My American

by Stella Gibbons

  But it was Mr. Antrobus who finally convinced Amy that the world of fame and fashion was not the world for her. She had been to a dinner given by a literary society at which he was also present, and had been excited and shy at the sight of him, for she always felt that it was he who had fired her ambition and made her into a “proper writer.” No-one had presented her to him, for the members of the society were many of them his friends and knew that George detested meeting promising young writers. He would grace the dinner with his presence, but be nice to promising young writers he would not. So Amy looked at him reverently from her place lower down the table, and was not in a mood to observe that he was drinking a good deal of burgundy; she only observed that he was making his neighbours laugh a lot and did not stop doing so during the speech made by the guest of honour.

  The dinner and speeches were boring. Both Amy and Mr. Antrobus decided to leave early, and as she was coming down the wide marble staircase of the restaurant, who should she see but the god himself, coming out of the gentlemen’s cloakroom and furling himself into his opera cloak with a dreary look on his face.

  At once she saw herself, as she so often did, going up to him and saying, “Mr. Antrobus, do you remember me?” and then she saw him put his parrotty head on one side and cry: “Why it’s little No-Boy-and-No-Brothers! Of course I remember you.”

  All the time she was thinking this she was flying down the steps after Mr. Antrobus with her cloak billowing out, and by the time she got to the foot of the stairs she caught up with him.

  “Mr. Antrobus!” she said eagerly.

  He turned, mechanically pulling off his hat.

  “Do you remember me?”

  Mr. Antrobus put his head on one side and considered a tiny, glowing, romantic girl with diamond stars in her hair and a red satin dress under a dark blue cloak like a soldier’s.

  “Of course,” said Mr. Antrobus, speaking carefully in a thick voice. “Of course I remember you, very well. How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m very well, thank you.”

  “Still living in the same——?” inquired Mr. Antrobus, swaying.

  “Well, you see——” she began, but Mr. Antrobus went on, swaying even nearer towards her:

  “How about dining with me? Would that amuse you?” And he put out his hand, gropingly, towards her bare neck.

  Amy suddenly remembered Old Porty, her father, and Mr. Beeding.

  “No thank you. It doesn’t matter,” she said very politely, and ran away from him, across the empty hall and out into the rain, where a fatherly commissionaire got her a taxi and was made even more fatherly by a five shilling tip. Because he’s got such a nice face, thought Amy confusedly, sitting back in the taxi. Beastly old Mr. Antrobus, I hope he’s sick. And she began to cry.

  After this incident she became quieter and less easy to entertain than ever, and as even the most intelligent and charming people in London could not go on entertaining a wittol and moron for ever, gradually, though it continued to read her books, Lady Welwoodham’s world lost interest in Amy Lee.

  She was deeply troubled by her failure to get on with people. She was intelligent enough to see that it was her own fault, and she began at last to wonder if she were very different from everyone else, and why. She had never thought much about her own character until this, her twenty-third year; she had identified herself with the people in her dream world, and had loved the memory of her mother, and had enjoyed her writing and occasionally (when she saw a man buying one of her books from a railway bookstall or a woman reading one in the tube) her fame. But she had never thought of herself as the outside world might see her until that sad, disappointing summer last year when Lady Welwoodham had tried to launch her into a circle of delightful new friends.

  That summer seemed a long time ago. For the last year she had been out hardly at all, and had seen fewer and fewer people. She had told Mr. Humfriss that she did not want to attend literary luncheons nor to make speeches to women’s clubs, and Mr. Humfriss protected her very thoroughly from all such activities. He realized that she was not one of those writers whose income is increased by their social life; it did not matter to the audiences who flocked to see the film of her latest book whether she went out or stayed at home. She was rich enough and well-known enough, as a name, to afford the last luxury of a successful writer in the modern world: she could be private. Besides, the literary luncheons and women’s clubs did not want her, for she had no glamour and nothing to say. Mr. Humfriss’s own opinion of Amy was that she was a fool with a gift. He did not mind how quiet she kept, and neither did Jeremy Aubrett.

  She was also secretly troubled by her failure to attract a proposal of marriage. It was not that she wanted to be married; she had never thought much about marriage or about love, and her new way of living had not made her think more. But it upset and annoyed her because a certain kind of witty and elegant young man, which was the only kind she had met at Lady Welwoodham’s parties, did not trouble to conceal his dislike of her books and, it was sadly plain, of their writer. This young man (he was all rather alike, and it was difficult to remember him apart) was often a balletomane or an interior-decorator or a dress designer. He accused Amy’s books of being subconscious Fascist or Communist propaganda, according to which way his own political dislikes lay, and when he had no politics but was a classless, nationless Artist, he accused her stories of being insensitive and brutal. It hurt Amy’s pride as a girl, as well as her pride as a writer, that these exquisite, goddish creatures should so clearly find her unattractive. And she was so lonely!

  In fact, the only bright spot about Amy’s venture into the great world was the way she got on with His Majesty’s Fighting Forces.

  At Lady Welwoodham’s parties she had more than once met military men in high positions and Air Force officers and important sailors, all of whom enjoyed her books and were prepared to admire their writer, and these admirers had offered to let her into all sorts of places where the general public never got.

  “Might be useful, perhaps?” diffidently suggested the soldiers and sailors and airmen. “If ever you’re writing about that sort of thing. … Getting copy, I believe you writers call it, don’t you?”

  These offers pleased and flattered her very much, and she had made careful notes of the names of the authoritative creatures and had later written polite letters asking if she might come to see whatever it was they commanded, as they had so kindly suggested, on such and such a day. She had always received a cordial permission, and had enjoyed tea after the visit in all kinds of Messes with demure Ranker-Members of H.M. Forces to hand the toasted scones and go off at the double for more hot water.

  Her hosts in the Services enjoyed these visits as much as she did. When they found that the writer of those grand yarns China Walk and Make Way for Death was a little girl just as high as their hearts, pretty in an unusual way and well-turned out, whose shy but polite manners did not conceal her interest in everything they had to show her and her admiration for themselves and their calling, the soldiers and sailors and airmen could hardly do enough for her.

  Amy came as near losing her heart as she had ever done to a young naval lieutenant. He had the bluest eyes she had ever seen in a human head, and he never took them off her own while he murmured at her.

  All through tea he gazed into her eyes between half-closed lids, and murmured. His favourite word was wizard. (“I hear Buda-Pesth’s a wizard place.”) He was rather like a very young wizard himself, in his blue-black and gold, with those eyes and that murmuring incantatory voice, and Amy dreamed about him for two nights.

  But on the second night the blue eyes looking into her own changed to grey, and the face that came suddenly nearer her own was not the face of the young lieutenant. Yet it was a real face; it was not the vague face of a dream. She had awakened with her heart beating fast, and had lain awake for some time, listening to the low sleepless roar of London far in the streets below, and trying to remember the face in her dream.

&n
bsp; But in spite of her enjoyable excursions with the Forces, she made no friends and found no sweetheart among the soldiers and sailors and airmen, and gradually, after the first public interest in her as a person had died away, she found herself almost as much alone as she had been before she became famous. The dark-red satin evening dress, the three diamond stars for her hair, were put away in wardrobe and jewel-box and had not enjoyed an airing for months.

  Her days were passed in work. She discovered that it set her imagination dancing to wander through districts of London that were unfamiliar to her; and once or twice a week she slipped out of Hyde House, dressed in garments saved from the old days before Lady Welwoodham took her clothes in hand, and took the bus to Clapton or Southall or Manor Park, Alperton or Walthamstow or Catford. There she idled along the streets, letting the people, the sights and sounds and smells, strike upon her senses while her mind was in a dream. She would have her tea at an A.B.C., or even an eating house frequented by lorry-drivers and bus-conductors. No-one took any notice of a smallish dark girl in a shabby fawn tweed coat, a fawn hat, and hornrimmed glasses. She managed to look like a nothing; she was hardly there at all. But the strongest, strangest feeling of all came to her when she strolled past some gigantic cinema, blazing with lights and flaring with posters proclaiming:

  GARY COOPER

  in

  “The Soldier of Misfortune.”

  The world-famous novel by Amy Lee

  She would stand in the dusk, staring up at Gary’s lean delightful face next to the name of her story—the name that she had invented, and fierce delight would overcome her. At last the Hurrying People had been made to stop! Listen … I will tell you a story… and the Hurrying People who had haunted the dreams of her childhood faltered in their haste, turning curiously to hear what Amy Lee had to say. In every city in the world they stopped to listen to Amy Lee. It was wonderful, it was like one of her own stories, to stand among them, unknown and unrecognized in her shabby clothes, and watch the crowds moving in to see The Soldier of Misfortune, by Amy Lee.

  On the days that she was not wandering through London, learning the city, she went to the London Library or to the British Museum Reading Room and read up facts to weave into the backgrounds of new stories. She had discovered that her imagination worked best upon facts, stated in books of reference. On the few occasions that she had attempted to report, rather than to imagine, an incident, she had done bad work; once, in the middle of writing a book, she had gone to watch a liner sail, but the description she had afterwards written had been spoiled by too much detail. She used to think: I only need a touch, to set my mind off, and experience had proved to her that this was true.

  When she was not learning the city of London, or reading up facts, she was writing, high in her room above the Park, in that unnatural silence in which she was now kneeling at the window watching the last of the sunset. She wrote quickly and for hours at a time, emerging, when the inspiration suddenly failed, cold and ravenously hungry and sleepy. She would either go down to a meal in the restaurant on the ground floor of Hyde House or send down to Service for whatever was on the menu; and sometimes she did not exchange a word all day with anyone except the maid who came in to clean the flat in the mornings and the man who brought dinner at night. Sometimes Lady Welwoodham rang up, or Mona Beeding (now married to a spotty young man connected with the London Telephone Exchange, and mistress of Trevarra, Parkview Avenue, Berrydown Estate, Esher) telephoned to say that she was Up for Swan and Edgar’s sale and could she pop in for tea? And Amy was always secretly ashamed of being so glad to see her. Mona never got tired of poking round the flat, examining Amy’s clothes, spraying herself with Blue Grass, telephoning down to Service for two Clover Clubs, pumping Amy to find out how much she earned, and generally bringing a breath of Highbury into Hyde House. But Mona did not often come to town, and Lady Welwoodham spent much of the year gardening down at the house in Hampshire, and Amy could not always be over at the Beedings—it would look so funny, they would think she wasn’t happy in her beautiful flat, if she went over to Highbury more than once every few weeks. And not to anyone would she admit how lonely—how frighteningly lonely—and unhappy she was.

  But in fact, Mrs. Beeding and Lady Welwoodham and Miss Lathom (with whom Amy still kept in touch) could see that everything was not right with her. All three women realized how unnatural her life was for a girl of twenty-three, even a girl with genius. All three, too, were sure that the terrible headaches that had lately been torturing her were due in some unexplained way to her unhappiness. She wore glasses while she wrote, and an oculist had assured her that the trouble did not lie with her eyes, so on Lady Welwoodham’s advice she went to the Welwoodham’s pet nerve specialist. He told her that the headaches might be due to half a dozen causes. He saw that she did not want to be asked if she were unhappy, and would not enjoy talking about herself, and he therefore asked her only the simplest questions. (“You have no worry, nothing is troubling you, that you’re aware of?”) He finally observed that more fresh air, light exercise, plenty of rest and sleep, could do no harm, and might do good.

  But he told Lady Welwoodham (whom he regarded as he would have Amy’s mother had she been living) that Miss Lee’s peculiar upbringing and lack of healthy family and social relationships, together with her super-developed imagination, causing what might almost be called mild delusions, and her strong sense of inferiority battling with an equally strong consciousness of unusual gifts, was quite enough to cause headaches and anything else from which Miss Lee might suffer. But he was as near certain as he could be of anything that the headaches would disappear when once Miss Lee had adjusted herself to a more normal way of living.

  “I suppose that means a husband and six babies?” tinkled Lady Welwoodham acidly; she was no feminist, but she knew more than one pastime that she preferred to husbands and babies.

  “A husband and six babies could do no harm and might do good,” smiled Sir Parham Blaine, indulgently.

  So that spring Amy walked alone in the woods, where yellow catkins trembled in the wind and the green leaves unfolded, and the sprays of beech were beginning to spread themselves in the warm sunlight. But although the delicious moist air of April brought colour into her cheeks, the woods made her so miserable that she wanted to die.

  She walked alone, crying noiselessly as she used to when a child, the tears running down her face and the same frightened loneliness on her spirit that had oppressed it in the dream of the Hurrying People.

  But when she was a child she had been able to retreat from loneliness and fear into her secret world; and now, when she was grown up and famous and rich, her secret world was becoming unreal to her, as if shafts of sunlight were breaking through the tattered walls of a sorcerer’s tent. Outside was the real world, covered with millions of people with homes and families, with their work troubles and their money troubles; millions of people loving and suffering and working under the blazing light of the sun as the Earth whirled round in space. And she knew nothing about any of these people, nor about the things they cared for. She did not like them and they did not like her. They liked her books (listen … I will tell you a story) but she was a nothing, a ghost in the sunlight.

  The power to love, that had slept in her nature since the death of her mother and fed in its trance upon the beings in her dream-world, moved in its slumber and wept. She did not know why she was miserable; she only stood staring at the green slope of a meadow with one golden tree in it, the clear blue sky above, the rich white masses of a hawthorn hedge lifted to the sun, and wished that she could die. Oh, what’s the matter with me? I’m the dreamer whose dream came true, and I wish I was dead.

  It was nearly dark, but she still sat at the window, staring unseeingly down at the people and wondering in a confused way why she had said that she would go to America. The romantic interest she had felt in that country as a child had faded, and the prospect of lecturing to hundreds of people terrified her, and so did the th
ought of leaving London, the only place where she had memories and friends. I must have been mad, she thought, to tell Mr. Humfriss I’d go.

  And suddenly, just as if a light had been struck in a dark room, she remembered that she was going to Vine Falls. She would not be utterly without memories in America. In the beautiful sycamore desk she still had the five-cent piece with the buffalo on one side of it and the Indian head on the other, wrapped in the original piece of paper with the name and address of the American boy who had given it to her ten years ago. She murmured the words over to herself as she sat there in the twilight:

  Robert … Somebody … (some name like Frost), Vine Falls, Paul County, New Leicester, America.

  I shall see the town where he lives.

  But I expect he’s left there long ago, it’s eleven years. Eleven years on my birthday this year.

  That was a queer picture I saw when I shut my eyes. It wasn’t like a dream, or the sort of picture I get when I’m seeing a story in my head. It was real.

  He was like my American, grown up. Only he looked ill and unhappy, and my American looked so happy, the only time I ever saw him.

  He was so kind. I do hope, wherever he is now, he’s all right and not (the words came unexpectedly into her head) in danger.

  She moved stiffly, and found that she had pins and needles. The window pane was cold against her forehead, and her headache was getting worse. Below in the streets the poor, the unlucky in love, the cruel, the disillusioned, and the mediocre, hurried past to their homes, and Amy, who was none of these things, stared down unseeingly at them from her tower.

  Some days before she sailed for America she went to a farewell supper with the Beedings.

  She got there about half-past six. It was May Day, and Mrs. Beeding was indignant because on her way out to buy sausages she had been held up by a procession of Communists and on her way back from buying sausages she had been held up by a procession of Fascists.