Maybe for the first weeks nobody will buy anything, but they'll come back and look again.”

She lifted her glass to her lips. Then put her hand back on the table where it had been touching mine.

“What do you do, Mr. North?”

“I'm a college student. When the War's over I'm going back to college.”

“What do you study most?”

“Languages.”

“You have nice friends. Are many of the men at Fort Adams like that?”

“Yes. For one reason or another the Army hasn't given us orders to go overseas. My eyes are all right, but they're just below the grade for overseas duty.”

By now the fingers of my right hand were intertwined with those of her left. What with eyes and hands, I was finding myself again.

She asked, “After you've learned those languages what are you going to do?”

She seized my restless hand firmly, flattened it on the table, and laid her hand over it to keep it still.

“In New York day before yesterday I had a narrow escape. A cousin of my mother's is in the business of importing silk from China. Big office. Typist girls tiptoeing around like whipped mice. He offered me a job when I graduate. He says the War is going to end in a month, so I'd graduate in 1920. He's a Scotchman and doesn't say a word he doesn't mean. He promised me that I'd be making five thousand dollars a year in five years. I wrestled with temptation for three minutes flat. Then I thanked him properly and got out. On the street I frightened the New Yorkers by shouting, ‘
AN OFFICE! AN OFFICE
!!'
No
, I can make money without sitting in a chair for forty years.”

“Theodore, not so loud!”

“I'm going to be an actor or a detective or an explorer or a wild animal tamer. I can always make money. What I want to see is a million faces. I want to
read
a million faces.”

“Sh—sh!”

I lowered my voice. “I guess I've read a million and so have you.”

She was laughing interiorly.

“But you're a new face, Miss Jenny. If a man travels enough he'll run into the Bay of Naples or Mount Chimborazo or something. He'll run into a surprise like Mr. Edgar Montgomery . . . or a great surprise like Miss Jenny,” and I leaned down and kissed her hand. I kissed it again and again.

The barman called out, “The bar's closing in about five minutes, ladies and gentlemen. We don't want that kind of business in here, soldier. You heard me say ‘ladies and gentlemen' and I meant it.”

I rose grandly and said, “Barman, I don't like your tone of voice. This lady and I have been married for three years. I wish you to apologize to my wife at once or I shall report you to Mr. Pendleton, passenger agent of this line and my own cousin.”

Even the revelers heard this.

The barman said, “I didn't mean no offense, ma'am, but I'm ready to tell Mr. Pendleton or anybody else that wherever your husband is, some peculiar things start to happen. He laid out dead here just twenty minutes ago.”

Mrs. Wills said, “Thank you, barman. Surely, you know that soldiers must be given consideration on the short leave that's given them before they cross the sea to offer their lives for us.”

The revelers applauded.

She rose, glass in hand, and said splendidly, “My husband is a very distinguished man. He speaks twelve languages better than he speaks English.”

More applause. I put my arm around my dear wife and shouted, “Iroquois! Choctaw!”

“Eskimo!” she cried.

“Jabberwocky!”

“Mulligatawny!”

There were cries of “Give 'em a drink!” . . . “Sprekkenzy Doysh?” . . . “Me likee Chinee girl, she likee me!”

Flushed with success, we sat down—the picture of conjugal love and pride.

Suddenly, however, world events took the matter out of our hands. The night watchman appeared at the head of the staircase, wearing a sou'wester and swinging a hurricane lantern. He had heard town-criers as a boy and put his whole soul into it. “Ladies and gentlemen, quiet please! Word has just come over the wireless that the War has come to an end. The Arnstiss—the Armystiss—what they call it!—has been signed. The skipper has tole me to tell you in the saloon, but not to wake anybody up that's gone to bed. There's high seas runnin' and the boat will be delayed, maybe, dockin' at Newport and Fall River.—Tommy, the skipper says the Line offers a free drink to anybody that's sittin' up. I gotta go down to the engine room.”

All hell broke loose. The revelers began hurling crockery about the hall. Cuspidors are too heavy to hurl, but they can be rolled on their rims for quite a distance. The card-players poured into the saloon.

“Jenny,” I said.

“What?”

“Jenny, let's not separate.”

“I didn't hear what you said.”

“Yes, you did! Yes, you did!”

“Why, where did you ever get such an idea!”

“Jenny!”

“Well, we don't see a war come to an end every day. In about ten minutes come down to Cabin 77. I have an alarm clock set for five-thirty.”

I whirled her about. When I restored her to the floor, she went downstairs to the cabins reserved for servants; I went upstairs and packed my gear.

“
Charmes d'amour, qui saurait vous peindre?
” as Benjamin Constant wrote on setting out to describe a similar encounter. “Enchantments of love, what artist can picture you?” The generosity of the woman, the bold tenderness of the grown man—the fathomless gratitude to nature for its revelation of itself, yet with some reminder that death is the end of all, death accepted, death united with life in the chain of being from the primal sea to the ultimate cold.
“Charmes d'amour, qui saurait vous peindre?”

She must have turned off the alarm clock instantaneously for it did not wake me. When I woke at the ship's whistle she had taken all her possessions and was gone. On the mirror was written with soap, “Don't change.” I dressed and was about to leave the cabin when I turned back and flung myself on the bed again and buried my head in the pillow, alone and not alone.

I was among the last to disembark. From the gangplank a strange sight met my eyes. There was a great bonfire in Washington Square. Hundreds of men and women and children, hastily dressed, in a tumult of distraught dogs, were dancing about it. “The War's over! The War's over!” Everyone in the Ninth City was hugging and kissing everyone else, particularly the few service men who were disembarking or who had come to the center of the town. Maybe I was hugged and kissed by the Materas and the Avonzinos and by Mrs. Keefe, and the Wentworths and Dr. Addison, but this was November, 1918, and I knew only seven civilians in all the Nine Cities. The apparatus of the Newport Fire Department was dashing up and down in the streets in an ecstasy of uselessness. In the little park where Alice and I were to see each other for the last time, sporadic religious revivals and scandalous orgies were contaminating each other. Nicolaidis's All Night Café, having run out of coffee and frankfurter buns, was jammed and was being looted by enraged customers. Reader, it was gorgeous!

No, I was not the last to leave the boat. I saw Mr. Montgomery, having aged thirty years in a few hours, unsteady on his legs, being met by his doctor, his valet, and two chauffeurs. His wife took her place beside him looking very fine indeed in sables. The second car was so filled with luggage that Toinette had to sit on the valet's knees.

I disentangled myself from the embraces of a grateful populace and started my walk to Fort Adams under the dawn's early light, only two miles, but the longest trek I remember ever having taken. At reveille about ninety percent of the soldiers were absent without leave.

That was the famous “False Armistice.”

All discipline broke down. During the intervening days before the end of the War was officially declared, the Headquarters Company had time to run up
pro forma
papers for the soldiers' separation from the service and I had time to obtain my travel orders and to brace myself for endless peace and the serious business of living. I made no attempt to get in touch with the Montgomery household which I assumed to be in as chaotic a condition as that about me.

So it was that—almost eight years later—it was not Toinette, not Jenny, but Mrs. Edweena Wills who followed me downstairs from Tante Liselotte's room and found me asleep against the wall between the second and third floors.

The summer was drawing to a close. Many of my “pupils” were occupied with plans for the fall and our lessons drew to a close. I welcomed the increase in my free time. I spent long contented hours in my apartment bringing my Journal up to date, filling in “portraits” of the persons I had known—pages which refreshed my memory and on which I am now drawing so many years later in the composition of this book. I had worked very hard and the “professor” experienced little difficulty in refusing invitations from his former “pupils,” however kindly intended.

I saw Edweena and Henry almost every day. They were engaged to be married as soon as Mr. Wills in far-off London had drunk himself to death on the allowance his wife continued to send him. I loved Edweena and I loved Henry and I'm proud to say they loved me. Never for a moment, in company or alone, did Edweena and I make any reference to having met previously. Even Mrs. Cranston, whom little escaped, had no inkling of it. Edweena had prospered. Her shops, first in New York, then in Newport, were a great success. She had selected and trained assistants and presently handed the management over to them, because a more satisfying and even more remunerative career opened up for her. No name could be found for it, but she was delighted when (from my fund of “twelve languages”) I offered and explained to her the words
arbitrix elegantiarum
, “The woman who dispenses the laws of good taste,” as Petronius Arbiter did at the Emperor Nero's court. She continued to insist that she was a lady's maid, but she turned down all invitations to serve as maid to any one lady; how far that designation falls short of the role she played in New York and Newport. No ball, no dinner of great occasion was imaginable without Edweena's presence in the
boudoir
reserved for the ladies. Many guests brought their own maid with them, but no guest was completely sure of her presented self until Edweena had approved of it. It was her sternly upheld doctrine of
nothing too much
that had changed the modes of dress. She proffered counsel only when she was asked for it; many a dame, supremely sure of herself in Chicago or Cleveland or even in New York, would start down the great staircase like a galleon in full sail, only to discover that confidence was ebbing step by step, and would remount the stairs. Insecurity as to how one looks can be a torment, particularly in a time of transition; the baroque was passing into the classic. Edweena had not created the new; she had felt the shifting tide “in her bones” and rode the wave.