So Lovers Dream

by Alec Waugh

At that they both roared with laughter.

  ‘So that’s the kind of person Gordon is.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the kind of lad he is!’

  ‘You wouldn’t think it by looking at him.’

  ‘You certainly would not.’

  ‘He is, though.’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘And since I am,’ said Gordon, ‘I had better go straight away and send this telegram.’

  ‘And that’s that,’ he thought, as he walked down the passage towards the elevator. It was close upon one o’clock. He had had no restful sleep during the last two nights. He had lectured that day and the day before. He was very tired. And now he had to stay awake while two drunkards deceived a third. He could not reasonably hope to get much sleep before three o’clock. He turned the key in the lock of Francis’s door. It was there that the party had started, they had told him. It clearly had. Its curtains were laden with smoke. On its table was arranged a row of empty glasses. On the wardrobe were seven half-empty bottles of White Rock. There was a bucket of melting ice cubes. The bed bore the impress of the forms that the room’s chairs had been unable to accommodate. It was as squalid a scene as that which he had left. Francis’s wardrobe trunk lay opened and unpacked. In its upper shelf was a pile of folders and typewritten sheets. They were headed ‘The Third Convention of the Leather and Boot Industries of the United States.’ Beneath this, a line of red typing announced that ‘Prosperity is round the Corner.’ Above Francis’s bed was pinned a programme, announcing the lectures that were to be given, the debates and conferences that were to be held. At ten o’clock next day Mr Silas K. Bottenweiser, of South Bend, Indiana, was going to speak on ‘Imaginative and Co-operative Salesmanship’. He wondered how many of the convention would attend it, and how many of them would be able to listen to it if they did. He supposed that there were a good many of the people on the convention who took the convention seriously: but they were not the people, he suspected from his memory of board meetings and committee meetings, whose influence was considerable. And this was American big business. A lot of people meeting in a hotel and getting drunk. And this was the American wife whose influence over her husband was so extolled; who came on conventions with her husband and mixed with men on equal terms and was respected both as a woman and as a man; whose efficiency was the finest flower of American civilization; the American woman who had become one of America’s chief articles of export into Europe. What the American woman was today the English woman would be tomorrow. The American woman had got the bit between her teeth. The English woman would have in a year or two. Life had been pleasanter in the old days, Gordon thought, when girls had husbands found for them by their mothers; when wives shut their eyes and were hostesses and mothers. You had known where you were with women then. There were two kinds of women: the kind you married and the other kind. And when you made love to that first kind you assumed that it meant something. A kiss meant a proposal. When you made love to a married woman, you made it seriously. It was an honour rooted in dishonour. But it had been a kind of honour. There had been responsibilities and obligations on both sides. There was loyalty, and within its bounds, fidelity. There was something that you could rely on. That you could build a life on and round. You did not make love casually to that sort of woman.

  That had been thirty years ago; but now young girls kissed in taxis every third young man who tried to. In the same way that they let young men cut in on them at dances, they went away with them for week-ends and thought nothing of it. There was no reason to believe that because a girl had gone away with you for one week-end she would go away the next. And you fell in love with a married woman. You violated for her sake every law of guest and host. You let yourself be involved in impossible situations. You exchanged vows. You planned to run away with her. Things went the wrong way. You imagined her heart as well as yours was breaking. For three months she was not for a moment out of your thoughts. You planned so that you could come back to her, so that you should be in a position, should she wish it, to run away with her. Then you met her again, and the first thing she did was to talk to you about some other man, and expect you to be sorry for her because she couldn’t arrange to run three men simultaneously. It was justice he supposed. Women were behaving to men as for centuries men had behaved to women. Men had told women they were polygamous and got away with it. They had had mistresses, and expected their wives to shut their eyes. Had Faith behaved very differently towards Roger, Horton himself, from the way in which her grandfather had behaved towards his wife? She had gone unhesitatingly to her husband when he had needed her after all. Women were playing a masculine hand now. They had turned the tables. People said things were different for a woman. But were they. It was men who had said it after all. In a weary confusion inconclusively out of his heart’s confusion his thoughts drifted. On the chest of drawers among the White Rock bottles was a Gideon Bible. He picked it up. It fell open at the Song of Songs. For a couple of hours he nodded over its small print. Then the telephone bell went. ‘It’s O.K., brother,’ a voice informed him. ‘We’re coming along for you.’

  Fanny was looking three times as pretty as she had two hours earlier. Gregory’s puffed features wore a deflated air. Gordon assumed it had gone all right. In the large suite drawing-room, the party had begun to grow drowsy, amorous and cantankerous. A couple of men were arguing querulously. One man was asleep. An affectionate couple, close-clasped upon the sofa, were murmuring into each other’s ears.

  ‘Oh, boys, but that New York rye was smooth!’ No one paid any attention to Gregory’s announcement. Gordon excused himself. He wondered what his own room would be like. They had done their best to tidy it. The glasses had been washed. The quart flask that no longer contained a quart, placed neatly by his hairwash. But a number of sequins were scattered among his sheets. Something, he felt, should be done about them. But he did not quite know what. Besides, he was very sleepy.

  Among the many calling-cards that Gordon acquired as a result of the Trade Convention was one bearing Gregory’s address. It was the name of a house in Norwich, Connecticut. ‘If you’re anywhere round my part of the world, you’re not going to forget, are you, to look me up? I shall be certainly offended if I find that you’ve been through New England without seeing me.’

  A couple of weeks later Gordon was lecturing at Providence. It would be amusing, he thought, to break the journey at New London and see what kind of a home life Gregory had; and what the wife he described as ‘Moma’ was really like. He liked Gregory. Gregory was so completely a caricature of the American tourist, the American amorist and the American business man that he wondered what he was really like. You could not tell what a man was like till you had seen his home.

  The telegram saying that he was passing through New London was enthusiatically answered. Of course he was expected; and of course he would be met; and of course he would stay the night.

  It was late in the afternoon that he reached New London. The boats, frozen into their moorings by the dim-lit wharves, had a sense of history. The fields, sloping under a thin covering of snow, had an aspect of Southern shires. It was strange to step from the train into the flickering lights of a standardized transatlantic street. And the Gregory who met him seemed unfamiliar; seemed unlike the raucous tourist whom he had seen shouting round Riviera bars and the drunken amorist of Detroit. He was humbler, quieter, yet at the same time more assured; more rooted, as though he were where he belonged.

  ‘You’ll find us very simple,’ he said, as he led Gordon towards the car. But he did not say it apologetically, or self-consciously. ‘I built the house myself,’ he said. ‘You can’t think how proud I felt at having a real place of my own.’

  As they motored out through the mounting New London streets, he talked with a friendly openness about his early struggles.

  ‘You’ve got to get started early, if you’re going to get anywhere in this country. Yes, sir. And when I got married before I was twenty-one, why all my frien
ds said I had handicapped myself beyond recovery. And I guess there’ve been times when I’ve thought I could have gone a bit further if I’d been freer. But I don’t know, take it for all in all I figure it that it doesn’t do a young man any harm to be forced to take things seriously.’

  His quietness surprised Gordon. He had expected to find Gregory a blatant, ostentatious host considerably worse than Roger at his worst.

  ‘Well, here’s the place,’ he said.

  It was a hundred yards from the main road, half-way down an inclined slope. There were firs and banks of snow beside it. It was a frame building. With the lights shining behind its windows it had the look of a Wendy House. As they drew up before the door, he honked his horn.

  ‘We’re here!’ he shouted.

  ‘I’ll be right down,’ a feminine voice answered.

  ‘We don’t have a maid after lunch time,’ Gregory said. ‘That’s one of the luxuries we can’t afford.’

  Since Gregory was close on forty, and had married when he was under twenty, Gordon wondered whether he would not find the door opened by a heavy, buxom woman in the early fifties, who as an experienced woman of thirty had appealed to an inexperienced boy. She was not in the least like that. She was grey-haired; but she was slim, supple and athletic. Her handclasp was firm, but it was feminine. She was definitely an attractive woman. And in spite of the fact that she was wearing a rough apron overall she had a look of smartness.

  ‘I’m glad to meet you,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’

  Gordon rather wondered what it was that she had heard. Very few of the exploits that he and her husband had shared would stand domestic repetition.

  ‘I always feel jealous when Gregory goes off to make Whoopee by himself, but when he comes back he looks so ill, that I don’t feel I’ve missed so very much.’

  ‘We’re all bad boys sometimes,’ Gregory said.

  ‘It took you a week to get over that party in Detroit.’

  ‘That only happens once in two years.’

  Remembering the parties in Detroit and Villefranche, Gordon wondered whether a party with Gregory in New London would be a good prelude to a lecture in Providence, but it was very clear that it was not going to be that kind of party. Gregory was one of those who only make Whoopee away from home.

  ‘I’ll show you your room,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll show you the family and the house.’

  It was a small room, but clean and warm; with a bathroom opening out of it. Down the passage he heard the sound of a child laughing.

  ‘That’s the baby,’ Gregory said. ‘We’ve got a boy of fifteen, but he’s away at boarding school.’

  It was a jolly child: plump and red-cheeked and healthy.

  Gordon was introduced to him as a new uncle. ‘I will show you my toys,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll get on with the dinner while you’re being shown them.’

  ‘Moma’s a grand cook,’ said Gregory. ‘I never really enjoy a meal she hasn’t cooked.

  He sat on the edge of the child’s bed, swinging his legs cheerfully, while the boy set out his toys.

  ‘I’m making a boat for his birthday. I’ll show it to you afterwards.’

  It was in the cellar where the furnace was, that Gregory was at work on the boat. It was three-masted, and was two feet long. Gregory explained how he was going to put portholes in, and a taffrail. But he was puzzled about the superstructure. He had a very complete carpentry set. It was clear that the making of the boat was causing him more excitement than the sailing of it would ever cause the child.

  ‘I’d better have a look at the furnace,’ he said. He swung open a stove door; a ruddy glow came out.

  ‘Another couple of shovelfuls,’ he said.

  The coke was stacked in a huge pile against the wall. He shovelled it in with a long stoker’s spade.

  ‘That fire eats up money, I can tell you.’ He showed Gordon the kitchen, and an electric machine that did the washing.

  ‘Ever seen one of those?’ he said. ‘Pretty marvellous, you know. Things aren’t so difficult nowadays, for a woman. Sometimes I feel rather guilty about all the work that Moma has to do. But every year some new thing is invented to spare her trouble. And I daresay that really she’s happier being busy. I think most divorces come about because the wives haven’t enough to do.’

  He opened the door of the Frigidaire. ‘Think how much work that saves,’ he said.

  He put his hand in against a couple of bottles. ‘They ought to be nice and cool by dinner time. I always make my own beer. That’s all we ever drink here. It works out at fifteen cents a gallon. Bit different from bootleggers’ gin. And it’s good stuff, too.’

  He took a simple and honest pride in his possessions.

  ‘I must show you my books,’ he said. ‘They’ll interest you.’

  He was a subscriber to the Book of the Month Club. He had also bought on the instalment plan complete sets of Dickens, Thackeray, Winston Churchill and Bret Harte. They filled four shelves of a five-shelved bookcase.

  ‘Books furnish a room,’ he said.

  It was a nice room they furnished. High, thick-carpeted, warm, with coloured reproductions of Romney and Land-seer on its walls. They sat talking before a log-fire’s light, while his wife prepared the dinner. It was an admirable dinner. A New England dinner of boiled beef and dumplings, carrots and baked potatoes, preceded by tomato juice, and followed by a crisp, well-dressed salad and a high-piled chocolate ice. The home-brewed beer was light, with body to it.

  ‘You could search Hoboken for anything better than this,’ said Gregory.

  It was friendly, intimate talk that crossed and re-crossed the dinner-table. After dinner they sat over pipes before the fire. By ten o’clock they were all three feeling sleepy.

  ‘And by six o’clock tomorrow that kid of ours will be howling the passage down. I’ll just stoke up that fire. Then we’ll all turn in.’

  So this is what he really is, thought Gordon as he undressed. This is his real life. And all that other life of Riviera bars, and Detroit orgies is like a sailor’s blind in Villefranche, the outcome of a schoolboy’s feeling that he had got to make the most of any bit of liberty that came his way. And just as the sailor was judged by the broken bottles and the broken crowns along the Villefranche water-front, so was this kind of American judged by his shouting down the hotel corridors and noise in cafés and his over-tipping. Really it wasn’t him at all.

  They talked about the Detroit convention next morning, as Gregory drove him down to New London to catch his train.

  ‘Now what kind of good do you think a show like that does? Is it just a holiday, an excuse for making Whoopee?’ Gordon asked.

  Gregory shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s more than that. All that talk about debates and conferences and lectures is so much bolony. But it has a point. You get some idea of the fellows you are doing business with. We’re all so far apart, you see. Most business boils down to the personal equation. And you know what a man’s like when you’ve been on a show like that with him. You know who’s likely to get frightened when things get difficult; who’s over-enthusiastic; whose “No” can be persuaded to mean “Yes.” And whose “Well, I’m a little doubtful” means quite definitely “Not, at any price.” You can read between the lines. You get a letter or cable or a long-distance call, and you know what it’s all about. I think that convention was pretty useful, all things considered.’

  Gordon supposed it had been. At any rate, it was in the tradition of American business. That was the way they liked doing business. That was the way they got business done, by making a party of it. During his first weeks in America Gordon had been impressed by the hustle of telephones and cables: the appearance of getting things done quickly. But in point of fact, judging by his own experiences, Americans were not particularly businesslike. They could take a long view. But they were untidy and inaccurate in detail. They telephoned too much and wrote too little. They did no
t confirm their telephone talks. They forgot what they had decided. The quiet efficiency of a man like Stanley was unknown in Gordon’s experience of New York. People usually prided themselves on national characteristics that were not theirs at all. The English, a shy and sentimental people, claimed to be hard-boiled. The Americans claimed to be businesslike, when what they really had was a genius for play. No one could make a party go in the way that Americans could. They made their business into a series of parties. Their innumerable telephone calls with three wires busy simultaneously, were a glorious, complicated game of blind-man’s-buff. They had a genius for making Whoopee. They made Whoopee, of big business. And because they so enjoyed Whoopee, ultimately things got done. The English who did not like business: who apologized for ‘talking shop’: who felt there was something discreditable about an office: who kept their home and their work separate: who stopped all thought of work when they left their offices, in order to get their work done completely and quickly, practised a rigid technique of efficiency. Because the Americans had been able to create a technique of business based upon making Whoopee, so that they were able to enjoy their work, they threw more of themselves into their work than the English did. But their hustle certainly did not get things done quicker, better, more finally, than the Londoner’s assumed indifference.

  So Gordon argued with himself, as the train rattled its way through the snow-white New England countryside towards his discussion of the Modern Novel for the benefit of the Women’s Club, Providence, Rhode Island.

  Chapter Six

  It was in the middle of February that Gordon finished his first draft of ‘These, Our Women.’ By the first week in March he had delivered the corrected typescript to his agent.

  ‘The Bremen mail’s just in,’ the girl in the front office told him as he came through. ‘I’ll see if there’s anything for you.’

  There was: a note from Stanley. It contained local gossip. Business was slack, it said, and London quiet. He had only been to one party in the last fortnight. A goodbye party for the cast of ‘Ganymede’. They had gone straight from the party to the boat train. They had caught the Scythia. Gordon had glanced over the pages casually for a first reading, meaning to return to it when he was in his apartment.