So Lovers Dream

by Alec Waugh

  At the word ‘Ganymede’, he paused. Joan Malcolm was on her way back to the States then. And the Scythia was a slow boat. It might be that Stanley’s letter travelling by the Bremen had overtaken it.

  ‘Have you got a copy of today’s Times}’ he asked.

  A copy was discovered. He turned to the shipping. The Scythia would dock that morning.

  ‘Could you find out where the Scythia is?’ he asked.

  He had not to wait ten minutes. The Scythia had just passed quarantine.

  ‘Then you might telephone this telegram,’ he said.

  On a sheet of paper he scrawled the message. ‘Welcome back. If you have a spare minute any time, do ring Caledonia 5-5627.’

  Within ninety minutes his telephone bell had gone.

  ‘It’s Joan. Joan Malcolm. Darling, how did you know I was on that boat? I hadn’t told a soul. There wasn’t one person here to meet me. Yours was the only telegram.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘At the customs.’

  ‘Are you through them?’

  ‘Not within sight.’

  ‘Shall I come down and help you?’

  ‘Angel!’

  He found her beside a large pile of baggage, awaiting the arrival of a final suitcase. It was cold. She was buried close into a vast fur coat. As he saw her, there came that excited flicker of anticipation and recognition that she always brought him.

  ‘You look fine,’ he said.

  ‘I feel fine.’

  ‘Here’s that suitcase.’

  He got the customs official for her. He fastened the trunks after the paper stamp had been affixed. He found a taxi.

  ‘Where’s all that going?’ he asked.

  ‘Most of it’s checked through to the Lafayette.’

  ‘Are you lunching anywhere?’

  ‘Darling, how could I be?’

  ‘Nor am I.’

  ‘I suppose you know all the speakeasies?’

  ‘I’ve a pocketful of cards.’

  ‘You are a blessing!’

  They had only met twice before. At the cricket match nearly four years ago and in her dressing-room for those few minutes. But he had the feeling that he had known her all his life, as they chatted together while the taxi rattled them across town; as they undid the luggage in the hall of the Lafayette; as they sent the taxi back northwards to the East Fifties, as they sat opposite each other in one of the few speakeasies that did not look like a night club, and in which the waiters were not familiar.

  She told him of her plans. She was going to Los Angeles, probably, with ‘Ganymede’ for a two months’ run. They were going to make a picture of it afterwards. No, she was not sure if she was going to get the part. She did not know yet what her screen tests were going to be like. If they were all right, and her picture was a success, she would probably be made an offer by Paramount. Would she accept it? Would she, hell!

  They chattered about London. She had been just crazy about London. She had been heartbroken to leave it. And had she left any broken hearts behind her?

  ‘Oh, darling, I hope so. One, at any rate.’

  They had laughed at that. Wasn’t she sure that it was broken? Englishmen are so reticent.

  She told him about their parting. He had come to see her off in an M.C.C. tie. Its yellow and scarlet had shone garishly against the drab gloom of Paddington. ‘I keep this for very sober occasions,’ he had said to her.

  ‘That’s as good as saying that you’ve only to lift a finger and he’ll fly with you to China,’ Gordon said.

  ‘What should I do with him in China?’

  Again they laughed. They were always laughing. He had never had a companion with whom he had felt so at ease. She returned to the subject of Englishmen.

  ‘Are English women as reticent as that, too?’ she asked. Gordon supposed they were. He thought of his long love affair with Gwen, in whose course the word love had not once been mentioned, whose nearest approach to sentiment had been that final ‘Bless you’ in the crowded Strand. He supposed that he and Gwen had cared as much for one another as people did outside grand passions; if there were such things.

  ‘I don’t know how you ever get yourselves understood if you’re both like that.’

  ‘We talk shorthand.’

  ‘It’s very difficult for foreigners who don’t know how to read it.’

  He supposed it was. He supposed that it was there that half his misunderstanding with Faith had lain; that they wrote a different shorthand; that he had not realized that her apparent absorption in him, her telephone calls over the Atlantic, her insistence upon his constant company meant no more than Gwen’s unpossessiveness had done: that it was a transatlantic gesture; just as his own seeming irresponsiveness was the English way of speaking in an undertone. Had not Faith said to him: ‘How can I tell what I’ve meant in your life?’

  And, ‘Do you know,’ Joan was saying, ‘that there wasn’t even a cable from him on the boat!’

  ‘The English don’t send telegrams.’

  ‘Oh, Gordon, don’t they? Won’t there be any answer to the long night-letter I’ve just sent off?’

  ‘As likely as not, there won’t.’

  ‘But one must answer telegrams.’

  ‘He’ll answer it with a nice long letter.’

  ‘Gordon, I’m so glad I’ve met you. I’ld have cried my eyes out if there hadn’t been a telegram tomorrow.’

  He asked if he was rich. Not a dime, she told him. He was young, and insolent and lovely.

  ‘Insolent!’

  ‘You can’t think how rude he was to all my friends. I felt so proud of him.’

  And suddenly before Gordon’s eyes there rose the picture of him, a counterpart of the bicyclist. Did not there run right through a man’s life the same woman in different forms? Did not there run also the man who touched that side of her he himself left untouched? Was it not almost certain that Joan between whom and himself had they met under different circumstances love might have blossomed, would be attracted either by such a man as himself or the kind of man by whom that other side of Faith had been touched and held?

  ‘He’s insolent, and young and proud,’ said Gordon. ‘He does masterful and gentle things.’

  Joan started. ‘How did you know that?’ she said.

  ‘You’re not sure of him. He makes you unhappy, you’re jealous of him; desperately jealous. You’re more fascinated by him than in love with him. But it’s something that you feel you’ll never forgive yourself if you let go.’

  Joan’s beautiful dark eyes grew wider.

  ‘How did you know that?’ she gasped.

  He did not answer. He wanted to hear more about this man. She would want to talk about him, he knew that, to anyone who would be likely to understand.

  ‘Where did you meet him?’ he asked.

  ‘At Twickenham. He was playing for the Harlequins. I couldn’t take my eyes off him all the afternoon. Then he came back in the same train with us, and friends introduced us.’

  ‘He was playing three-quarter?’

  ‘How could I be expected to know that?’

  ‘Anyhow, he wasn’t in the scrum.’

  ‘He didn’t put down his head and push.’

  ‘I know him, then.’

  His name was Clewer Green, and Gordon had met him during winter sports in Weiner. They were both staying at the same hotel. It was the first time that Gordon had ever gone there. The previous Easter he had been to Finse. There is no better ski-ing to be found in Europe. The snow is dry and soft. The sun shines out of a blue sky steadily. The day began with the vast varied Norwegian breakfast. The cold bordt spread with fifty dishes; with cold meats, with fish, with cheese, with eggs. A panorama of hors d’oeuvres. You set out after breakfast, with sandwiches in a knapsack on your back. For six or seven hours you climbed and flew over the white expanse. You returned exhausted; with your muscles loose, your brain a-doze, to sit in the twilit drawing-room before the smoking log fire. Rarely had
he felt so supremely well. He had imagined that Weiner would be like that.

  It wasn’t. It was like going to school again. Within a half-hour of his arrival a bustling secretary had told him where he could hire skis. ‘You’d better practise a little on the nursery slopes this afternoon. Then we’ll put you on your third-class tests tomorrow. And as soon as you’re through those, you’ll be allowed to go on runs.’

  On the boards in the hotel passages were placards with notices about tests and runs and competitions and awards. Everyone wore or was trying to wear some badge or other. Caps and shoulders were studded with the gold and silver K’s. Everyone was being dragooned into the passing of some test. The standard of ski-ing was very high. It was as professional as only a public schoolboy can make a sport. Nothing but ski-ing was ever discussed. The importance of a hotel guest depended on his capacity to ‘take it straight by Lone Tree slope.’ The women looked like men, the men like prefects at a public school. It was in this atmosphere that Gordon had met Clewer Green. Green was a cricket blue, a first-class footballer and a member of the Oxford ski-ing side. He was very handsome. He was popular. His photographs were very frequently in the illustrated papers. He was definitely one of the Weiner bloods.

  Talk would cease when he came into the dining-room in the same way that the chatter of the fags in the Fernhurst cloisters had ceased when a cap had passed. He was also afflicted with a very marked inferiority complex. Gordon, during the ten days of his stay in Weiner, got the benefit of it.

  On the first evening Green came up and began to talk books to him in the same way that a social climber will discuss drawing-rooms. As the snob will only mention those places and people, familiarity with which may be expected to confer credit upon himself, so Green mentioned only those books that he thought he should have read; speaking of them not because as books they meant anything to him, but because he imagined that knowledge of them would increase Gordon’s opinion of him. Gordon, however, who had great respect for Green’s powers as an athlete and none at all for his industrious study of Marcel Proust, in the same way that a person socially established will, in the presence of a snob, discuss only his less creditable acquaintances, drew parallels and instances only from writers of whom Green would have imagined that a reading would cast an unfortunate reflection on his literary taste. At first he had thought Green was an extremely tiresome person. Later, when he had contrived to change the subject of conversation, he had discovered him to be a pathetically self-conscious person, desperately aware of the fleeting nature of athletic success; aware that he was only asked to parties because he was a blue; suspecting that he would be ignored when his body lost its suppleness; afraid that at forty he would find it extremely difficult to hold his place in life.

  He quite genuinely despised himself. ‘What’s the good of me?’ he would say. ‘I’ve got quickness of eye. I’m strong. I can run fast. But that’ll go. What’s going to happen to me? Because for the moment I’m talked about and asked to places, it’s worth a stockbroker’s while to pay me a reasonable salary for the sake of the business that I bring him. People do business with me, not because I know much about the market, but because they like to be able to say afterwards: “Green was saying this to me.” But they won’t want to say that when I’m no longer in the public eye. I shall be out of it by the time I’m forty.’

  He was desperately frightened of the future. Desperately conscious of his own deficiencies. To Gordon, who had had to handle him with the tenderest care, he had never appeared in terms of glamour or insolence or power. But he could understand how the deploying of that insolence before Joan might be a protective mask to restore to him his self-esteem. The Green that he knew was not the Green that fascinated Joan. As no doubt the Horton before whose beauty Faith’s resistance was as water was not the Horton that his men friends talked about. Just as he thought of Green with rather affectionate contempt as a weakling who had not come to terms with his limitations, so were there men who would say on the same note and feeling: ‘Poor Horton.’

  It was not difficult to see why Joan had fallen for him.

  ‘Gordon,’ she said, ‘how you understand!’

  He compared the mood in which he had received Joan’s admission from the way in which he had revolted against Faith’s admission. For Faith, to whom he had wanted to give everything, he had been unable to feel pity, he had been unable to give understanding. Faith had relied on him to see her through this trouble and he had raged at her. Joan, who had expected nothing of him, had found in him the one friend who could assist her. It was ironical that: that Faith should have made him for another woman the friend that she had needed for herself.

  ‘I’ve so enjoyed myself,’ said Joan, as they left the table. ‘When are we going to meet again?’

  * * *

  There was a publishers’ tea being given that afternoon at the Chatham to celebrate the publication of a presumed best-seller. Would she like to go to it? he asked her. She thought she would. At the tea they met Edie Wasserman who told them there was an amusing cocktail party going on at Muriel Draper’s. It was nine o’clock before Muriel Draper’s party began to look like ending. An hour before that they had found themselves with enough invitations to last them over the entire week.

  ‘It looks as though we should be seeing a good deal of each other during the next few days,’ said Gordon.

  They saw, in fact, extremely little of anybody else. They saw each other practically every day. Ringing each other up three or four times each day. They each knew where the other was at any given moment. He discussed her contracts with her. Should she sign up with Paramount straight away? Or wait till she had reached the coast? Awaited with her with anxiety the result of the screen tests; an anxiety that was turned by a more than favourable report into jubilant delight.

  It was as near a love-affair as anything could be that was not a love-affair. They needed each other for their separate reasons. They knew that there was a limit set: a date marked upon the calendar, after which she would turn westwards to the Pacific and he eastwards to London or the Riviera. They flung themselves into the friendship with the recklessness of those who know that what they build is transient. There was to some extent a shipwrecked sailors’ bond about their friendship. He was a foreigner and a stranger in New York. She had been away so long that she had lost her contacts. Her friends scarcely realized that she was back. As she was to go away so soon, she did not think it worth while to pick up the dropped threads. Besides, love is an islanding of oneself. The only thing that mattered to her was the man she had left behind; Gordon, because he was the one person that she could talk to of him, who understood the situation, had been taken upon that island. Not that they talked much of Green. Not that they talked much of anything. They chattered happily of one thing and the other, as people do when they are in love.

  They went to theatres together and cafeterias and cocktail parties and cinemas. They went to the Metropolitan Museum, to the Aquarium and on an absurd sight-seeing tour of New York in a glass-roofed car. They did all the things that Gordon had dreamed he would do with Faith.

  He had never enjoyed a comradeship so completely and so fully. He had never been able to feel so complete. Each knew what the other was about. They were both entertainers. They had both had to drive the same hard bargains with the demands of livelihood. They had both the same hard core of ruthlessness. They knew how little use the public would have for them when they had ceased to please. They were not going to let themselves be exploited under the guise of friendliness. They recognized that about each other. They understood, too, that point about the business side of an artist’s career that only a fellow artist really understands; understood how an artist, though he may stage-manage his career, though he does not produce an unmarketable article, though he drives the hardest possible bargains with his employer, though he extorts the last penny that he can, though he would not work unless he was paid to work, though he seems to be as hard-boiled as any financier on Wall St
reet, does not, in fact, work for the sake of money, but because whether in paint, in print, in stone or upon a platform, he has something that he wants to put across. They both knew that their job came first; that there was no sacrifice they would not make for it.

  They were talking once about her leaving London. ‘I thought I was going to die,’ she said. ‘I knew I’ld see him again, of course. But it wouldn’t be the same. I knew that. And then when they offered me a ridiculously small part in a ridiculously bad play, I so nearly took it. It would have meant being with him for another month at least, with the rehearsals. But I couldn’t. I felt such a meanie, but I just couldn’t.’

  ‘It’s always one’s work that comes first, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘Usually one knows it is. But there comes just one time when one’s not too certain, when one thinks that there’s something that may be more important.’

  ‘So you’ve felt that way too?’

  ‘I’ve felt that way too.’

  ‘And what’s happened to it, Gordon?’

  ‘I don’t know, Joan.’

  He didn’t know. It was over and it was not over. He never wanted to see Faith again, but every night he tossed restlessly, longing for her, through unsleeping hours. It was the hold that Faith had still on him that was preventing his friendship for Joan from sweeping him into a headlong passion. He did not know what it was that was happening to that one love that made him think there was something more important in his life than writing. He only knew that he was very tired. That the strain of the last months had grown too great. He had known that, the moment the last lines of his book were written.

  The last line of a book is rather like the last stroke in a boat-race. You will see right down the finish of a course a crew swinging apparently within its strength. The movement is measured, smooth, rhythmical. There is no sign of effort. You feel that they could continue rowing for hours with that even swing. And then the post is passed, and instantly every man falls upon his oar, collapsed and spent. The tension snaps. The crew has all the time been working beyond its strength.