My American

by Stella Gibbons

  “I don’t know, Amy. It’s difficult enough for the young ones nowadays, let alone old ones.”

  “Oh, well … we don’t care, do we, Mrs. Beeding?”

  “It’s a judgment on him, there’s no doubt about that,” agreed Mrs. Beeding.

  But her eyes, lifted from the knitting, rested just for an instant on the mink coat.

  Amy rode home in a taxi that night after the good-byes, the kisses, the good-luck wishes had been exchanged, leaving the Beedings grouped on the doorstep of 5 Highbury Walk waving her farewell. She leant back with a sigh, recognizing with dread the creeping onslaught of a headache, and shut her eyes.

  Now she had said her last good-bye. Lord and Lady Welwoodham were coming to the train to see her off, and she had looked in at the offices of The Prize yesterday to bid farewell to Mr. Danesford and Miss Grace. They had both been rather surprised to see her, but Mr. Danesford had given her his good wishes with the touch of condescension that he always kept for the former office-girl, poor Lee’s daughter. He had never quite forgiven her for deceiving The Prize about The River Boy, and only seemed pleased at her success because it was well known that The Prize had published her first story, and any fame belonging to Amy must indirectly belong also to The Prize. Amy always felt a little envious and depressed after she had seen him, because he was so plainly a contented man. She suspected him of having some private grief that darkened his life (though he had never once uttered a word that gave her cause to suspect as much), but his work on The Prize and his attachment to the paper seemed to make up for it. Amy was young, rich and famous, but she was less content with her lot than Mr. Danesford, the ageing sub-editor on a slowly dying magazine.

  Miss Grace had filled the office on the occasion of Amy’s farewell visit with the familiar hot-vinegar odour of envy. The words Upstart and Cheat seemed to hover in the air above Miss Grace’s elaborately curled head, and she could barely bring herself to give Amy a sour farewell smile. Miss Grace had worked off her feeling about Amy by building up an elaborate theory among her friends that Amy had a man friend who wrote all her books, based on the fact that Maurice Beeding had once rung Amy up at the office with some information about dog-racing which she wanted to work into a story. Miss Grace’s friends used to nod their heads and compress their lips and smile whenever Amy’s books came up in conversation, and if envy and hard work on the Man-Friend theory could have miraculously procured Miss Grace a mink jacket, Miss Grace would have had more mink jackets than she knew what to do with. But as she said good-bye to Amy Miss Grace had to face the fact that she had only a squirrel coney collar on a three and a half guinea coat. Small wonder that the vinegar boiled and seethed.

  I hate making people jealous, suddenly thought Amy, leaning back with her eyes shut as the taxi rattled through Islington. Miss Grace was awfully jealous yesterday because I’ve got a fur jacket. I liked thinking she was jealous, too, because I’ve always hated her, but to-night I feel miserable myself and everything’s in a muddle and beastly and I’m so lonely I wish I was dead.

  It serves Porty right. Why should I do anything for him? He’s never done anything for me. Why should you feel sorry for people who’ve always been beastly to you, and been wicked, too?

  But on the emerald walls of the Snow Queen’s Palace, that had never reflected any light but the lonely flashing of the Aurora, there must have gleamed faintly for an instant the common gold of daybreak. Before Amy sailed for America, accompanied by some smart new pigskin luggage, the kind farewells of Lord and Lady Welwoodham, and a lecture-schedule drawn up by Mr. Humfriss, she had put in the post two cheques. One was for a hundred pounds “for dear Mrs. Beeding with love from Amy,” and one was for twenty pounds, and made out to E. Talbot Porteous, c/o Murray’s Hotel, King’s Cross. With it went this note:

  “DEAR PORTY,

  I am sorry you are down on your luck. Please accept this. Wishing you good luck.

  AMY LEE.”

  Ungracious, stiff with dislike as the note was, all the icy bastions of the Palace trembled. For about its walls swept the first warm breath of the conquering spring.

  CHAPTER XIX

  AT FOUR O’CLOCK on a June afternoon Lou was still trying to make up her mind whether to go to Mrs. Boadman’s reception.

  She was sitting at the table in the sewing-room finishing the hem of a dress by hand, and thinking what a nuisance it was that a reception for an English writer in Vine Falls (where receptions were rare and English writers even rarer) should have to be held at the Boadman home. There were so many other homes to which Lou would sooner have gone!

  Since she had had to give up all hope of two years at a dress-designing school in New York, she had made it a practice to accept every invitation she received, sensibly deciding that a full social life in a small town was better than no social life at all. Parties in Vine Falls were dull compared with those imaginary parties in New York about which her fancy had played, but at least she was Somebody at the parties in Vine Falls, and it was more satisfying to be a big fish in a little sea than a frustrated fish who refused to swim in any social ocean. And, quite apart from her habit of accepting local invitations, she had wanted to meet this English writer; the dress she was finishing had been designed and made for this very ocasion. Oh, yes, she had been looking forward to it; it was only an hour or two ago that the quietness of the empty, sunny house had begun to creep over her spirits in a vague sadness, and then her depression had ended (as all depression did nowadays) in thoughts of Bob, and she had remembered how inquisitive and cruel Mrs. Boadman could be.

  “The hell with the old battleaxe,” thought Lou, reaching for the cotton. “I feel just like going out. It would take me out of myself, as they put it. There certainly is nothing like a quiet summer afternoon alone in the house for making a girl realize that time is fleeting. But if I go, that old heel is sure to ask if we’ve heard from Bob lately, and I know Miss Cordell will ask me right out where he is; she doesn’t believe a word of that Down South story, she as good as told Mother so. Oh, well. Maybe if I don’t open my mouth and stay all evening behind the radiogram. …”

  She sighed. Her nature from childhood had been curiously without illusions or dreams. She had never been unthinkingly happy, as most of the young people in Vine Falls were happy, but she had had a cool appreciation of the good things of life and the climate of her spirit had been equable, dry yet bright like a pleasant day in any season of the year. Now even this moderate happiness (Greek in its natural wisdom, although Lou did not suspect it) had been driven away by Bob’s disappearance; and when his sister sighed it was because she could not imagine ever regaining her former ease of mind. She had always loved Bob deeply, as a naturally sophisticated nature will sometimes love a simple one, and her distress in watching the misery that was torturing her mother, and the helpless rage that was making an old man of her father, was increased by her own ceaseless anxiety.

  But she did not believe that Bob would never come back to them. She had said to her mother, in the first dreadful days after he had gone:

  “I’m sure he’ll come back. I’ve got a cast-iron hunch he will. He’s so good, naturally good, like a dog or a nice kid. Life doesn’t smash up that sort of person. He’ll stop being crazy and then he’ll come home.”

  And this had been all the comfort Mrs. Vorst had been able to find in the three months since Bob had disappeared.

  For all efforts to trace Dan Carr by private detectives had been useless; and Mr. Vorst had been hindered by the fact that he did not dare to inform the police. If he had told them that his son was last heard of in the company of a small time gangster who had promised him “a job,” he might draw Bob into a net that would end in his ruin and death. The father raged, but he raged helplessly. The boy was of age and could do as he chose. So long as he did not drive a car in the State of New Leicester he was on the right side of the Law, and if he wanted to run with mobsmen, neither his father nor the police could stop him. He had chosen to share the gang
sters’ dangers and if he came up against the police in doing so they could shoot him, but they could neither arrest nor kill him so long as he did not break the law. A father could not say to the police: “I think my boy is in bad company; find him and save him for me.” And his family did not even know if he was still with Dan.

  Since the night that Helen had watched him walk through the doors of the Black Lake Hotel, silence had fallen over him, and not a word nor a glimpse nor a rumour had broken that silence. He might have been dead—except that had he been dead they might sometimes have spoken of him only with love and sorrow.

  The family had prepared a story that he had gone South to continue his medical studies in Louisiana, where Mrs. Vorst’s brother, the doctor, lived; and most of their old friends and neighbours pretended to believe it. But gradually Vine Falls as a whole had come to realize that something mighty queer had happened to Bob Vorst.

  This was the fault, naturally, of Myron.

  Myron had been surprisingly moved out of his usual malicious detachment by Bob’s disappearance, and he had not been able to hold his tongue after years of letting it wag. His contempt for his buddies in Vine Falls and his grudging loyalty to the Vorsts had prevented him from telling everything that he knew to the pool-rooms and bars, but he had not been able to prevent himself from hinting. The story had spread from south of the tracks to the residential district, and it was too good a story for people not to listen to it. Many kind neighbours disbelieved it, but many others did believe it and were both shocked and sorry, while a minority was eager to find out as many facts as possible and to enjoy a thrill.

  The Boadmans came in this last class; and that was why Lou did not want to go to their home to meet the famous English writer Amy Lee.

  But towards five o’clock, when the dress was pressed and hanging by the window in the sunlight, Lou’s desire to exchange the quiet of the sunlit house for voices and company proved too strong for her, and she went upstairs to put on the new dress. After all, she thought, if I’m there I can at least quash any stories that old battleaxe spreads around, and maybe she won’t say so much if I’m there, either. I’ll go.

  Amy stood in the centre of a group with a polite serious expression on her face, listening. In one hand she held a glass full of golden drink and in the other a cigarette from which a piece of ash occasionally fell to the ground. The large room was full of people and the air was thick with smoke, and if anyone there had had ears sufficiently sensitive to mind an ugly noise they would have noticed the ugly noise of voices talking foolishly and fast, like ghosts gabbling in Hell. But no-one noticed the uproar except Amy, and she was getting used to it, for it seemed to her, as she stood there politely listening and sometimes sipping her golden drink, that for the last two months she had lived in an uproar and had never been away from crowds of people.

  Her heart (already troubled by its own coldness before she left England) had been touched by the admiration, the kindness and hospitality which she had everywhere found in America; and she felt that she was a kinder, friendlier person than she had been two months ago because of the welcome she had received; it was impossible not to be warmed by so much kindness. But she had made no friends, although she had made many pleasant acquaintanceships which might have ripened into friendships had they been given time, and there had been times when she had found herself wishing rather drearily amid the clamour and the crowds that she had never come to America.

  It was not the America she had loved in the stories of her childhood; the Land of The Free, where the feathered headdress of the Indian and the black face of the negro were woven with the white hood of the prairie schooner and the dull gleam on the rattlesnake into one marvellous tapestry, bordered with the red maple leaves of the fall. It was just a country new to her, where she liked the people and enjoyed the novel food and the sense of great tracts of country lying all about her; but where her chief happiness, so far, had been in those moments when she had recognized some custom or object (distorted by time but still identifiable) that was dear and familiar to her from the pages of American books she had loved in her childhood. And there had not been many of those moments.

  The tour had seemed like a confused and noisy dream in which she, its central figure, obediently read aloud the lectures prepared for her, and was afterwards applauded, fêted, and asked questions which she found it simplest to answer by a shake of her head, a nod, or a smile.

  But it had been a comfort to realize that the Americans whom she met at receptions seemed to like her better than the English people she had met at Lady Welwoodham’s parties. The remarks that she made about her stories or about the news of the day, her mild little jokes and her shy inquiries about those things in American life that interested her, were received by Americans with attention and apparent pleasure, and she had found, with a heartening sensation of being understood, that she could talk as “ordinarily” (as she called it) to most Americans as she did to the Beedings.

  Her only encounter with that doubtful and amused expression which had disturbed her when she saw it on the charming and intelligent faces of Lady Welwoodham’s friends had been in New York, where her agent gave a party for the Press to meet Amy Lee. Some of the smart newspaperwomen had looked at her knowingly, as if they could see that she was playing a joke on them, and some of them had been condescending, as if she had been a soppy kid. And when the interviews appeared in the New York papers some of them had had headlines like: SO SIMPLE: AMY LEE RIBS NEW YORK, and others had said: JUST A DAISY IN THE FIELD: AMY LEE CAN’T TALK. It had been unpleasant, and had cast a shadow over the beginning of her American tour which had only been dispersed by the simple kindness she had met in the smaller towns.

  (The newspaperwomen, in fact, were still wondering whether Amy was too green to be real or whether she was the most sophisticated thing that had hit the city since Dorothy Parker. Their experiences had prepared them for reporting every type of publicity-hunter except a person who never thought about publicity at all, and it was not unnatural that they had fallen down on the story).

  Amy’s childhood interest in America had revived at the prospect of visiting the country, but it had again faded as the weeks went on and she did not find her dream-America except in the kind hearts of its people. Her itinerary took her from cities to small towns and back again to cities, and she could never stay long enough in any one of the places she visited to absorb its special atmosphere; therefore all American cities and small towns seemed much alike to her. Only New York had seemed different from all the other places. In spite of her unfortunate experiences with the newspaper-women, she had liked the sparkling streets of New York under its hard blue sky, and had been sorry to leave it. And now the tour was nearly over, Vine Falls was the last town but two on her itinerary, and here she was in Vine Falls, the only town in America which was linked with her childhood, the only place where someone had once lived who had seen her and talked to her when she was a little girl living in a secret world.

  She had looked forward all through her tour to visiting Vine Falls, hoping wistfully that there, in the town with the pretty name where her American had lived, she might find the America of her childhood. But on alighting from the train at the depot she had been gushingly received by a large smart woman called Mrs. Boadman and a committee of ladies, who at once whisked her off to the hotel where the lecture was to be given; she had barely had time for a glance through the windows of the car before they arrived.

  However, she had seen a brightness in the air, a profusion of snowball bushes and lilacs in the gardens, a glimpse between the houses of distant hills lending mystery to the view, that made this town seem different from all the other places she had visited; and all through the lecture, and even now as she stood in Mrs. Boadman’s apartment listening politely to an elegant middle-aged man talking about American literature, she was wishing that she could slip away by herself and explore Vine Falls. She wanted to wander through its streets as she did in London, unrecognized and in
old clothes, watching and listening and remembering that day long ago when she had talked to the American boy outside Kenwood House. He would be grown up by now, of course, and gone away; Americans did not live in the same place for years as English people did, but it would be delightful to wander through the streets where he had walked to school and think about him.

  I suppose (Amy lifted her glass and took a sip, her light brown eyes fixed steadily upon the face of the elegant elderly man) the way I’ve always felt about that American boy is the nearest I’ve ever been to being in love. It’s awfully queer. And it was queer, too, seeing the picture of that young man with his head on the red cushion looking just like my American grown up.

  I do wonder what my American looks like now?

  And then she happened to glance away from the elderly man for an instant towards the crowd in the background, and gave such a start that she nearly dropped her glass.

  A face, smiling under a slanting grey hat like a young man’s, was moving slowly towards her.

  Her heart began to beat fast. She could not take her eyes from that face—so strangely familiar and dear!—whose owner was working her way through the crowd. Her way, for Amy could now see that the face belonged to a girl of her own age, elegantly dressed in dark grey. But the high cheekbones, the shape of the grey eyes, the sweet wide mouth, were those that had haunted Amy’s imagination ever since the evening in her flat when she had seen the picture of the young man asleep on a red cushion. And as she stared, she realized that this was the face that had come between her own face and the blue eyes of the young lieutenant in her dream; it was the face of her American, Robert Somebody, grown-up!

  The girl had now got clear of the crowd and was approaching their little group, with a faint wary smile. She held a pair of dark red net gloves in one hand and was swinging them gently as she came up.