The Wars of Love

by Schorer, Mark;

  I walked slowly back, and even before I came to the gallery, I saw that the police were there, two of them blocking the door, two others with the ambulance.

  Jo told me most of what had happened, but some of it I learned from Dan himself as he talked incoherently through the wire that separated us in the prison. A number of things had happened between the time that he had ordered me out of the gallery and that last day. At the beginning of the year, for example, a play had opened that caused a good deal of controversy. It was the most vigorous of all those anti-fascist plays that were coming and going, and it involved, beside a good deal of shooting, torture and murder of peculiarly violent and perverse sorts on stage. Milly and Freddie had tickets, and had assumed that Dan would have no interest in going with them, but for some reason, a rare determination to test himself, perhaps, he insisted on going, too. Milly and Freddie said that under no circumstances was that possible, that the play would completely upset him, and then that, very well, none of them would go, it was just another of those propaganda things anyway. But then Dan insisted, and finally all of them went, and in the middle of the first act he became violently ill and had to be taken out of the theater by Freddie and an usher.

  He was home, in bed, for a week or more after that, and when he went back to work he found himself in such a state of nervous exhaustion that even the ordinary, routine matters of his business seemed like insuperable problems. He had reached the stage in which he had lost the power of all decision; decision, he assured me, not in matters of importance, but in the most trivial details, so that all his energies were suddenly involved in an interminable debate between pointless alternatives. A doctor decided for them that he must not try to go on, that Freddie would have to take over the gallery completely until Dan was once more able to do so. That he would never know that time again, Dan told me, he was utterly convinced; and for the first time, as he contemplated his own endless, gray, and invalided future, he resented Freddie. In a dim way, a picture of the true state of affairs was forming in his mind. Jo’s visit to the gallery flooded that picture with a light that blinded him.

  It was the morning on which Dan was to leave the gallery. He was going over files and accounts with Freddie. Actually, of course, Freddie was far more familiar with Dan’s business than Dan was, but some obscure impulse to preserve as much of his integrity as he could muster from the ruins had prompted him to enact this fiction that Freddie needed to be instructed. They were at Dan’s desk when Jo was shown in. The desk was covered with papers, and the large flat center drawer was open. The revolver which, as the owner of a gallery housing treasures, Dan was permitted to keep, lay there. He would not, of course, have calculated murder; nor would the mere presence of that weapon have been enough to bring him to it; a particular and fatal taunt was essential. That she made it was Milly’s vast miscalculation.

  Jo Drew had not planned to tell Dan of the way in which they had been deceived. That was damage done, she said, not to be undone. So she entered in a casual, friendly way and told Dan that she had heard that he was not well and that she hoped he would consider coming back to Windhaven. At first, Freddie was simply silent, and everything might have been all right if he had remained silent; but presently he began to bristle and bluster and finally he interrupted rudely to ask Jo to mind her own affairs.

  Dan was pleased to see her. He had not, for example, told Freddie of my call or that she was on her way. Now he listened to her carefully and even pulled himself together sufficiently to show her some deference, a kind of halting gallantry that moved her. But Freddie was outraged and asked her to leave.

  “May I talk to you alone?” Jo begged Dan.

  “Go away, Freddie,” he said.

  “I will not. Your welfare is our concern, not hers. Why is she here? We have a doctor. Who sent her?”

  “Get out, Freddie,” Dan said, and Freddie went. He went, however, to telephone Milly, whose apartment, after all, was not six blocks away. Then, while he waited for her, he listened at the door, and he burst into that private room where they were just before Milly arrived, just as Jo did tell, as she was forced, at last, to do, of Milly’s treachery and Freddie’s complicity.

  For when Dan and Jo were alone together, Dan slipped at once into one of his spells of despondency. She had offered him an alternative which, however attractive it may have seemed at first, was far too drastic for him to contemplate for long. He deplored his condition, he complained, he lamented; but there was, he said, no hope for him. He was best in Milly’s hands.

  Jo explained to him how mistaken Milly’s care had been, and showed him, in as much detail as she could command, what had been done to him. To this recital he listened with lethargic sorrow, and half assented. “Perhaps,” he said, “they were wrong, but they love me.”

  “I loved you once,” she said, and then told him the rest.

  Then Freddie burst in. He seized Jo and tried to force her out. He was yelling, “She’s lying, Dan. A lot of lies!” But Dan picked up the revolver from his desk.

  “Let her go, Freddie!”

  Then Milly strode in. “Put down the gun, Dan,” she said calmly. She was wearing that coat, which, under the circumstances, must in itself have been a kind of taunt.

  “This woman—” Freddie began.

  “Let her go!” Dan cried again, and raised the revolver.

  “I don’t know what lies she’s told you,” Milly said, “but I want Freddie to put her out, and I want you to put the gun down.”

  His eyes moved from Freddie to Milly, wavered, then back to Freddie. “Let her go!”

  “Put the gun down, Dan,” Milly said again.

  “Put the gun down, Dan,” Jo said then. “I haven’t told any lies, but put the gun down, Dan, and come with me.”

  Then Milly made her error. If he was asked again, he would put it down for Jo, but he would not put it down for her. In that moment, it must have been vanity at last and vanity alone that moved her, for she started to walk easily toward Dan, saying, and saying apparently with that smiling high scorn with which I was all too familiar, “Very well hold it if you like. It doesn’t matter. You couldn’t fire it, darling!”

  He fired it, and, as Freddie pushed Jo aside and ran to seize the gun, Dan turned slowly toward him and fired it again.

  Before the trial, I was allowed to see him only once. He pressed his forehead against that wire between us and poured out incoherent details of the shooting to me, and of the events of the weeks before, talked rapidly and desperately, in fragments, then, suddenly dispiritedly, and gradually fell silent. I had not come to hear that, and did not urge him to go on. For I had a responsibility in the disaster, since it was I who had interfered, and it was my turn now to talk rapidly and at length and with fervor, searching in him for an escape. But he did not seem to care, he did not listen.

  He sat on his stiff chair and shuddered, and his stare passed through me as though I were wire, too. Then I tried to comfort him. I tried to persuade him that there are climaxes in life when to go on living is not the major value, when a man saves himself through destruction, when a man’s triumph lies in his doom. But he was himself only a remnant, only a rag of a man by then, and he had really passed beyond moral assurances, as he had passed beyond salvation.

  And that, except for a coda that pertains only to me, is the end of the story. Is that coda worth playing through? Does it pertain, really, at all, this last part of what happened to me? Some voice insists that it does.

  Very well. But there are two questions: what happened to me in a final sense, and what happened to me immediately.

  I cannot answer the first very ably, and I am not at all sure that with the onslaughts of middle age, the necessity of reading glasses and the occasional extraction of a tooth, the deterioration of pleasure, and the confusion of all public issues—I am not at all sure that I have any wish to answer. I should like to leave it at the level of generality, to say only that I did not get the girl when I was still able to have a g
irl, and beyond that—well, we all read the newspapers, we all know that war is our condition, that everybody gets drafted in one way or another, that there is to be no peace in our time even though no one really seems to know why there cannot be. We can only ask why people such as those in this story can allow love to become such a fatality, and remind ourselves of the poet who wrote that “There never was a war that was not inward.”

  I can answer the second question, the question of my immediate fate, more easily, for it involves no speculation, only the facts again. After that last unsatisfactory session with Dan, I went to Jo’s hotel. A conviction bore me, the conviction of which I have spoken: that here was my salvation, that for me nothing yet was too late. I begged her to marry me. I held her for an hour, two hours, at a corner table in a paltry cocktail lounge, made her stay there while I told this story again, or as much of it as she did not already know. Once more I must have told it badly, for when I finished, she said, “No, I don’t like it.”

  And she told me why not.

  I left her. I fled through the lobby, ran down the steps and into the street. It was raining, and dazzled by rain and the long, bright reflections, and dazed besides, I started across the street against a light. Brakes screamed, horns blasted, and then I was like a small island around which the violent currents of traffic swept. Alone there, I was overcome by the old terror of the cliff wall. I was hanging over perilous air, and in some automatic gesture of recollection, I flung out my arms to grasp for rock as I hung there. Then the lights changed, and I limped across the rest of that street and then leaned against a building in the rain. My head was throbbing. I was shaking. Rain poured down upon me.

  Always I have heard a voice asking, who are you really? I heard it now, and now I could answer. You ask? I, THE PIG, the perfect pig, in the world I made!

  And still it was not over. Standing there in the rain in the city street, I could still wish for a chance, still, oh God, yearn for it, for another chance, even as, looking back over this whole stretch for a point at which it might have been really different, I could not see any place where another chance might ever have begun, for it all seemed to be made up of endings alone, endings and endings and endings, and no beginnings at all, never a place to start from.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1954 by Mark Schorer

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2528-7

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