So Lovers Dream

by Alec Waugh

  ‘I must be getting back,’ Gordon would remark.

  ‘I’ll drop you,’ Stanley answered.

  ‘St Pancras is out of your way.’

  ‘It is. We had better hurry.’

  And with a day fixed for their next game, they would drive through the quiet, lamplit squares of Bloomsbury to the thronged thoroughfare of the Euston Road.

  ‘Till Friday,’ Gordon would say.

  ‘Thanks, till Friday.’

  As Gordon hurried towards his train he pondered on the strange thing that is a friendship between two men. It is undramatic, it is slow of growth, with no surface difference from acquaintanceship. It is born out of an instinctive liking, nourished by shared interests and experiences. It can be dropped for months, for years; sometimes to be recovered, sometimes not. It bears the same relation to love that prose does to poetry. It has its rhythm, unmarked, unstressed, at times submerged, but existent and insistent, swelling to its hour of crisis, when the one has need of the other or both have need of one another. More often than not it is one-sided. At this moment he himself meant no more nor less to Stanley than he had ever meant, than Stanley twelve months ago had meant to him. But at this moment to himself Stanley was the one person in London that could be of service.

  And the weeks would pass; and with them would pass too his trouble. And with that trouble’s passing would pass his need for Stanley. They would become again the unexacting friends of twelve months back; making no demands upon one another, meeting casually for squash rackets, for cricket, in the houses of their mutual friends. But with, on Gordon’s side at least, the memory of those harassed months to make it impossible for their relations to be casual.

  Looking ahead, picturing the time when he would have no longer an immediate need of Stanley, he pictured the time when the need that had forced that need would too be at an end. He knew that such a time must come: as he knew that old age would come: that death would come. But it was a time too far off for him to picture. The time must come when either his life and Faith’s would have become one life, or she would be no longer a part of it. That he knew must come. But he could not picture the slow stages by which he would learn to forget the days they had spent in Villefranche. She had taken the whole of his life into her possession. At Villefranche little by little she had taken charge of it. The discontinuing of his day’s ordinary routine; his visits to Antibes and to Nice: his rowing across the bay to the Lutitia beach; his visits in the evening to the Summer Bar, was a shedding from his life of everything that was not concerned with Faith. And now, away from her, the same condition of isolation stood. There was a date marked upon the calendar. Before it nothing mattered. After it nothing mattered. When at the end of a morning’s work he would count up the number of lines that he had written, he would think: ‘I’m fifteen hundred words nearer to New York.’

  Every word that he wrote was directed towards Faith. Never before had a book of his been so bound up with anyone. Not only was every sentence so many words closer to the sailing of a long lean liner, but it was also closer to the penultimate scene to which every scene was secondary, in which he would explain to Faith all that she meant, all that she had meant, all that she would mean, when the hero, sitting alone on the balcony of Basso’s restaurant, would be thinking: ‘In two hours’ time my ship is sailing. For three more years it will be farewell to Europe.’ He is seeing for the last time a setting for white faces. And sitting there, he will remember the spirit in which eight months earlier he had sat there. The comparison of those two moods would explain to Faith all that he longed to put in the letters whose writing she forbade him.

  His longing for her during those weeks was very great. She was at the back of everything he thought and did. The memory of her voice would return suddenly to him, to spoil any moment when he found himself relaxing to enjoyment. At cinemas, he would be startled by the pitch of an American voice, vaguely reminding him of hers; in the street by chance resemblances of features: by eyes or a mouth like hers, by the modelling of a chin.

  Endlessly, during those wakeful, sleepless hours, would he turn over and over the various aspects of the problem. Away from Villefranche and its island atmosphere, in a world where the sun did not shine, it was no longer possible to ignore material considerations. It was a matter of exchange. One could not have a thing both ways. During the long nights of an autumn that turned chillingly to winter, he rehearsed and rehearsed the conversations with which when he reached New York he would argue out the situation. He would quietly put the facts, one by one, in front of her. He would not try and stampede her into action; he would make no appeal to her pity; to her mother instinct: that masculine equivalent for the disarmingness of a woman’s tears. Whatever happened, her life must not be ruined. One thing she must realize clearly, though: she would have to make a choice, she could not keep both her husband and himself.

  And as he argued, he thought how a year ago he would have welcomed just such a situation; with a well-off married woman, who would not pester him with bridge debts nor demands upon his time; whom he would be able to fit into his life, pigeon-hole into his masculine routine along with squash rackets, cricket and travel. It was precisely such a relationship that Faith, if she was not actually offering him, would be, at least, ready to accept. But because he loved her, he had no use for it.

  Of what she was thinking, of what was happening, he had no idea. Occasionally she would send a cable that told him little, that was little more than a signal waved friendlily across the three thousand miles. In a way he was rather glad that she had kept her resolve not to write. He knew with what jealous eyes he would read and re-read the letters; reading into them meanings she never meant. It would not be of any person he would be jealous. He trusted her as much as he could trust himself. To her as to him, surely, after Villefranche any thought of any other person would be impossible. It would not be of that that he would be jealous; but of the things she would be doing, of the parties, the theatres, the dances to which she would be surrendering her interest; that would be helping her to forget him; of those he would be jealous.

  It was better he should not know.

  Of the trouble that had taken her back to Paris, he knew nothing either. The American news that appeared in the English press was fragmentary. The Stock market had collapsed again. There was talk of unemployment; of bread lines; of farmers ruined by the drought. But how far this meant that the life of the individual was affected, he did not know. He had, a year earlier, heard of decimated fortunes; but he had found in New York a life of display and extravagance and seeming prosperity. It was not real money, they said, that had been lost; not money that had been saved; not capital on which income and consequently a standard of living depended. He remembered when a rubber slump had hit Penang how everyone claimed to have lost a fortune. But the pahit parties had gone on. There were long accounts of the State of Chicago being unable to pay its policemen and officials, but there were still a great many millionaires along Michigan Avenue. He had read many articles describing the parlous plight of England, but he had seen smiling faces in the English villages; he had seen queues outside theatres, publishers advertising the fortieth-thousand copy of a best-seller, champagne on every supper-table in the Berkeley, a vast number of privately-owned cars, a generally high standard of living throughout the country. He could not tell how far the newspaper reports about America actually reflected the condition of the country. Himself he would not believe that things were serious till you could buy a quart of rye for six-and-a-half dollars. When the bootleggers cut their prices, then there would be cause for worry.

  Every week he had himself sent the Sunday supplement of the New York Times. As he turned its pages the photograph leapt out at him of a small Italian upon a bicycle. ‘Georgetti’ it read, ‘is training for the next series at Madison Square Garden.’

  He turned the page quickly. Yes, there it was. On Monday week the races would be starting. And it was Tuesday now: eight days since the issue of the
number. It was yesterday that the races had begun. At this moment the riders would be racing round the banks of Madison Square Garden, with Faith perhaps looking down at the man who had once so stirred her.

  He ran his eye down the list of competitors. They were Europeans for the most part, with an Australian and a Canadian couple entered. The names meant nothing to him. He realized suddenly that he did not know the name of the man who had done masterful and gentle things. He did not know his nationality. The list told him nothing. At that moment perhaps, while he sat in the coffee-room of the Black Furnace at Shenley, she was within a few yards of the man about whom she did not know how she would feel were she to meet him again. He looked at the clock. It was a few minutes short of midday. Eight o’clock in New York, that was to say. She would probably, almost certainly, be at home now. He crossed over from the coffee-room, through the bar, to the private part of the house.

  ‘Mr Freeman,’ he said to the proprietor, ‘I’m going to be very extravagant and ask your telephone to put a call through to New York.’

  Mr Freeman’s features expressed appropriate astonishment.

  ‘It must be very important,’ he said.

  ‘It is.’

  The Black Furnace line was an extension. Usually when one lifted the receiver one interrupted the conversation of a neighbour. It took a long while before he got through to the American service. It was certainly the first call that had ever been put through to the United States from the Black Furnace, and probably the whole village of Shenley had not sent too many. There was a further delay from the American service. They were insistent in explaining to him how much the call would cost.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Gordon impatiently, ‘I know.’ Every minute it seemed to him would be likelier to take Faith out of the house. He sat irritably by the telephone waiting. It was ten minutes before an answer came.

  ‘Would he be prepared to take the call at ten o’clock,’ it said. ‘Yes, he would take it then,’ he said.

  Ten o’clock. Six o’clock by New York time. And she had left the house a little after eight, or she had been in the country. Was only just coming back that day. It would be nearly ten hours before he knew. They were hours that ordinarily he knew well enough how to fill.

  His days at Shenley followed an unchanged routine. At quarter-past eight he would get up. Breakfast would be at nine. After breakfast he would read his papers for half an hour. There would be no post. He never had letters forwarded while he was at work. For a few minutes he would stroll in the garden. Then he would settle down to work. He would work solidly till one. By one o’clock usually, the pedestrians and the commercial travellers would have begun to arrive for lunch. On the arrival of the first he would leave the coffee-room and go for his morning walk. No matter what the weather was, he would do a six or seven mile walk every day. It would be shortly after half-past two that he would be back. The last of the lunchers would be preparing to leave the table. He would sit and talk to him while his own lunch of tea, two boiled eggs and salad was prepared for him. He would work till half-past five; till the bar was opened and the stream of motorists began to call for their whiskies and their ports and lemon. It would be the time then for his evening bath; with after it the companionship of the tap-room and his supper.

  It was a simple routine. But on this day he could not, when he returned from his walk, settle down to his usual five minutes of chat with the representative of a St Albans grocery who, every Tuesday, in a horse and cart, included Shenley in his rounds and stopped at the Black Furnace for a steak and bitter.

  Ordinarily, Gordon was amused by the conversation of the little weedy man with the straggling moustache and imperfectly concealed cockney accent. He was sixty years old. For over forty years he had been employed in the same firm of provision merchants. He had., as a small boy, run errands, delivered parcels; as a young man, waited behind the counter. Now, in his late middle age, he was rewarded with the responsible job of visiting country customers, collecting orders, seeing that previous orders had been satisfactorily executed.

  ‘If you’d told me forty years ago that we’ld be delivering out as far as Shenley, you could have knocked me down with a feather,’ he told Gordon. ‘When all except local people wanted anything, they had to come in to us to fetch it. Once a week someone from a local grocery would come. But now. . . .’

  He was very proud of his firm’s development. Over fifteen hundred pounds turn-over in a week. But he was at the same time very alarmed at the way other firms in London were developing. As he had trotted in his pony-cart round village lanes he had noted with consternation the vast vans of Selfridge and Harrod rattling past him. It wasn’t fair, he complained, to take away local business.

  ‘Isn’t it what you did with the small grocer in a place like Shenley?’ Gordon answered. ‘Once he used to come to you to buy for his village. Now, because transport’s simpler, you prefer to deal direct with your customers and cut out the middleman’s profit.’

  ‘No,’ said the traveller, ‘that wasn’t the same at all.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Gordon, ‘if soon all the business of this kind wasn’t run from London. If Selfridge and Harrod and the rest bought up all the minor shops, and ran a system of chain stores right through the country.’

  ‘If that’s what’s coming, I’m thankful I shan’t be here to see it. No,’ he went on, after a pause, ‘that won’t happen. People like the personal touch. I bring the personal touch. They like dealing with the same person, year in, year out. They like that five minutes’ chat, every three days or so. I see that that chat’s personal. Do you know what I do to make it personal? I’ll tell you. Every morning I look at my list. I say, “Who am I going to see today?” I know each person, what they like and what they don’t like. At Steebing, now, there’s an old girl who likes a bit of spice. Then there’s the man at Manely who’s just mad about Bolshevism, and there’s that young feller at Sympson’s, a smart bit of work he is, who thinks the Arsenal is the only side playing football. Well, what do I do? I read my morning paper. I find out a little paragraph that’ll suit each. To the old girl I say, “That’s a funny bit in the paper about the girl who said she was only watching the swans at Hampton Court. Looks a bit funny to me. How does it to you?” And she’ll chuckle and forget about the tinned apricots that got sent to her instead of pears. And then for the old Bolshevik man I’ll find something about a socialist agitation in Leeds. We’ll agree that fellows like that should be put in gaol; on the strength of that he’ll probably order a bottle or two of port. And then for the young feller I’ll say, “There’s no one like Charlie Buchan in football nowadays.” Personal touch, that’s what gets ‘em, and every time.’

  Gordon would lead him to discuss his customers.

  ‘What was the spicy one you found for the old girl today?’ he would ask. And a minute later. ‘And how did it go down?’

  ‘Ate it. She simply ate it,’ he would be told, ‘ordered a new line of soap at once.’ But today Gordon was too restless, too impatient to be interested in the skill with which Arsenal’s defeat at Stamford Bridge had been presented so as to appear a moral victory.

  Three thousand miles away, under the arc lights, the figures were pedalling round that wooden basin; with Faith watching perhaps, her heart beating quickly, her lips parted, her eyes following, following; held by a feeling different from anything he had ever touched in her.

  His restlessness grew as the day advanced. He had to play ‘Banana Oil’ over and over again before he could get his mind concentrated on his work. And when, shortly before six, with enough of the day’s work done, he came down into the tap-room from his bath, he could not enter into the familiar jokes.

  As ten o’clock drew nearer his nervousness increased. He sat in the parlour, looking with hypnotized eyes at the contrivance of wood and metal that was to be converted in so short a number of minutes into a living presence. The bell rang. It was the American service speaking. Was Mr Gordon Carruthers th
ere? Right. Would he stand by? The call would be through any moment now. He waited. When the bell went again, he so expected to hear that there would be a delay owing to atmospheric conditions that he could not really believe that the call had started. There was a curiously vague buzz. The operator’s voice. ‘Speak to the lady!’

  Then Faith’s voice.

  ‘Hullo there! Yes, hullo!’

  It was so clear that she might have been in the room. Yet it was not the gold-toned voice that he was hungry for. It was Faith’s voice, but it had a preoccupied, an anxious note. ‘Is anything the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. I just wanted to hear your voice.’

  There was the sound of a laugh: a relieved laugh.

  ‘That’s fine, then; I was worried. I thought something might have happened.’

  ‘No, nothing’s happened.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Did you go to the bicycle races today?’

  ‘As many hours as I could escape.’

  Another pause.

  ‘When are you coming over?’ she asked.

  ‘As soon as my book’s finished.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘The middle of December.’

  ‘That’s not so far away.’

  ‘It seems centuries to me.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘I’ve been so missing you.’

  ‘I’m glad of that.’

  ‘How are things?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Business and all that.’

  ‘Not too hot.’

  There was another pause. Gordon had placed a watch in front of him to count the seconds flying. They had only been talking for a minute. He could not think how they were going to keep the conversation going for the remaining two minutes.

  ‘I had to hear your voice again,’ he said. ‘You seemed so far away.’

  ‘Did I?’

  Through the pause that followed he remembered the many times he had sat with a receiver to his ear, longing for the talking to end, itching to be away, but waiting for the other to end the call.