Thirteen Such Years

by Alec Waugh

  Up at the breakfast table that morning was a wireless message signed “Edgar.” “Counting the days to your return,” it said. With a weary sigh she read the message. Although she had written to him only twice and scrappily, he had kept the most astute check upon her movements. There had been a cable waiting her on the ship. Letters at ports of call. Once by a strange ingenuity he had succeeded in delivering yellow roses to her breakfast table. And when the ship docked in San Francisco, there he would be waiting on the quay below, his arms full of flowers, and over the lunch table three hours later he would be making his seventeenth proposal. And probably this time she would accept it. She was twenty-four. One was better married than not married. After a certain point one needed the status of a married woman. Edgar would make her a good husband; would not be exciting, romantic, adventurous. It would be cosy, though. It was silly to wait for what almost certainly did not exist. Men were mice. One ended by marrying the most persistent.

  And so it was with a feeling of depression, of frustration, that she stood on the upper deck on a pearl-grey April morning as the ship swung slowly through the Golden Gate. The kick had gone out of life. She had lived twenty-four years and had nothing to show for it. She had been halfway round the world and had nothing to show for that. She was now going to settle down into domesticity. She had had her chance. She had missed it. It was over now. It would end when the ship docked against the quay. So certain was she that it was ended, that when she saw no flower-festooned Edgar waiting her, when instead the ship’s agent brought on shore a telegram signed “Edgar,” lamenting that an important case had taken him to Santa Barbara; and when a young man presented himself with a letter from her parents explaining that they were staying at a house party down the coast, from which they had not thought it worth while coming up to San Francisco, particularly as the son of the house was himself coming down that way and would escort her, she felt like a prisoner who had been reprieved.

  “One more day of life, anyhow,” she thought. And she laughed gaily with a sense of fellow-conspiracy at the young man whom the letter had presented to her. He was young, blonde and handsome. His grey-blue flannels fitted closely to the lines of his tall, well-built figure. His tie of grey-blue Spitalfield, matched very admirably his grey-cream shirt. In his breast pocket there was a crepe handkerchief. He had a friendly, open smile. Marda felt that she had never been so pleased to see anyone in her life.

  “I thought it might to fun,” he said, “to motor there.”

  She could imagine nothing that would be more fun. Nothing that could be a more delightful contrast from the grey homecoming she had predicted, with its lunch, its proposal, its engagement ring. With eager excitement she watched this agreeable young man who had rescued her from so grim a fate, manœuvre her luggage faster than anyone else could through the customs, checking the heavy cabin trunks through by rail, moving the two light suitcases on to the back of his roadster. As she sat at his side and the car swung out southwards along the coast, she had a feeling of embarking on adventure. How varied and surprising, after all, life was. You imagined yourself being forced by tiresome and familiar people to do things which were inevitable, but against the grain, and instead of that you found yourself beside a delightful person, whom you were meeting for the first time, doing something utterly unexpected, delightful. And as the car raced over the smooth, winding road, he talked to her in a firm but sensitively cadenced voice, telling her of this friend and of that, and then when he had exhausted his own news, questioning her of hers: asking her of this place and that, friendly, intimately, so that she found it the easiest thing in the world to talk to him. And when he said, “But besides all that, didn’t you have any real adventures?” she found it easy to say quite naturally:

  “One thinks things are going to be adventurous, and then they don’t turn out to be.”

  And he nodded his head. “So you’ve found that too,” he said, and the modest, uncynical way in which he said it tightened that feeling of comradeship she had with him.

  “It’s months since I’ve been able to talk like this,” she thought, “fully, openly. I don’t believe there’s a thing in the world I’d not be able to say to him.”

  The car raced on through the clear, sun-soaked April air. To the left of them there were the pines and to the right the ragged rocks with the Pacific breaking on them. It was lovely after the long days on the ship to be on firm land again, lovely after eight months of strangers to hear talk of one’s own world again, lovely when you felt hungry to stop by the roadside and eat a hot-dog, leaning against a counter, lovely to see a man produce a hip flask from his pocket and say: “Now this really is real Bourbon.” After they had lunched they seemed to drive rather slower as though they had more to say to one another, or rather of one another, as though each wanted to tell to their newfound confidant those personal things that could not be freely spoken.

  After a while he began to talk about his work. He was in real estate, he said. But he did most of his business on the golf-course.

  “Are you good at golf?” she asked.

  “These things are relative.”

  “That means I’ll have to play with you to find out.”

  “We could stop at Del Monte if you like on the way through?”

  “Wouldn’t that make us very late?”

  “Would it matter particularly if it did?”

  And they laughed together, and at Del Monte they parked their car.

  “How many strokes are you giving me?” she asked.

  “I’m not giving you any. The fun of golf is, that you start each hole square.” He outdrove her by sixty yards, and he did the first hole in four, and the second in three, and at the turn he was seven up. But all the same she had played better golf than she ever remembered to have played before, and she was very proud of the two holes that she had halved, and prouder still when she sunk a five-yard putt on the thirteenth green and won the hole. And she was very happy walking beside him in that familiar world of firs and sea.

  By the time that their game was over, the sun was sinking and the shadows were long.

  “We’ll have to hurry,” she said.

  “Unless,” he answered, “we were to have dinner here.”

  “How late would that make us?”

  “It depends how long we were to sit over dinner.”

  And his eyes twinkled, and she got again that jolly conspiratorial feeling of shared mischief. So they sat for a little in the club-house. And it was in Monterey at a little fish restaurant that they dined, and somehow as they sat looking out over the sea their sense of gaiety, their need to laugh together deserted them. They fell quiet and tired and happy-sad.

  “It’s good to be back,” she said.

  “I guess you must have been pretty lonely sometimes over there.”

  And she nodded her head. Yes, now that she came to think of it she had been rather lonely sometimes.

  “I know,” he said, “they talk about women’s independence and women’s freedom, but the half lot of it is awful nonsense. A woman needs someone to look after her.” His eyes as they spoke were soft, and they sat in silence for a little.

  “This is the happiest day I’ve ever had,” he said.

  She laughed at that, a little nervously. “I shouldn’t have thought you had much to make you unhappy.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s well enough,” he said. “But one could make so much more of it. The years go so quickly, one’s best years. Haven’t you felt that, ever?” She nodded her head quickly.

  “Yes, yes,” she said; she had felt that too.

  “I guess,” he added, “one can never make a fearful lot of one’s life by oneself.”

  And they sat in silence for a while, till the Chinese waiter brought their bill to them on a plate, and with a start they realised how late it was.

  “It’ll be eleven before we’re back,” he said.

  It was cold outside, and she shivered slightly.
/>   “You’ll be frozen,” he said, “we’ll have to wrap you in a dozen rugs.” With his free arm he held the rugs close around her, so that she was nestled close against his shoulder. And they drove on, his arm about her, her cheek rested against his, her hair touching against his cheek. They scarcely spoke till they had at last arrived and he had driven the car round to the garage. Then turning towards her in the half-light of the headlamp: “It’s been heavenly, all this,” he said. “Such a surprise, as the real things always are.” And his arm about her shoulder tightened for a moment, then dropped its hold.

  A moment later there were the bright lights of the house, the welcomes, the embraces, the eager questionings, but Marda was in no mood for the buzz of talk. She wanted to be with her own thoughts, alone. She was tired, she said, desperately tired. Could she go to her room at once?

  Leaning there, over the balcony, looking out over the dark moonless night, her memory recalled every incident of this day. The way he had looked at her. The things he had said to her. His words were still beating through her brain. All that about knowing the real thing when it came, about being unable to make much of one’s self alone, of the years that fleeted, of a woman’s need to be looked after. What but one thing could they mean? And the way he had looked at her. No one had ever spoken to her like that. One could not look that way unless.… She sighed softly, stretching her arms happily and drowsily above her head. To-morrow she would be seeing him again. How full life was of adventure and romance.

  “He’s marvellous,” she thought. He was unlike any man that she had ever met.

  Chapter IX

  It is very hard for the tourist not to make mistakes. He cannot assess the universality of what he sees. A New Yorker visiting London a month ago remarked that manners were an affair of taste, and that things were done in England which would seem shocking in America. I agreed, asking him to name a specific instance.

  “You would never see toothpicks on an American dinner table,” he replied.

  During the next fortnight I not only looked carefully for signs of a toothpick in every house I visited, but asked a number of my friends to pursue similar investigations. At the end of a fortnight one of us said that he had seen four toothpicks wrapped in tissue paper, in a wineglass on the mantelpiece of the smoking room in his club. But my American friend has returned to New York under the impression that toothpicks appear as often as not on English tables.

  My first evening in New York I dined alone in the grill room of one of the city’s ten most fashionable hotels. At half the tables waiters were serving either wine from bottles that were kept in ice buckets beneath the table or liquor out of flasks. I returned to England with the impression that wine could be, if not ordered, at least served quite openly in New York’s equivalent for Claridge’s and the Berkeley. And indeed said as much in an interview. I know now that it is not so. I have never since seen wine served in such a way in such a place. And I have been told by New Yorkers that such a thing could never have occurred at any time. I know it did because I saw it. But I have not seen it since.

  Very often the tourist misleads himself. When I received in California a vagueish invitation to “have some dinner at our ranch,” and was told in answer to my query what should I wear, “a tuxedo will be all right,” I bought in the belief that it would be suitable to a ranch and was what a tuxedo was, a black large-brimmed Mexican sombrero.

  Different words have different connotations. English newspapers make great play with American slang. But in actual fact slang is as little used in New York as it is in London. The average educated New Yorker would no more call a face a “pan” than a Londoner would call a face a “fizz.” The use however of certain phrases, such as “embarrassed,” “impressed,” “discouraged,” and “taken care of,” can cause misunderstanding. The frequent use of the word “embarrassed” made me think for at least a week: “Really, these people are self-conscious,” and I resented the frequent promises that I would “be taken care of.” I wished they would not treat me like a small child.

  It is very easy to make and to take false impressions. It is impossible to know what the sides of life which one encounters represent; impossible because it is only by living in a city that one becomes familiar, by an unconscious process of absorption, with the vast cohort of facts, faces, contacts, personalities that make such an assessment possible.

  The nature of setting is determined not by the prominent people in its foreground, but by the general background: not by those who belong to a number of worlds but by the less known whose lungs cannot breathe the air above a certain altitude. If, for instance, you are told that someone has got drunk and quarrelsome, you judge the nature of the party he misbehaved at from a list not of the prominent but the unprominent guests. Such an assessment the foreigner is unable to make.

  An example from the cricket field will serve: An Australian taken to a field on which G. T. S. Stevens and A. G. Doggert were making a first wicket partnership against the bowling of G. O. Allen, and Geoffrey Lowndes, would believe himself to be watching a first class cricket match. A Londoner would know, however, from the presence in the pavilion of A. D. Peters and myself as numbers eight and nine on the batting order, that it could be nothing but a light-hearted one day game. In no other atmosphere could Stevens, Allen, Peters and myself be appearing on the same field. It would be the presence not of Test Players like Stevens and Allen but Club players like Peters and myself that would determine the nature of the game. The Australian, who could not conceivably have heard of Peters and myself, would judge the match by Stevens, Allen, Lowndes and Doggert: and would form not only an entirely false impression of English cricket, but of the characteristic qualities as cricketers of Stevens, Allen, Lowndes and Doggert.

  Such difficulties are constantly met with by the tourist. And they are serious difficulties. Because if he is to form an idea of life as it is lived in a foreign country he needs to know exactly whom he is meeting and what the people that he meets represent. Particularly when a political issue is being discussed. He knows more or less the arguments that exist on both sides of any case. He is not going to be convinced by any repetition of those arguments. Opinions only become important when they are voiced by people who have earned the right to be considered. If I hear a young man in London whom I know to frequent the Bloomsbury parties, expressing certain views, I can judge the value and sincerity of his opinions by my knowledge of the Bloomsbury background. In New York I am only rarely in a position to do that.

  The tourist has to rely on guesswork: his conclusions are tentative. Any statement he makes should be prefaced by the words “I think.” At the same time the conclusions and the impressions of the tourist are valuable. Not only can he draw comparisons between one country and another, but because he has seen processes universal to his age working themselves out in different ways in different countries he can recognise the essential differences between those countries. The various shapes that the recent economic crisis has taken in the various countries of the world are both a symbol and an explanation of the differences between those countries.

  §

  It is one of the problems of contemporary politics, that the majority of politicians are in the widest sense untravelled. They legislate for conditions that are worldwide, with no practical knowledge of the world. They see other people’s troubles in terms of their own troubles: without recognising that though the appearance of those troubles may be the same because it was one universal earthquake that has produced those conditions, each case is different because of the different mentality at the back of it.

  It is not by our weakness but by our strength that we are betrayed. Nations as individuals are aware of their weakness and guard against it. The great qualities of the Australian people are their doggedness, their faith in themselves, their belief that they can do everything better than anybody else. Those qualities have determined the condition of their troubles. They have acted as though the rest of the world did not exist: as tho
ugh they could ignore the experiences of older peoples.

  France, with its lovely landscape and lovelier villages, with its high standard of culture, its comely way of life, its gentle manners, its deep love of its own soil, with no real wish to extend its frontiers, contented to guard and cherish what is its own, has created a narrow insularity of outlook that was parodied in the Broadway song “Fifty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong.”

  English life is tolerant, broadminded. There is no interference with private liberty: there is a love of the middle road: a refusal to be flurried: the resolve to maintain a balanced mind: backed by the certainty that an Englishman is never beaten. Those qualities inspired the policy of drift that brought the country very near to bankruptcy. The pioneer spirit of America with its passion to build; its readiness to destroy what has ceased to be of service, its faith in the future, built higher than its roots, creating a system of credit that crashed in the autumn of 1929.

  §

  To understand that crash at all one had to have been in the States during the boom period: during those years when gilt-edged shares paid thirty per cent dividends, when stocks bounded: when everyone bought new cars: when the mine of fortune seemed inexhaustible. Manhattan’s skyline was then the symbol of success. People will tell you that New York is not America: in the same way that people will say that London is not England—though New York is far less the United States than London is England; since London contains the country’s parliament and court. Americans will say that New York is just an organisation of which the United States makes use. They may say that. But New York is the biggest city: and the richest city. The best brains are there. It is the intellectual fountain of the country. It is in close touch with the European civilizations from which the United States came. It is the first and the last city to the traveller. The skyline welcomes him. It is to the skyline that he waves farewell. During the boom years those vast buildings, that whole atmosphere of destruction and rebuilding were symbols of prosperity of a new life built upon the old. If its atmosphere was intoxicating to the foreigner, how much more must it have been to the American himself. As whole blocks were rebuilt overnight, as a summer in New England brought him back to a changed city, how could he resist the optimism and flamboyance that Europe watching from a distance found overpowering?