Mr. Smith/XIII

Although I did not recognize Maby at first sight that day on the road, she knew me at once. This seemed odd because in Crescent City she was a fairly mysterious and spectacular person about whom people talked a great deal and whose very appearance on the streets caused people to turn and look and make comments. On the other hand I myself was simply "Mr. Smith" a typical citizen, almost a kind o impersonal symbol.

She smiled and said, "Oh, hello, Wolcott! Thank God somebody came along!"

I got down from the car and said, "You aren't hurt, are you?"

"No, at least I don't think so... nothing that shows." She was astonishingly calm to have just come through an upsetting experience and one which might have been disastrous.

"Will you take me home?" she said. I'll get someone to send for the car."

That was the beginning as simple as that. There is always a point in the relations between a man or a woman when one or both can see what is coming, perhaps foresee the hurt or the disaster that lies ahead, and turn aside before it is too late. Sometimes of course one senses the disaster and rushes toward it, perhaps because the driving force of desire is so great that the achievement of the end seems worth any misery or disaster, and with some, I suppose, the unhappiness, the disaster, is of no consequence because it is in reality a part of the whole and complete experience. I can only speculate about these things since of course I cannot answer for others and no one really knows the heart of any other person. Certainly at that time I was unaware of what was to happen, and even though I had divined something of the unhappiness that was finally to come, I might not have turned aside, for at that moment I was ready for any experience, no matter what. Inwardly and secretly, in the spirit, I was both sick and desperate. As for Mary, she may have known all along. Certainly of the two she was the more experienced.

On the drive back to Mary's house we made the most conventional and trivial conversation. I noticed only one thing once or twice I found her regarding intently my profile, so intently that I could feel her regard.

I had not been on the grounds of the big Victorian house for more than twenty years and doubt that I had been even in Mary's part of town more than once or twice since that time, and I was surprised that the house and grounds had changed so little. The neighborhood had become greatly altered and the near-by houses, once more or less pretentious, had fallen upon shabby days and turned into boarding houses and tourist "homes," but like an expensive luxurious island in a sea of shabbiness, the old house stood proud and well kept. The iron grillwork of the tall barrier which surrounded all the lawn and garden was freshly painted with black paint. The same iron deer and dogs, freshly whitewashed, stood on the lawns among the ordered, circular, and crescent-shaped beds of geraniums, kohlias, salvia, and lobelia. The driveway must have been freshly raked only a little while earlier, for there were no automobile tracks or even a footprint on the blue-gray limestone gravel. The whole place was a museum piece out of the past.

As we drove under the great high porte-cochere Mary said, "Better come in and have a cocktail."

"Delighted," I said, shut off the motor, and followed her into the great cross-hallway which led from the porte-cochere into the main hall of the house.

At the foot of the great stairway the old desire to slide down the long wide rail returned to me and I spoke of it. Mary laughed and said, "I used to think of it sometimes, but I never did any sliding. There were never any children about to join in the game. Sliding alone wouldn't have been much fun. The impulse always died."

Then she raised her voice and called, "Nicole! Nicole!" and a voice from above stairs answered, "Oui, cherie" and Mary called again, "We have a visitor. Come down!" and then incongruously the voice called back, "Okay. I'll be right down."

Then Mary turned to me and said, "Would you like to have a look around? You remember the house. I haven't changed anything," and I became aware of the music which filled the whole of the place. It seemed to pervade every room, coming from some invisible source. It was pleasant music and I commented on it and Mary said, "Yes. It's a ballet called “Giselle” I'm very fond of the ballet. Do you like it?"

"I've never seen a ballet," I said.

"No, I suppose you haven't. It's a great art," and with that she appeared to dismiss the whole subject.

It was true. She had changed nothing in the big old house. There was the same old heavy furniture and the great gilded baldachins capping the high windows with their curtains of red velvet, the same marble-topped tables and consoles, and the same thick heavy dark carpets which must have been renewed since my day. It was as if she had sought to arrest the corroding flight of time and change. The odd thing was that the furnishings and the decorations which in my youth had been considered old-fashioned and ugly and indeed I myself had considered them so had somehow changed and were now beautiful. They had, it is certain, a great look of richness and even dignity as compared with the houses of my own world, all decorated in mud colors by Mr. Banville, so alike that you could not tell them apart.

She said, "Do you like it this way?"

"Yes." And then Nicole came into the room.

She was a small thin dark woman with black hair in which there was a streak of white. Her eyes were small and intensely bright and intelligent. She moved in a small quick bird-like way, like a song sparrow. I almost expected a flick of a tail. She might have been forty or sixty. It was difficult to make a certain estimate.

Mary said, "This is Nicole Villon, a great friend of mine."

The little dark woman shook hands with me and said, "Delighted, Mr. Ferris." She pronounced my name with a distinct hiss at the end.

Mary said, "Tell Alexander I'm home and to bring the cocktail things to the veranda... and thanks a lot."

When she had gone out Mary said, "Nicole is a very old friend. She sometimes travels with me. She is part French and part Rumanian. She is very clever. She writes for the French journals," and I was aware that Mary had sent Nicole for the cocktails because she wanted time to explain her and I was also aware that Nicole knew why she was sent out of the room and approved.

Then Mary led us to the veranda on the north side of the house where it was cool. Here I discovered the only change. The north veranda had been screened in and was furnished with comfortable wicker furniture upholstered in bright-colored chintz. From the veranda there was a wide view of the whole of Crescent City. I had not seen this view for twenty years and I was struck suddenly by how much the landscape had altered during that time. Here and there rose the towers of new tall buildings. The familiar roofs of whole streets of houses had disappeared and in their place were the broad wide roofs and sheds of factories and warehouses with the late afternoon sun painting whole sheets of their windows the color of fresh blood. The hills beyond the river, which once were covered with trees and only a scattering of houses, were now bare of trees. Where the virgin forest had been in my grandfathe/s time there were rows of streets lined with houses all exactly alike. The change had been going on steadily and so gradually that I had not noticed the complete transformation until now when I saw it all at once from the same angle after almost a generation.

It was no longer the town it had been in my grandfather's day or even the town it had been in my own boyhood. This town which I saw from the veranda of Mary's house, this town in which I had spent the whole of my life, was a stranger. It was not even a town but a great city in which, in a way, all of us were lost. It was quite beyond control, spreading out, crossing the river, climbing the once wooded hills on the far side, growing here, dying and rotting there, but it was a living thing possessed of a colossal vitality. It had neither remained static nor had it begun to die. It was possessed of an empty dynamism which forced it to grow and change but without order or direction in a kind of cancerous fashion in the midst of the once rural, almost primitive landscape. And somewhere in the midst of it I, and many others like me, was lost and confused, belonging neither to the old strong dominant generations which had cleared the way out of a desert wilderness nor to a new generation which might, if God willed it, dominate and channel and bring to real fruitfulness all the violent and dynamic forces which were loose, growing, expanding, spreading aimlessly like the growth of a cancer, a growth which did not know where it was going, unguided by any ideal or philosophy save that of bigness and speed and material wealth. Perhaps it was more like a plant growing on an unbalanced diet, rapidly and aimlessly until at last, without order or support, it collapsed to earth once more.

I had had enough to drink not to mind standing there in silence looking at the 'spectacle, permitting my soft, ambitious, undisciplined mind to wander and to speculate. All this and the things which had grown out of it were a long way from the day of my two immediate grandfathers. How in such a world was a man to be strong, to have character, to dominate his surroundings, to find the way out for himself, his children, or his friends? Suddenly it seemed like a tower of Babel which one day would collapse because of its very pretentiousness and pride.

For a moment I fancied that I divined why Mary had kept this immense and flamboyant old house exactly as it had always been. It was a monument, a museum, a rock, past which had swept the torrent of mediocrity and uniformity, a torrent of ranch-type and bungalow houses, and picture windows and scatter rugs and dull conforming minds, of universities like ant heaps turning out clod-brained athletes and hordes of uneducated and mediocre drones, and clubs and government bureaus and do-gooding and taxes, worse than those of the ruined and decayed Roman Empire.

Out of such a torrent no civilization was ever built, for it was a torrent in which there was nothing of taste or individuality, or respect for the mind or the spirit, or even ethics and morality, in which even science was largely dedicated to destruction. In some ways it was uglier than the rotting desert of the Dark Ages when man lived again by his own wits and civilization, burning with a brilliant enduring light, took refuge in monasteries and fortified farms. In such a world there would at least be some satisfaction. A man could be a man.

I heard Mary saying suddenly, "You're thinking how much it has changed since we were children," and I started at the fashion in which she had read my thoughts. It was a trick she had, as I was to learn later on.

"It's almost unbelievable," I said. I'd never noticed it before."

"I would notice it more than you because I'm away for at least half the time. I could keep this place as it was, but I couldn't control the whole of the city."

Suddenly I asked, "Do you like it here?"

She smiled. "I don't really know. I needn't tell you why I have to come back. Everybody knows why. That makes a difference. If I came back by choice I'd probably like it more... or perhaps I wouldn't come back at all. I don't really know. I like it because my father loved it here in this house."

She moved to the table as Nicole returned followed by Alexander, an ancient colored servant from her father's day, who came in bringing ice and glasses and the things for making martinis. She looked at me with a quizzical look. "I suppose that surprises you. Most people never thought of him as liking Crescent City and particularly this house, but he did. He loved it much more than my mother. He didn't go out much, but he had some very good friends in the town and he was always happy here. My mother was restless and trivial. If there were not crowds of people about her she was lost. He said once that our life in Europe made this place seem more attractive and that each time he came here it made him value more the life we had over there. He was a very civilized man and because he was very rich he could devote all his time to being civilized. I suppose he was a land of parasite in his way. It's because of him I've kept this place exactly as it was. Even the books in his library are in the same order they were in on the day he died."

Then she laughed. "Well, well. That was a long speech, but I thought I'd explain. I know a lot of people in Crescent City think Tm a good deal of a mystery or a little crazy. It's only that this is a good place to rest."

She started to mix the martinis and almost at once Nicole began to chatter, very rapidly like a bird, about the heat, about the countryside and the beauties of the road along the river.

"It's as beautiful as any river in the world and the farms are so rich and prosperous. The houses and the barns are different, but otherwise the country is like the Valois en France"

Mary said, "Nicole is writing a book of poems called Paysages. It is about the difference and likeness of landscapes the world over."

I started to express my doubts that such a book would have a big public and then checked myself.

The martinis were made and Mary passed them. An unexpected animation seemed to have come over her. Her eyes seemed brighter and there was more color in her face. I made an effort to help her with the cocktails, but she said, "No, I like waiting on people. Sit still and relax. I don't imagine you have much opportunity in Crescent City. Everybody is always running about."

When she sat down I noticed that she did not take a cocktail but poured herself a glass of sherry. She said, "I'll tell you something, but it's a secret. My lawyers are trying to break the conditions concerning the estate which force me to spend half of every year here. I don't know whether they'll succeed or not and I don't suppose it would make much difference in the way I live. I'd still keep the house the way it is and Td probably come back just the same. Legally I can still go about and visit friends while I'm here. But I hate the idea of being pinned down to something."

"How right you are, cherie," said Nicole. "Don't you think so, Mr. Ferris?"

The martini had acted quickly on top of all the whisky I had had at the club and the feeling of strangeness began to go away. I think the presence of Nicole had something to do with the change as well. She was so completely trivial and friendly and imshy.

The music inside the house continued softly, and in the fading twilight the view over the familiar city which in the full sun had been sharp and garish and ugly began to soften and take on a dull color as the cool of the evening chilled the mist arising from the river so that it hung low, blurring and softening the harsh outlines of factories and warehouses and shabby houses. Across the river the coke ovens and blast furnaces were turning slowly from black and sooty ugliness into a kind of glowing illuminated beauty. I had another martini and then another and another until I was feeling very well indeed. My tongue was loosened, and although I do not remember what it was we talked about, we must have talked a great deal. I remember that something happened which made us no longer strangers and I remember that I began to feel a growing confidence in myself, perhaps because I did not seem a bore to two women of so much experience and knowledge of the world.

Once Mary said, "Oh, my God! I've forgotten all about the car! Ill go and tell Alexander to call about it. Ill be back in a moment."

When she had gone Nicole said, "She is a charming woman, Mary," and I answered, "Yes. We haven't seen each other for a long time. It was almost like two strangers meeting."

"Very warm in personality she is," said Nicole, "and impetuous. We're very old friends. We've seen a great deal together."

It was odd that in describing Mary she should use two words that would never have occurred to me in connection with her. But perhaps she was right. I had never really known Mary at all and certainly she seemed friendly enough on this occasion. Certainly the Mary I had encountered on the road was a very different person from the shy, rather plump girl I had known so casually a long time ago.

When Mary returned she said, "Why don't you stay to dinner? There's only Nicole and myself. We'd love it."

"Thanks, it's already past my dinner hour and I haven't even called home."

I wanted to stay but something restrained me. I think perhaps it was the feeling that I didn't quite belong as yet. I knew that at home Enid and the children would probably already have finished dinner. I was not particularly concerned about this because since our open quarrel I had told her that if I did not arrive home at the expected hour she should not wait for me, and she had been forced to accept the arrangement since I really did not care whether she accepted it or not.

Then Mary said, "I dislike being personal, but did it ever occur to you, Wolcott, that you have remarkably beautiful hands?"

I laughed. "I've never thought about it one way or the other. I just thought of them as hands." I was suddenly embarrassed as I have always been when I am paid a compliment, especially if the compliment conies from a woman. She moved forward a little in her chair and leaned toward me. "May I look at them?"

I extended my hands palms upward, still embarrassed and uncertain. She said, "No, one at a time. Your right hand first," and laughing she said, "I'm interested in palmistry." Her eyes seemed suddenly very bright and her habitual rather quiet manner seemed completely changed although she had taken only part of the sherry in her glass.

As she leaned toward me the blouse of thin transparent stuff fell away from her body and I was aware that she had very beautiful breasts. Then as she took my hand in both hers something happened which was the beginning of everything. Her hands were small and beautifully kept and warm and how shall I describe it? vibrant, I suppose, to use a banal word, and on contact with them a kind of current ran through the whole of my body and something inside me said, "Here's your chance! Here's experience! Here's everything! Here's escape! Now something may happen to you."

She squeezed the palm gently and said, "Look, Nicole! It's an interesting hand!" She looked up at me very frankly and in the friendliest way. "It's a tortured hand," she said, looking directly at me. "What is it that tortures you?"

"I don't know," I said "I didn't know that I was tortured," but I confess that I was a little scared and uneasy. I felt the color coming into my face and found myself avoiding her gaze.

"Are you happy?" she asked.

"I suppose as happy as anybody."

Then she laughed in an excited way. "In any case it's none of my business. Let's forget it. Have one more for the road." She dropped my hand quickly and rose to make a final cocktail.

"I must say," she said, "that my accident was really very lucky. This has been a pleasant couple of hours. We must do it again."

There's nothing I'd like better," I said with the sudden boldness of alcohol. "Whenever you like. How about tomorrow?"

"Fine," she said, pouring the one for the road.

"About the same time?"

"Okay. It's been great fun for Nicole and me. We don't see many people. Nicole works and I do a great deal of reading when we aren't in Virginia or Kentucky."

A little later she said, "You must have noticed me staring at you this afternoon driving home."

"Yes," I said. "I did notice it."

"It was for a special reason. It struck me suddenly how much you looked like my father. I never noticed it before, but of course I hardly knew you at all and when you were younger your face was softer. It's sharpened now and the likeness is really extraordinary. Do you notice it, Nicole? In the throat and in the sharp clean angle of the jaw and chin... like the Sargent portrait in the house in the Rue de la Pompe."

"Yes," said Nicole. "Extraordinaire... même le nez."

Then Mary rose quickly and said, "Wait, I'll fetch a picture of him. You probably don't remember him very well."

I confessed that I did not. In my memory there was no image of him at all.

She came back in a moment with a photograph of the Sargent, a painting which must have been done of her father when he was about my age. The painter had given his subject a certain dash which the man may or may not have had. The head was turned a little to the right with the chin tilted a little as if in pride. In the picture the man was certainly handsome, more handsome, I am sure, than I have ever been. I knew my own face from shaving (God knows only too well that was what started all the trouble), and I had seen it a thousand times from just the angle shown in the picture with the chin tilted a little so as to shave clean that part of me where the line of the throat joined that of the jaw. I saw what she meant. There was a marked likeness. The man in the picture wore rather long and romantic sideburns.

I said, "I see what you mean. But your father was a much handsomer man."

"Not really," said Mary. "Sargent always made his subjects glorified everyone he painted. He even made my mother seem pretty even distinguished although she had no distinction." And after a moment she said, glancing from me to the picture and back again, "Really it is remarkable. The only difference is the sideburns. If you wore them you would be exactly like the portrait."

It did not seem to me that the likeness was quite that remarkable, but she seemed so intent upon the point that I did not press the argument.

Then somewhere in the depth of the house a bell rang. It must have been a big bell and the sound was exactly like that of the bell at Churchill Downs which means, "They're off!"

"You're sure you won't stay?" Mary said. I'm sure Alexander has laid a place for you."

"No, I really can't."

Something told me that it was better to leave. I was quite drunk although probably I did not show it. I had need to pull myself together and try to precipitate my confusion as a cloud is precipitated into rain. Everything that had happened was so wholly unexpected, so completely different from what I had imagined, lazily and indifferently, on the way to the old house, would be the experience of having a cocktail with Mary Raeburn. I was aware that suddenly we seemed very old friends and that there was even a feeling of warmth between us, but I did not know why, and with that coldness and clarity of thought which has always stuck by me even after much drink, and with the caution which has dominated the whole of my life, I thought that perhaps after the martinis I had simply imagined all of these tilings and had better sober up a little before progressing any farther.

I rose and said, "I've had a lovely time. If you expect me tomorrow I'll be here."

Mary laughed. "Of course we expect you!"

"Bien sûr," said Nicole.

They both walked with me through the long hall to the porte-cochere and Mary said again, "It's been great fun," and then Alexander appeared and said, "Telephone, Miss Mary. It's long-distance from Warrenton. They're holding it."

"Good-bye," said Mary and turned to follow him, but Nicole remained behind. As I stepped into my car she said, "You've been verree good for Mary. She doesn't see enough people. She doesn't like enough people. But with you... She likes you."

Then I drove off, still in a kind of fog, aware that something had happened of the greatest importance although I did not quite know what it was.

I did not go home, for I did not want to see Enid both because I felt I had had enough alcohol either to put me at a disadvantage with her or to precipitate a quarrel and because I wanted to clear my head a little, so I turned toward the road to Williamsport along the river. I thought, "To hell with Enid!" and at the same time I was aware that such an attitude was dangerous, for it always gave her the advantage over me in all her calculations.

I write about this in great detail as I remember it because it was the beginning of something that was at once the most wonderful and the most wretched period of my life, and everything about it seems to be etched in my memory like the lines on copper plate. The unhappiness with Enid was a dull and boring kind of misery which by now is almost wholly erased from my memory, especially since I have transferred much of it from my heart onto paper and so purged myself of it, but this other experience involves pain and a humiliation almost brilliant in its clarity, to which I cling as if I could not bear to give it up.

Even now I can remember small and insignificant things which occurred during that first meeting and in all the meetings which followed the way she held her sherry glass and the way, toward the end of that afternoon when one blond lock detached itself and fell across her face until she thrust it back again into place, and a certain breathlessness which I had never expected in her and which excited me. And remember, in my mind there were no longer any inhibitions. I did not care what happened and I felt no responsibility toward anyone.

As I drove along the river the night air grew steadily cooler and presently I felt almost sober again and began examining carefully, detail by detail, what had happened and, because I was able to recreate everything with great clarity and the utmost sense of reality, I began to understand that it had all happened as it seemed to have happened and that nothing of it was an illusion born of alcohol. It really did happen and it had meaning. What it meant was that if things went well I could have Mary Raeburn and indeed that she could have me and that perhaps this would be a good thing for both. I remembered what she had said about the hand being that of a tortured person.

"Now," I thought, "is my chance!"

I was aware that for a moment I seemed to have entered again that distant glowing half-forgotten world of Frank Saunders and his family, yet it was not the same. They were both worlds in which people moved about, it seemed, on a different plane and with a freedom and ease which was strange yet pleasurable, a world in which the barriers and inhibitions, the limitations, the vulgar incessant concern with small things did not seem to exist On this plane Mary and I had moved quickly and directly toward each otter in the short space of a few hours. Yet I was aware of a difference between the world of Mary and the world of Frank which I could neither pin down nor understand.

I do not know whether at that moment I was in love with Mary or not. Certainly I was aware of a strong physical attraction and I was aware with a sensation of surprise and almost of shock that Mary was not at all what I had believed her to be, if indeed I had believed her to be anything at all, one way or another. It was not that she had thrown herself at my head, but I knew that if I chose I could have her and I knew even then that this was what she wanted and that she knew I was aware of her willingness. There had not been a word or even a gesture that could be interpreted as an invitation, yet we both knew. Those who have fallen in love at a mature age will understand what I mean.

The figure of Nicole disturbed me vaguely. Why was she there? Who was she? Her foreignness and the alien quality not only of her speech but of her manner and behavior seemed to envelop her in mystery. To be sure, I had never met a woman anything like her. She seemed unobtrusive and at times almost servile in her eagerness to agree with every opinion of Mary's. Apparently she was a friend and an equal, yet she seemed also to be a kind of servant to whom Mary gave orders.

Once during the drive home I experienced a sudden shadow of doubt and an impulse to withdraw from the whole thing while it was still possible, and I might have done so but for the belief that here was my chance to escape both in flesh and in spirit and that it might be my last chance. It was the only time doubt occurred until the very end of the affair.

I had had that earlier chance, long ago in ray youth, when Frank Saunders had opened the door for a moment on a new and dazzling world and then closed it ruthlessly in my face. This chance was different, for it involved desire and the flesh which cannot quickly and ruthlessly be cast aside, which once the flame is lighted cannot be extinguished until at last desire is satisfied or burnt out. I was calculating enough to understand that in the case of Mary, once my foot was in the door, it must remain there for a least a little time. In the earlier experience the flesh was not involved except vaguely perhaps in the shadows of Frank's consciousness and of my own, in that realm in wijich we could not and would not at that age recognize or even admit the truth, although I think the flesh was the only explanation of the fashion in which he took me up quickly and warmly and apparently without reason and then abandoned me as if he understood that what he thought was friendship was not friendship at all but only a sudden emotional mistake and one which troubled him deeply.

Once I stopped at a roadhouse for a drink and by the time I arrived home it was after midnight. I put the car in the garage and went to the icebox and ate half a chicken I found there, knowing that in the morning I should hear complaints from Enid that I had upset the whole of her week's planning and budgeting. She must have heard me close the garage door but she did not appear. I did not care one way or another. On the drive back from Williamsport I had made my decision. Between Enid and me everything I knew now was finished. We might speak to each other in a civil fashion for the sake of the children, but beyond that there would not even be conversation.

In the morning Enid had breakfast with me as always. She seemed to be remarkably cheerful and talkative and more than usually filled with plans for redoing the living room, for putting a bird bath in the garden near the dogwoods. (She was never one of those who was willing to leave nature in peace. She was always for putting in concrete paths and garden globes and special benches she had seen advertised in some "home planning" magazine.)

She asked, "Did you have a good time last night?"

"Yes," I said, and easy as anything added, "Some of us went up to Williamsport bowling."

She poured me another cup of coffee and said, "I've been thinking over what you said once... about being more free, about doing things on your own occasionally. I think you were quite right. That's the trouble with a lot of our friends. I've come to believe there is such a thing as being too devoted. It can become morbid."

"Yes," I said without much interest. I'm sure of that."

"I want you to feel as free as free, darling."

And then looking up from my paper I caught her watching me, and out of long experience I knew that she understood at last that she had lost me and she could not understand how it had happened and was trying a new tactic of throwing my freedom at my head. Probably she had read such advice in one of the modern psychiatry columns that were beginning to appear in the papers. ("All men are really boys at heart and want to think that they are free. This is something that it is easy for any clever wife to accomplish. Once a husband thinks he has his freedom he will want to stay at home every night.")

I thought, "Oh, yeah!"

"Will you be home for dinner tonight?" she asked. "I don't mind. If you won't be I'll just have a simple meal for me and the children."

"You know it's the monthly meeting of the Chamber," I said. "I'll just have dinner downtown and be home right after the meeting." She didn't of course know that it was the night of the monthly meeting, but it did happen to be and it came into my head as an inspiration.

"Okay," she said. "The children and I will just have a pick-up meal. Don't hurry to come home afterward. If you're not in early I'll just go to bed."

She was overdoing the freedom idea, thrusting it down my throat, forcing me to see how she was permitting me to be, exaggerating it, rubbing my nose in it. It struck me that she was never able to let anything alone. She had to work at it, organize it, exploit it as if it were the Parent-Teacher Association or the League of Women Voters. Why were so many American women like that? What was the matter with them? What in hell weren't they getting and what did they want? Why couldn't they simply relax and be women?

I thought, "Okay, if you're going to force freedom down my throat it will make much easier what I am going to do."

What made American women think so much about "holding" their husbands or "winning them back" after they had lost them? It made everything, every relationship, seem phony and involved and tiresome.

I hurriedly finished my coffee before the children went off to school not because I had a bad conscience but simply because I did not want to be left alone with Enid to kiss me as if nothing had happened between us, to have her bring me my hat and stand watching me in the doorway when I got out the car and drove off. I simply wanted to be left alone. I simply wanted her not to bother me, not to go on assuming and indeed imposing on me the illusion that these small acts gave me any pleasure. I think I would have minded much less a nagging wife than one who behaved like Enid.

All day at the office and even at lunch with the boys I kept thinking of Mary Raebum. Again and again I lived through all that had happened the evening before until I no longer doubted what lay ahead of both of us. I no longer had any doubts that she had made the way clear, and the more I considered the whole affair, the more desirable it seemed to be. And suddenly I realized that something wonderful had happened to me. I was no longer bored. There was something I wanted to do, something in which I was interested. It was like being very young again, almost like being born. There was at last an interest in my life. There was something I wanted to do.

In order not to appear too eager and arrive at Mary's house too soon I stopped at the hotel bar and had a couple of drinks with the boys. It was the first time in months, even years, when I enjoyed a drink instead of drinking mechanically to raise my spirits. It was after six o'clock when I drove through the big iron gateway of the big house and up the driveway which again had been freshly raked with no sign of a track or a footprint on it. It occurred to me that the place was like the palace of the sleeping beauty.

As I drove into the porte-cochere she was standing there, dressed in a lot of soft green stuff that trailed on the floor, with a curious high collar that gave her an old-fashioned look as if she were a ghost who had lingered on from the time when the house was new.

She said, "Hello! I'd been waiting for you."

I parked the car, and as I came up the steps and joined her she thrust her arm through mine and said, Tve got a perfect martini waiting for you and Hazel has got a wonderful dinner.

I told her eight o'clock so we wouldn't have to hurry," and almost coquettishly she added, "You're late."

The whole greeting may have been impulse or it may have been calculated, but the effect was not only sympathetic and warm but it skipped, as you might say, a lot of ground. It was as if we had known each other intimately for a long time or had been seeing each other constantly. Only an experienced woman, I think, could have conceived and contrived the whole thing. With one gesture she had taken me wholly into her world. My only doubt arose from the knowledge that once before it had happened like this with Frank and his family.

I noticed that since yesterday there were flowers in the house, huge bouquets of mixed flowers out of the garden for which she kept a gardener the year round. They were not simply like stuffy bouquets of zinnias or marigolds or garden-club flower arrangements; they were great flamboyant bouquets made up of huge dahlias and second-flowering delphinium and day lilies and gladioli, opulent, rich, and on scale with the size of the big rooms and the great height of the ceilings. They had, like the flowers which Frank's mother had arranged long ago, an architectural quality.

The house was filled again with music which seemed to be in every room.

On the veranda Nicole was sitting, dressed all in black lace with a lot of loose crimson lacy stuff wrapped about her throat. She wore tiny diamonds in her ears and looked even more foreign than she had looked the day before.

I think it was at dinner that I divined for the first time a hint of the unreality, even of the fantasy in which later I was to lose myself almost completely for a time.

The table was laid out much as it had been at that single dinner Mary's mother had given long ago in a feeble, rather muddled effort to bring her daughter closer to the young people of the town. The huge mahogany table carried a heavy old-fashioned silver epergne with many small compartments filled with flowers and fruit. And there were many silver dishes and two enormous silver candelabra with, candles which threw the great height and size of the room into the shadows. We sat at one end o the table and were waited uppn by old Alexander.

The dinner was excellent and as always there was music coming from some distant part of the big house.

I remember that I had a curious impression for an instant of having gone backward in time to another period, another perhaps happier if more ignorant and stupid time in my life. Even the dresses that Mary and Nicole Villon wore seemed to fit into this return into the past or at least they seemed tuneless. Certainly Crescent City and Oakdale seemed immensely and pleasantly remote and even unreal.

I do not remember the conversation at dinner. What I remember most clearly was that the effect of cocktails followed by an excellent dinner with two kinds of wine and brandy brought on not the sense of depression which attacked me frequently enough when I had been drinking heavily but a sense of dreaminess and relaxation and contentment something that was unaccustomed in my life. It was more and more as if the outside world had vanished, as if by some enchantment I had been transported backward into some more leisurely, pleasant time. What I did not comprehend was that the illusion was created very largely through money... and wealth, in such proportions as to be almost incomprehensible even to a prosperous fellow like myself. Out of money Mary had attempted to create a world as she would have liked it, and in a way she had succeeded. But money or not, it was extremely agreeable.

We had the brandy together with coffee on the big screened veranda, and by the time we were seated there again, the summer sun had sunk across the river and in the dark moonless night, soft and black as velvet, the fires of the blast furnaces and the coke ovens lighted the whole of the sky along the flat land across the river and high on the hills of the opposite shore. By night the city was a bejeweled and magical place with a canopy of crimson on the reflected clouds overhead. The old man, Mary's grandfather, had done well to build his house on this hill. When the house was new the view must have been wild and romantic with the river boats coming up from New Orleans and the barges slipping downstream with the current against the forested hills opposite. It was all changed now; the beauty was equally wild but different, far more savage than the beauty of the original wilderness.

Mary said, "I wonder what would have happened if things had been different... if this had really been my home instead of just a town where I visited... if, for example, we had married each other."

I laughed. "If s something to think about."

"Quel romanticisme," said Nicole. She had brought a piece of fine tapestry and was working on It as she sat without speaking.

"I used to think you were very good-looking when you were a boy in the twenties." She laughed. "I never told you that... but I liked your hair and your blue eyes and your high color. You always looked so clean."

"I hope I still do."

"You still do. My father liked you too. I think he'd have been pleased if we had got married. But in those days I was shy. I never really knew anybody very well here. When I had to go out and compete with the other girls it was agony."

I laughed again. "It was hard to get to know you, I never knew what to talk about. I always thought you considered us a bunch of hicks, and anyway if I'd tried to get acquainted with you people would have said. There's that Ferris boy, trying to many Mary for her money. Probably his mother is behind it. I was just as shy as you were."

"It might have been different save for my mother," said Mary. "I never really liked her and I don't think she liked me. She was a rather silly woman who chattered a great deal and never said anything. There were times when she drove my father crazy. And she couldn't bear to be alone. It didn't matter what kind of company surrounded her so long as someone was there to be talked at. Words just came out of her mouth without any thought behind them. Sometimes she was ludicrous, and she never learned that very often people were laughing at her rather than with her and this ignorance only incited lier to more of the same silly talk. She always thought that she was having a great success. I think it was so because at heart she was supremely selfish. Everything, even the weather, was referred to her own ego and whether it pleased her or not. Needless to say, she dressed very fussily and extravagantly without taste. She was so feminine that she became nauseating in her clothes, her manner, her self-confidence. For some time before he died my father scarcely talked with her at all. He was polite and answered her but avoided her company. She disliked me because as a child I was rather dumpy and never suited the lacy ribbony things in which she insisted on dressing me. The moment anyone came into a room when both of us were present, she at once began operating on me straightening my dresses, tucking up my hair, rubbing smudge spots from my face with a lacy perfumed handkerchief. She always used the same perfume, rather heavy and sickening. It pervaded everything and hung in the room long after she had left it. I doubt that it's manufactured any more, but now and then I get a whiff of something which smells like it and suddenly I am sickened. Once or twice I have actually been sick." She lighted a cigarette and looked out over the glowing city. "You see," she added, "I really hated her. As a child I didn't know it because a child living as closely as I did with my parents, traveling with them everywhere, never having any close friends among other children... a child like that thinks the whole world is made up of people like his mother and father. I must have been a young woman before I discovered that all men were not like my father and all women not like my mother. But the experience made me dislike women. I have never been able to get on with them. I really hated my mother, but I didn't know it until I was nearly grown."

It was a very long speech and I wondered at the time why she made it. She was very quiet while she talked, as if she were very tired. It was almost as if she were talking to herself. Nicole went on working on her embroidery without looking up, perhaps because all of this was something the two women had discussed before many times.

I felt that I must say something so I said, "That's funny how things happening in your childhood affect all the rest of your life."

She turned toward me, and for the first time I saw that some of the beauty which was in her eyes was the beauty of suffering. She said, "I know the girls here in town thought I had a wonderful life with all the money and the travel and Europe and New York They envied me, but I'd have traded places then, and even now, with any of them. I was always lost and lonely, I never had any real home or any real roots. I just drifted about the world in luxury and I was about as shy and lonely as it was possible to be/' She laughed again and a curious edge of hardness came into her voice. But I learned to get over that. I learned the hard way by forcing myself. There are a lot of American women like me wandering around in Europe and in the East... the daughters of the second and third generations of great wealth who don't belong anywhere. They're the most unhappy people on earth. You've never asked me, but I know you've wondered like everybody else in the town why I keep this big house and spend so much money on it. It's because I'm still trying to grow roots and because the whole place is associated with my father whom I loved. When he died it was the worst thing that ever happened to me or that can ever happen. I got married at once because it seemed the only thing to do. And that was a mess. My God! What a mess! Herby was a suitable conventional man, not too bad in his way, but I scared him. In spite of the fact that I had never had any experience and only knew abolit sex through what Yd overheard as a child in the general gossip about mistresses, I scared him."

Suddenly she laughed. "It all makes me think of a story which happened to a Frenchwoman I know... a widow who married a second time at thirty-five a very handsome and desirable Englishman. Everyone thought the marriage ideal and believed her very fortunate, but after six months she appeared to be unhappy and looked very badly. Outwardly no one could see any reason for it. The husband was charming, considerate of her, and very much in love. At the end of a year a Frenchman, a cousin who had grown up with her, knew her very well, and loved her very much and was an experienced man, went to her and asked her to tell him franldy what the trouble was. She answered him quite as honestly. There was no physical satisfaction in her relation with her husband. He behaved as if the act were shameful and to be gotten over as rapidly as possible. Yet he was constantly driven to it.

"Forgive me for being so long-winded, but it's a good story with a great deal of significance. The French cousin approached the husband tactfully and suggested that he might give greater satisfaction, but the husband appeared bewildered and the Frenchman suggested that it might be a good thing for the husband to take a course in love-making. He even volunteered to provide the instructress an attractive and experienced actress and courtesan of the better sort living in Paris. The ironic part of the story is that the English husband accepted the offer, in reality, because he loved his own wife so much and wanted to make her happy. He went to Paris on occasional visits and at length completed the course and was given a diploma for proficiency by the actress. But after months nothing seemed to change. The wife became more nervous and looked more and more drawn and ill, and when the cousin questioned her she told him that nothing had changed. It was all as bad as ever. So the cousin again approached the husband, telling him that the actress teacher had reported that he was charming, proficient, and satisfactory, yet his education appeared to be of no benefit to his wife who constantly grew more ill. Why, asked the cousin, had the husband not put into practice what he had been taught? But the husband only looked horrified and said, "But, my dear fellow, a gentleman doesn't do such things with his wife!"

Again she laughed. "I have told it fable fashion," she said, "but it explains why my marriage didn't last very long and why my husband was scared of me. He was a Harvard man and belonged to the best clubs, but he wasn't quite bright, and very conventional. There was never a chance of our being happily married and there wasn't any use in going on with it."

Then suddenly Nicole picked up her embroidery and stood up saying, "If you'll forgive me I'll go to bed. I've had a migraine all day and it's worse than ever." Then she turned to Mary and said, "Do you want to give me a moment to check over what I'm to do in New York?"

Mary got up and said, "Of course," and turning to me she said, "I'll only be five minutes. Nicole is going to New York in the morning, probably before I'm awake. You've got everything there on the table. Help yourself. I'll be back in a second."

The two women went out. I poured myself another brandy and lay back in the chair feeling relaxed, drowsy yet interested. I wondered why she had been so talkative and why she had revealed so much. There could only be one reason. I closed my eyes and lay back on the chaise longue.

She was gone for a longer time than she had promised, and when she returned I was not aware of her return until I felt the touch of her hand running through my hair. I opened my eyes and smiled at her saying, "Go on. That feels very pleasant."

She in turn smiled but said nothing. Her eyes seemed very brilliant and I knew then that both of us understood what it was we wanted. Then as if the gesture had never occurred at all she turned away from me and poured herself a glass of sherry and sat down.

"You've never told me anything about yourself," she said. "You're married and it seems to have lasted. Are you happy?"

I laughed. "As much as anybody is," I said. "Like most people I probably expected too much in the beginning. It didn't turn out that way."

"It seems to me that all of us are entitled to a share of happiness, even if we have to fight for it. Otherwise the world is a miserable gray place in which we just drag along until the end."

That was it! I suddenly saw the three of us Mary and Enid and myself each fighting for that little dole of happiness and satisfaction, each of us isolated, each of us wanting the other to conform to his terms. What was Enid's happiness was certainly not mine, nor mine hers. And Mary too probably wanted her happiness on her own terms. I began to see why the whole business of living must be a compromise, There might be moments or hours or even days when that satisfaction was achieved, but all the rest was compromise, a little here, a little there, until the whole thing lost its shape and purpose. But that was not what I wanted. I wanted the whole thing, as very clearly did Mary.

We began talldng again about our childhoods and the past and it seemed to me that we had known each other intimately for much longer than a few hours. Perhaps, I thought, this is the thing called "understanding each other" which people were always talking about. And presently we found ourselves talking about her grandfather, the old Titan who had built this house which she cherished so carefully. Neither of us had ever known him very well and only as children, but on both of us he had left a tremendous memory and impression as dominant and forceful personalities do upon children. He had been shrewd and foresighted and sometimes extravagant but only in solid and material things which in the end paid him back for his extravagance things like this huge old house overlooking the river which had become long ago a monument to his energy and wisdom that was known from one end to the other of the great river valley. In the old days it was pointed out on every river boat or barge that passed up or downstream.

He had had fine horses and a whole array of fine carriages, and when I spoke of them Mary said, "They're still there. They're kept like a museum." She sat up suddenly. "Would you like to see them?"

So we went out across the lawn. It was very dark under the great trees with only the distant light from the veranda to show us the way. We followed a great hedge of lilacs until we came to the courtyard of the stables, and there the lights from the blast furnaces and coke ovens, reflected downward from the low-lying clouds, illuminated the whole of the place. We crossed the open space, she switched on a light by which I found the key hanging on a nail and we went inside. There, ranged along the wall, polished and with all the metal shining, hung the harnesses of the horses long since dead, and on the floor itself there was in truth a museum collection of carriages, dogcarts, phaetons, cabriolets, an Irish jaunting cart, two governess' carts made to be drawn by ponies and donkeys, and even a sporting coach. They were all spotless and polished.

Mary seemed excited by the experience and even climbed into several of the carriages, but for me the whole exhibition of shining carriages was depressing, as depressing as the skeletons of animals exhibited in a museum of natural history. They were dead. They had no use. They belonged to another day.

"Once," said Mary, "the pony ran away with the governess' cart and dumped us all in a ditch. That's where I got the small scar over my left eye."

By now I knew what it was I wanted and that I wanted it now, tonight. It was the first time I had ever felt an emotion so strongly. The sensation was as much mental as physical. I could not leave her without its being satisfied. She divined, I think, that I was not much interested in the carriages and we left the place, and as we crossed the courtyard again I saw that she had not troubled to lift her long frock of flimsy stuff out of the dust. She walked very quickly, and as we reached the veranda she said. "While we're about it I'll show you my rooms upstairs."

I said, "I've never been upstairs in the house."

She said, "I'm rather fond of the place. I've made a kind of nest up there different from the rest of the house."

I followed her up the long high red-carpeted stairs with the heavy, polished balustrade, and at the top she turned to the left, opened a tall door, and after I had gone through it she closed it behind us and smiling at me she said, "Now?" and I took her in my arms and kissed her. It was a violent kiss. Her whole body was shaking. Her hands were tangled in my hair.

It was nearly daylight when I left. We agreed upon my leaving while it was still dark because of the old servants and because there was always a chance that someone might recognize me or my car.

What happened in the room was like nothing that had ever happened to me before. It was as if until then I had known nothing whatever of lovemaking and certainly nothing of what the response could be. It was beyond anything I had ever imagined. It is quite impossible for me with my poor gifts as a writer to put it on paper, even if I felt any desire to do so.

And now began a period of my life when, looking back upon it from the solitude and objectivity of this beautiful and wretched island, I seem to myself to be a stranger. It is very easy to see myself quite as if I had been at that time another person. The odd complex thing is that I like myself as I was then. I think I must have been quite attractive, physically. I was not quite forty, vigorous, with a good physique and at heart amiable if tormented. There is even, I think, a certain amount of narcissism in my feeling toward the stranger Wolcott Ferris of that brief and isolated period. I am proud even now of the vitality and the vigor I possessed in meeting the demands of Mary's curious obsession for me. I could take it and did, at least to the moment of the final break-up. How much longer I could have lasted physically I do not know. But for the time being I was quite a fellow.

I think that the real reason I seem a stranger is that for a time I was released from all worry or thought concerning myself and my life. I simply gave myself up to the whole thing. I became reckless, so reckless that, thinking of it now, it seems to me that it was all impossible and unbelievable. I slept marvelously well and wakened feeling young and wholly restored each morning, and I found that almost every hour of the day I was thinking of Mary and what had happened and how soon I could be with her again. Each moment away from her seemed wasted and lost. It did not matter to me very profoundly whether we were found out. My business ceased to be of any concern whatever, and it was fortunate that it was the kind of business which managed to run itself.

Certainly the people around me must live noticed a difference that I was exceptionally good-humored and full of bad jokes, that in the office I was never ill-tempered and never criticized anyone or anything, that I enjoyed people again and enjoyed almost anything I did. Even conversation which had bored me to the point of hysterical deafness seemed all at once rather pleasant and agreeable.

And that brings us back again to what love is. I suppose this was real amour which I experienced, the thing French novelists write about better than any others, exploring it down to the finest of details. But again what is amour but a different thing for every individual, for every man and woman violently attracted to each other? So many things enter into it background and tradition and environment, the condition of one's feeling and psychology at the moment, the so-called "chemical element of attraction," the compensation of two temperaments, the biological elements of glands and their stimulated activity which makes all people in love (even the ugly and the lout) appear to glow with an augmented vitality and even charm.

I had never thought of myself as especially passionate or demanding or driven where sex was concerned. The experiences I had had came about largely through boredom or the desire to become utterly lost for a time, as in the adventure with the girl in New Orleans who lived over the bakery shop. Now there was the element of sensuality, in my case an aroused sensuality which had never been touched during the mechanical embraces and tricks of the women whom I had taken up casually.

All this and much more went into this relationship with Mary. It was a powerful and overwhelming experience, and perhaps it was just as well that when it all ended suddenly and with violence I came out here to the South Pacific. Otherwise I might have gone on searching recklessly for something to replace it, something to carry along that sensation of lightness and delight which was always with me, that renewed interest in everything about me which I had known as a young man and which had come to die slowly during all the years in Oakdale. Out here there was nothing to explore, nothing to search for, with the only women for hundreds of miles around those black and greasy specimens with which Homer, the wool-hat, satisfies himself.

Probably such an adventure always seems unique to the man who has experienced it. While it lasts and even long afterward it must seem that this has never happened to any other man, and probably it has never happened in exactly the same fashion. But it is very likely something like it happens to many a man who is middle-aged or on the verge of middle age, especially in a world such as mine. It is doubtless the story of the preacher who elopes with the choir singer, the story of the solid businessman who suddenly abandons his wife and children and goes wild with a model or a female acrobat, the story of the mature and sedate lawyer who suddenly blasts the whole structure of his life for a girl working in the filing department.

It is often enough, I suppose, the story of Mr. Smith. It was different in my case only because Mary was very rich and because she never wanted to marry me or anyone else. It was different too in other ways which I did not understand until the very end, yet even then amour is compounded of so many things that with other Smiths there may have been similar complex psychological factors at once alike and different.

Crudely the fact is that I felt an animal delight in everything that was Mary, in the perfume she used which did not smell sweet and heavy like flowers but rather like a clean chemical, like a fresh, unscented, and delightful odor of fine soap. The lipstick which on Enid, and consequently with all other women, I abhorred, became an exciting element where Mary was concerned. Most of all perhaps was the fierce physical excitement of her body seen always in darkness or a half light. Even now the memory of it has a tremendous power to excite me, sometimes almost beyond endurance. There was nothing sentimental or spiritual about that. It was direct and primitive, yet I know that it was that which lent a kind of glow to every other element. And of course there was her own recklessness... that she held back nothing... nothing whatever to give me delight and satisfaction. Oh, I can understand well enough why it is that men at middle age and later suddenly throw all else recklessly to the winds for the sake even of a single night. If you have not known it there is no way of making you understand. It would not matter even if death brought down the curtain at the coming of the dawn.

For the first two weeks we saw each other every night in those rooms she had made over for herself on the second floor of the old house. At first I was so lost that I did not even see the rooms or the furniture, but gradually my consciousness became aware of the surroundings and I discovered that in all the house these were the only rooms which she had not kept as they had been in her father's time. They were furnished completely with the most feminine of French furniture. In reality what she had re-created there was, I suppose, the atmosphere of the boudoir and bedroom of a demimondaine. I do not know what men or how many men had been there before me, but it is unlikely that any will ever follow me there because Mary succeeded in breaking the rules of the trust and is no longer forced to return to Crescent City. There is a curious perverse satisfaction in such knowledge, even out here in the islands removed in both time and space from what happened there. I myself shall probably never see the rooms or the house again, and probably it is much better that way.

During much of those two weeks Nicole remained in New York. The old servants lived in a far wing of the house, and although they must have had suspicions when night after night I came to dinner, they could not know what went on, afterward... when each succeeding night we went at an earlier hour up the big empty stairway to the cocotte's boudoir, until presently we went there before dinner and returned again after we had had our brandy.

As a concession, or more perhaps out of long habit and because of the children, I returned each night to my own house an hour or two before daylight. Apparently Enid was always asleep in her own room, although when everything broke up I discovered that she always knew the hour at which I came in.

I took to sleeping late and usually got up about around ten or ten-thirty to find that at the sound of the footsteps overhead Enid had got my breakfast under way. After the first three or four times I came in late she no longer asked or even hinted for information as to where I had been. I think she discovered that I always had a quick lie ready for her, a lie which was difficult to run to earth and expose. Also she was still practicing the sob sister's advice of giving me my freedom until I was sick of it. But of course this wasn't simply a matter of freedom. It was infinitely more serious, and there was behind it all the years of slow corroding irritation, appeasement, and even hatred on my side which made the chances of my ever returning to her possession for good wholly out of the question.

This of course was something she could never understand since all heir life, her thoughts, her calculations were upon a plane so false, so imaginary, so fictional that reality or truth could never touch them. In her world husbands and wives "shared" everything. Husbands were "lost" and "won back again." By the use of a new perfume or a little more effort at dressing attractively an erring husband could even be brought back to the conjugal bed. It was all formula and tricks which never once touched the tragic and passionate depths of reality or fact.

I sometimes think that during all this period she was at times actually happy because she saw herself playing a game, as she thought with great cleverness, bringing me back to submission without my knowing it "the husband who after a fling always comes back to the fireside." Even after the gossip got around and people began talking I think she found satisfaction in the knowledge or at least in her own conviction that other women were saying, "Dear Enid, how well she is taking the whole thing!"

As I write it occurs to me that the whole of Enid's character and existence, all her motives and calculations might well be enclosed in quotation marks. And God knows that among American women she does not stand alone. It is a part of the whole dullness and unreality and confusion created by advertising hucksters and sob sisters and "he-man" novelists and preachers and interior decorators and perfume manufacturers and radio soap operas, as if a man could be tricked into or out of something which is stronger than any of us and over which in the end none of us but the unsexed or the weaklings have any control. It is a vicarious, synthetic, and pitiful world, indeed perhaps a whole civilization if it might be called that

There are plenty of other men who have been subjected to the same maneuvers as those practiced by Enid and they will understand how incredibly maddening such tactics can be. I will never be sure that Enid herself was unaware of this and did not get some satisfactions out of the maneuvers and the peculiar torture they produced. She was always bright and cheerful, almost too much so, when she brought in my breakfast in the morning. Although the maid could have done it she never permitted this. She brought it "with her own hands." In the old days when I wanted desperately to read my newspaper undisturbed she was always interrupting me with questions and comments, but now she never interrupted me at all. She simply sat opposite me with her "extra cup of coffee," looking out of the window cheerfully, sometimes even half humming a tune. A little later she arranged it so that when I came downstairs the record player was playing music which she knew I especially liked (most of which I have never wanted to hear again). And when I went to the garage for the car she stood on the porch smiling and waving at me.

However rested and well I felt on waking up, my whole mood was destroyed by the time I left the house. Fortunately in my obsession the mood quickly vanished and I fell again to thinking of Mary to the exclusion of all else.

Of course it was inevitable that gossip should find us out. We had been lucky for a time in the fact that the big old house stood in a part of town where people we knew seldom came and that my car, parked there night after night, could not be seen from the street. It is probable that somehow the old servants came to talk, and once that pipeline was opened the news went quickly through every kitchen and laundry in Oakdale and thence upstairs to the women who were to so great an extent Oakdale itself. Who it was that tipped off Enid or when the revelation occurred I have never known, but there was never at any point any sign I could detect that she had discovered the whole of the truth.

In the meanwhile in the background Nicole Villon played a puzzling role. She remained in New York for several days, and when she returned she had dinner with us in the evening and then silently and without any explanation disappeared. Sometimes Mary went with her and was absent for a few moments. Nicole seemed more than ever like a small bright-eyed bird who came to dinner as a bird might come to a feeding shelf and then vanished. She never gave the faintest outward sign of knowing what was going on and none of us ever mentioned her trick of disappearing immediately after dinner. Outwardly, so far as the town was concerned, she served in a flimsy way as a "cover" or a chaperone for Mary.

Her presence and her relationship to Mary I found more and more puzzling. She seemed half friend and confidante and half servant, and I did not believe the story that she was writing a book of poetry. Presently I discovered that actually she also performed the duties of a lady's maid. She it was who pressed Mary's clothes and kept the rooms above stairs in order, yet there were moments when she could be disagreeable and even insolent to Mary. Obviously she had a good background with her languages and her knowledge of art and of music. It was Nicole who made the selections of the disks which kept the big house filled with music constantly and she who operated the expensive gramophone concealed in a room beneath the great stairway. Mary never took her anywhere in Crescent City and few people had ever seen her.

I came presently to get the impression that she was jealous of me or that she did not like me and that she talked against me to Mary. It was a curious impression which I could not analyze or justify, but when I suggested such a thing to Mary she only laughed and said, "You mustn't mind. It doesn't mean anything. She is always jealous of anyone who comes close to me. It's a very old story."

What puzzled me most was the bond between the two of them. I could discover no reason for it save that, in traveling, such a woman as Nicole, who served as a companion, friend, secretary, and maid, might be useful. It is difficult to discover, now why I experienced this growing reaction of mistrust and dislike of Nicole. There was nothing, no act, no insinuation, no word to which you could pin the feeling and explain it. It was, I think, a matter of instinct and intuition, of the male recognizing an element of hostility in the female, not toward any given individual but toward the whole of his sex. There are women like that, women who would be accounted "normal" (whatever that means) yet who experience and practice toward all men an attitude of actual hostility, who see any act, however trivial, of any man as a part of a general conspiracy against the whole of the female sex. It is not that they are involved personally; the whole thing is abstract, objective as you might say, "a matter of principle." They are suspicious of all men, suspecting them of calculated predation or at least of swindling and deceit. They are the most annoying of women and, of all neurotic types, the most unnatural.

Nicole was of that sort. The attitude may have been the result of unhappy experience in the past, and Mary did tell me that twice Nicole had been badly treated by men, once by a husband and once by a lover. As a clinical type she was neither masculine nor feminine but seemed wholly sexless small, brisk, thin, with a quick if superficial intelligence.

I could not be rid of her. She was a third wheel in the affair, never really present and yet always there in the background, as if in some way she were an incarnation of fate, a symbol of the whole affair and its eventual sterility. There was no question of inducing Mary to be rid of her. When, after we had progressed beyond the first violence of passion into a degree of intimacy, I suggested that we, and especially myself, might be happier if Nicole went back to Europe, leaving us wholly free, Mary only laughed and said, "Don't be ridiculous. What difference does she make to us? In reality she is not here at all. She doesn't object to what we are doing. She hasn't even any interest in it and I can't do without her. She takes care of a million small things."

What troubled me most and what I suppose was nothing more than jealousy was the knowledge that when" I was not with Mary her company was shared almost entirely by Nicole. And I felt that when they were together in the hours when I was absent they talked of me and of the whole affair, although Mary denied this when I once suggested my suspicion. I believed passionately that what went on between Mary and myself belonged to us alone and should be kept thus. And there was too the feeling, again wholly intuitive, that there was something at once cold and unclean about Nicole and that even her presence in some way defiled the whole of our relationship. In my obsession I wanted to share Mary with no one, and so I fell into the same error as Enid herself, consuming myself with a desire to absorb and devour Mary in the delusion that one person can absorb another. It is one of the greatest errors in love, whether it happens in the love between husband and wife, lover and mistress, or even mother and son. There is no such thing as complete possession. It cannot happen, and inevitably one of the partnership is hurt and in the end perhaps destroyed.

I know now that nothing could have been less possible with Mary than the attempt to absorb her for she was above all else independent. In a way she had a masculine mind and will within the most feminine and desirable of bodies. She wanted freedom and in the end she bought it, not only with all her money, but through the sacrifice of many other things, until she arrived at that point of instability which was her ruin.

It was, in other words, a nice mess in which I found myself a rather simple, even naive, inexperienced American approaching middle age. I saw and understood none of this until it was all finished and I had been used to the point of satiety. I am still trying to understand it all. It is possible that I shall never understand it although Mary in that final letter did her best to make me understand it at least her side of it.

In the end there arrived a point at which it became impossible for us to carry on as we had been doing. Obviously I could not go on forever visiting her each night and returning home in the early morning in the face of the knowledge that by now almost everyone shared. I knew how thoroughly the whole thing was known, even by the way in which my friends and acquaintances looked at me. I knew that every time I bought something in the drug store the clerk knew why, that every time I ordered a drink in a bar the bartender would conceal in his eyes the knowledge he shared. I knew that every girl in my office watched me and once my back was turned began talking to the nearest companion about Mary and me. And there was always, I knew, the gossip that I was planning in the end to become Mary's husband and thus "feather my own nest."

But there was another element. Presently in our relationship there emerged a desire to give a curious kind of permanence to the affair, to make it in a way more "comfortable." And so we evolved a more sensible plan. It was that Mary should go away to stay in the East or in Virginia and that I should come there to meet her over week ends or even for a day or two in the middle of the week, and that is how it worked out. One concession I did achieve that when I was with Mary, Nicole should be sent away.

As it turned out, the arrangement was more satisfactory than the old one because it meant that the old necessity for breaking off before morning no longer existed. I could remain with her as long as I liked. We could waken together, lazily, at any hour, have breakfast together, and share our waking hours. Even though it meant separation sometimes for several days, it was better than the old way. Indeed I think the arrangement even maintained our ardor and interest in each other at a higher pitch because during the periods apart I could think of nothing but the time when I should see her again. Each time we met it was a renewal. I returned fresh and excited and ardent. It has occurred to me that it might have continued thus for years had not the final crisis put a sudden end to the whole thing.

Sometimes we met at a hotel in New York when we rarely left the hotel bedroom-sitting room, and on several occasions we met in hotels at resort places, and twice she took me with her into the world of hunting and horses which she frequented from time to time. It was a pleasant world but to me a strange one in which people used what seemed almost a foreign tongue and in which I always felt an inferior outsider. And it was in that world that occurred the first warning, the first small spark of suspicion and disillusionment.

We had been staying at the hotel in Lexington and moving in a society which showed neither disapproval nor even very much interest in an affair carried on so openly. As in the world of Frank's family, these people had other interests. They regarded the romantic goings-on of individuals as their own affair. It was a long week end for us, from Thursday night to Tuesday morning, and on Saturday night, after the races, we went to the house of a man called Stacy who had a big stable of horses.

There were people there from all over the country and even from Europe, and I was both astonished and proud that nearly all of them seemed to know Mary and were glad to see her again. But most of all it seemed to me that Mary became almost another person. She appeared clever, gay, gregarious, and friendly. In the intensity of our relationship no one until now had ever come into it no one save Nicole with her curious detached, almost clinical relationship. And for me this was a dashing attractive world in which everybody seemed to be a character. It was a world in which I would have liked to live, and during the week end I found myself calculating (for the first time since the affair had begun) on how this could be done and arrived at the conclusion that there were only two ways. One was to cut all ties with Crescent City and simply live and travel with Mary as her lover. The other of course was to have Enid divorce me and marry Mary, something which by now I divined would be virtually impossible. Enid would never divorce me, and Mary had a curious abhorrence of marriage, arising partly I think from the marital history of her parents and partly out of experience with her husband.

There were perhaps forty people at the big Stacy house for cocktails and dinner, and many of them by the time dinner was served had had a great deal to drink.

At dinner Mary put me with two old friends of hers, a middle-aged and very horsy woman and a handsome younger woman who had come to dinner in jodhpurs and jacket. For me it was a sticky and uncomfortable position for they talked across me mostly of the ancestry, the build, and the records of horses, going far back into the England of the eighteenth century. So far as I was concerned they might have been talking Chinese, and I felt a worm.

Mary sat between two men to whom she had introduced me earlier, and because I was bored by my table companions and I was jealous I watched the two men. One was a thin, hard-bitten old man who must have been seventy. The other was a big man of perhaps my age, good-looking in a florid way with a very red face and very black hair. He had the physical softness about him that marks many a middle-aged heavy drinker, and from his manner and the loudness of his laughter it was evident that he had done very well by himself. It was clear that he found Mary attractive and that his attentions were annoying her, for more than once I observed her turn as if she would have moved away from him had it been possible. Once I saw anger flash in her blue eyes, and then presently I saw her excuse herself and go away from the table. The man looked after her and then rose and followed a little unsteadily.

I was aware of several things that Mary wanted to escape from him, that he was obviously following her, and that my course of action was to go to her rescue. I was aware too that I must do this discreetly in order not to make the rescue evident or to risk an unpleasant scene of some sort. Jealousy did not enter into the picture, for it was clear that she wanted only to rid herself of the man.

When I felt that I could do so discreetly I excused myself to my two horsy companions and slipped away from the table, going in the direction of the hallway through which Mary had disappeared. It led, I discovered, to one of the huge verandas which surrounded the house, and I followed the veranda to the point where it turned a corner. The veranda where I stood was dimly lighted. Further on it lay in darkness.

As I reached the corner I heard Mary's voice, very cold now, saying, "Well, you wanted to talk to me, Basil. What is it you want to say?" and I hesitated, thinking that if he had followed at Mary's invitation I had no right to intervene. And again any jealousy I might have felt was extinguished by the peculiar hardness of Mary's voice. It indicated that she hated the man. I remained in case she might need help and because I was drawn by an almost ungovernable curiosity.

I heard the man called Basil say, "You know damned well what I want to say. I want you to come home with me for an hour."

Mary said, "That's all over and you know it. I'd as soon jump in the lake as go home with you. That goes even if you were sober. I sat with you at dinner to keep you quiet because you were drunk. Now shut up and leave me in peace."

When he spoke again there was a nasty edge in his voice. "I was good enough for you once, plenty good. What's turned you so nasty nice?"

I did not know whether to disappear or to intervene and if necessary sock the fellow on the jaw. For the time being I was paralyzed by indecision, and before I could move I heard him say, "Good God! You've taken on anything even jockeys and now you stick at me. You've slept with half the men at this party..."

He did not finish the sentence, but I heard the sound of a violent slap and cursing and I called out, "Mary! Mary!" and came round the corner.

The man was standing still staring at her, and at the sound of my voice Mary said, very quietly, "Get me out of here, Wolcott. Don't hit him. It'll only make things much worse." And she took my arm and fairly dragged me out of the darkness into the light. Then the man began to laugh. It was a horrid mocking sound and it followed us along the whole of the veranda.

Mary said quickly, "Go out and find the car. I'll meet you at the door."

Still bewildered, I obeyed her tod in two minutes she was at the door. We drove off in silence and Mary said suddenly, "Did you hear what he said to me?"

"Some of it. I should have knocked him down."

"No," said Mary. "You're wrong there. He was drunk and it would have made an awful scandal. I've been trying to get rid of him since six o'clock."

I said, "Why didn't you call me earlier? I'd have got rid of him."

"It wouldn't have done any good. He was drunk when he came in. I stalled him off until it didn't work any longer." Then very quietly she said, "He was in love with me once. I haven't seen him for four years. He was drunk tonight and he's a cad anyway even when he's sober."

I said weakly, "The whole thing makes me feel like a sap."

"You needn't feel that way. You behaved exactly as a gentleman should. If you had hit him it would have been much worse."

Then suddenly she seemed to collapse. She began to cry and crumpled against my shoulder. I slowed down the car, put one arm about her and kissed her, and at that the sobbing only increased.

Presently she said, "Don't pay any attention to me. I'll be over it in a minute. I'm just tired... that's all... so bloody, goddamn tired. Just hang on to me, darling, till I come out of it."

I said nothing but kissed her and let her cry. But the sudden collapse startled me. She had always seemed so confident and sure of herself. She always seemed to have everything in life under control, and now she was collapsed, crumpled and sobbing, and the anguish of her cry, "I'm so tired... so bloody, goddamn tired!" rang in my ears. It was a cry of real and terrible anguish.

That night at the hotel a new element entered our relationship, for it seemed that she had come to depend on me. She became for that night and from then on softer and in a way more feminine. It was also as if she had become suddenly younger, at times almost like a child. Of all the countless times we made love I think that night was the best of all, for we came that night nearer to what the relationship between a man and a woman in love should be.

It was, of course, a forewarning, a sort of first sounding of the theme of doom in a symphony. In the next few meetings we were both, I think, really happy, happier in the truest sense of the word than we had ever been. I began to think of the whole thing seriously for the first time as a permanent relationship either with or without marriage, and I believe the thought occurred as well to Mary, although we never discussed it. She knew that there was small chance that any such thing could happen, but she knew the reasons why this was so and I did not.

Four weeks later we met in Virginia at a country hotel. She had been staying in the countryside with friends and Nicole was in New York. Mary indeed had scarcely seen her since the ugly incident at the party in Lexington. She met me in Washington at the airfield and we drove impatiently to the village hotel, only stopping on the way at the village post office because Mary said she "was expecting a special delivery letter from New York. She hurried into the post office and after a little time came out looking irritated and nervous.

"Damn Nicole!" she said. "She was to have written me two days ago about something important."

She seemed in a bad temper which I managed to break down by making love to her as soon as we reached the hotel and hurried up to our rooms. Afterward she seemed calmer again, but at six o'clock she insisted on driving down to the post office to ask a second time for the letter, again with no success.

That evening we had dinner with some hunting people, and immediately after dinner Mary said, "Do you mind taking me home, darling? I feel like the devil."

She looked very pale and," I noticed small beads of perspiration on her forehead.

Back at the hotel she said, "I'll take some aspirin and feel better in the morning."

She went to sleep in my arms, but twice during the night I was wakened by the faint light from the bathroom and found her there. The second time she was wet with perspiration and shaking violently.

She said, "I think you'd better send for the doctor. I don't know what's the matter with me. It's Doctor Wyndham. You'll find his telephone number on a card in the inside flap of my handbag... No, bring it to me. I'll find it."

I put her back to bed, covered her, and gave her the handbag. Her hands shook so violently that she could scarcely open it, but, fumbling, she found the card at last and gave it to me. She said, "Tell him I'm having one of my attacks... that it's serious... he'll understand... for God's sake to come at once."

It was a country hotel with no telephone in the room and I was forced to go below stairs to the office. It was four in the morning and there was no one on duty, and it took me what seemed an endless time, first to discover how the country telephone worked, and then to rouse the operator at the exchange. Then after a long wait a sleepy voice answered me at the other end of the wire. It was Doctor Wyndham himself.

I tried to explain myself and give him Mary's urgent message, but he seemed to understand at once and to find nothing extraordinary in the situation. He seemed to know what was meant by "one of my attacks."

"Tell her," he said, "that I'll be over at once... as soon as I can."

By now I was terrified, and the fear increased when as I approached the door of our room I could hear the sound of Mary's groaning. As I entered the door she fell silent and turned toward me, and as she did so I saw that the pillow was covered with lipstick and what I suspected were teeth marks. I sat down beside her and began stroking her damp hair saying, "What is it, darling? Isn't there something I can do?"

With what appeared to be a great effort she said, "There isn't anything until the doctor comes. Just hold my hand... like that. It makes it easier."

"What is it?" I asked, gently enough.

Again with a great effort she said, "It's something that goes wrong with my insides. You wouldn't understand. The doctor knows about it."

Then she began to cry, shaking violently like a small child and burying her head in the crook of my arm. As before on that night at Lexington we came very near to each other. Outside the sky began to turn gray and then pink, and I had that strange feeling, which some people have in time of crisis, of clairvoyance and utter disaster. Somehow I knew that this was the end of something... not death... but of some part of my life and of hers. It was almost a physical thing, as if I saw not with my eyes alone or with my mind but with the whole of me. And I was afraid suddenly with a fear that was only the same emotion I had experienced that night in Lexington but greatly heightened and touched by a sense of dread, of something which I was about to discover, which lay just a little way ahead of me.

There was something horrible and almost obscene in the sight of her suffering, as if there were a quality of the unnatural about it. At moments she seemed unable any longer to control herself and cried out, and once when I laid my hand on her thigh, she thrust it away fiercely as if it had burned her, saying, "Please!... Please, don't touch me! It's agony!" I had had little experience with physical suffering in others and certainly I had never witnessed anything like this. At moments it seemed impossible for anyone to suffer as acutely and still survive.

And after what seemed an eternity, while Mary cried and thrust her body, arched and convulsive with suffering, away from me, I heard the sound of a car on the silent village street. It pulled up to the hotel and stopped, and bending down to kiss her forehead, I said, "It's the doctor, darling. I'll go and bring him up."

As I stood up she reached out and, seizing my hand, kissed it. This was the last action in the world I would have expected of her, and I freed my hand and kissed her again and she whispered, "I want to be alone with the doctor."

"Yes, darling."

I met the doctor in the downstairs hall, still in my pajamas and dressing gown. He was a tall thin man of about sixty with a gentle distinguished pleasant face and wore very clear rimless glasses. I introduced myself and we shook hands and I said, "She's suffering a great deal. I'm frightened about her." But he seemed strangely quiet about it. He said, "I think I know what is the matter. She'll be all right again in a little while. I'll go right up to her."

He left me and hurried up the stairs, and for a while I stood looking out of the window into the street. There was nothing to see but an old brick house and a filling station and some trees, yet today I know exactly how it looks even to the streaks of rust that ran down from the roof across the white face of the filling station. The sense of something coming to an end was still with me and I thought, for no apparent reason at all, "What do I do now? Where do I go?" It was not death, either Mary's or my own, which concerned me, for as I have grown older death has come to mean less and less.

I found myself thinking, "Why am I here in this little Virginia town amongst strangers? How did I come here? What has happened to me?" and for a moment the whole of the affair with Mary seemed completely unreal as if it were something I had dreamed, and I saw myself as if I had been slightly insane for many weeks and had recovered my sanity. All the weeks and months when nothing had existed for me but Mary and the emotions and sensuality which centered in her seemed distant and strange. The memory of it was like something emerging, vague and distorted, in a fog. And then I heard someone at the hotel desk behind me and saw the old man who had been there the afternoon before.

I said, "My wife was taken ill. Doctor Wyndham is with her now."

He looked at me with a rather gentle smile as if he thought, "Another one of those things among the people who come down here!" as if I were a complete foreigner.

I'm sorry to hear that," he said. "I'm sure it will turn out all right." Then he added, "The cook is here. Perhaps you'd like a cup of coffee."

I thanked him and he led me into the plain empty dining room and pulled out a chair at a table and went into the kitchen, returning in a moment with a cup and a small enameled coffee pot.

"It's fresh made," he said. "Would you like some eggs or something with it?"

I thanked him and said I wasn't hungry. "When the doctor comes down, tell him I'm in here."

"I'll tell him," said the old man, and I had a feeling that, for all his kindness, he wished to wash his hands of me, of Maiy, of all people like us.

I had finished the coffee when I saw the doctor, followed by the old man, coming in the door of the dining room. The old man went to fetch another cup, and the doctor, still carrying his little medicine case, came over and said to me, "She'll be all right now in a little while... as right as ever."

"What about some coffee?" I asked.

"Yes," said the doctor and sat down.

"What is it with her?" I asked.

The doctor took out a cigarette. He seemed to be neither perturbed nor in a hurry. "I'm coming to that," he said. "In one sense it's nothing to worry about. In another it's terrible." He lighted the cigarette and lifted bis coffee cup. I liked him. He seemed calm and gentle with his clear blue eyes, and very reassuring.

He said, "You see, I like horses. That's why I'm down here. I don't really practice any longer... just now and then for friends like Mary. It's a good life... farming, horses, just enough doctoring to keep my hand in."

I wanted him to get to the point, but I was aware that trying to hurry so calm a man would lead nowhere.

He said, "I meet all kinds of people... any doctor does... but I get more than the average share of people with a lot of money who somehow get lost along the way. Maybe it's because they never really know where they're going or don't care much whether they go one way or another... This coffee is very good. The Inn's not a bad place really."

Hoping to lead him to the point I said, "It was very good of you to come out at such an ungodly hour."

"That's all right," he said. I'm fond of Mary. She's one of the ones who got lost along the road. By the way, she wanted me to tell you something. Maybe you know it already. It's hard to believe that you don't, but she is sure you don't." He put down his coffee cup and said, "You know, she's a drug addict. There wasn't anything wrong with her but that she ran out of drugs. She was expecting it by post three or four days ago and it didn't arrive. You see, that woman Nicole didn't send the stuff and she ran out of it."

So that was why the letter at the post office was so important. For a moment I just sat there trying to pull myself together in order to make some coherent or sensible remark. Somehow the sense of doom I had felt was now all connected.

All I could think to say was, "How did she ever get started on that?"

He went on calmly talking as if what he had told me was no more startling than the news that Mary was suffering from indigestion.

"She never talks much about it I think it began in Italy so far as I can make out, a long time ago. You see, this happened once before, so when you. called I knew what was the matter. I've taken care of her for the moment. She'll be all right very quickly." He looked at me sharply. "It's a frightening thing, isn't it?... I mean the suffering. I don't suppose anyone can quite describe it. When they're in that condition it's as if the whole of the body is a mass of exposed nerves. The inquisition, the Nazis never thought up any torture quite like it."

I still could find nothing to say and he continued, I'm surprised you didn't know it already, but Mary said she was sure you had no suspicion. I suppose someone would have to know the signs very well the little scars, the way she would seem very tired one moment and then disappear for a little while and return gay and full of vitality, the look in the eyes. And of course she never drinks anything stronger than sherry."

It all fitted... too well. I had noticed these things without noticing them, perhaps because I did not understand their significance, because I was just too damned dumb and inexperienced.

The doctor went on calmly drinking his coffee and presently in a voice which did not sound to me like my own, I asked, "Can't anything be done about it?"

"It might be possible to cure her perhaps for good, perhaps not. I don't think she wants to be cured. That is what is difficult in such cases. It all begins in the first place through despair, and usually they're afraid to go back and face that despair. Nearly always they break down again. You see, Mary is very unstable psychologically. It's all very complex and I don't pretend to know the reasons."

Outside it was now quite light and the morning sun was coming in at the windows. I saw people begin to appear in the little village street. The man at the filling station opposite unlocked the door and came out to fill a car with gasoline. But despite the sunlight everything was gray for me, as if the whole scene was enveloped by a fog which penetrated even the bare little dining room.

The doctor said, "All this, of course, is none of my business and there's no bloody reason why I should give anybody advice except that none of us can help it. I don't know who you are or anything about what goes on between you and Mary, but if I were you I'd break it up. Nothing good can come of it. It can only get worse and it might end in tragedy."

"What does Mary think?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask her. It's not only the drugs, you know. It's other things. It may be that you've gotten into something you don't understand at all." He stood up suddenly. "And now I'm going to shut up... tight. I'm going to take Mary back to New York this afternoon. I'll drive her to Washington and go from there on the train. She ought to be in a hospital of some kind for a time... you know, a private sort of place."

"I could take her," I said quickly.

"No. You wouldn't know the right persons to see or the right place to take her. You see, there's a whole secret inside world that exists for people like Mary. You have to have the key. Besides, she doesn't want you to go with her. She didn't even want to see you, but I didn't see how that could be avoided. I I were you I'd Just pack up and clear out... at least for the moment. Mary knows I'll take care of her. I've known her well for twenty years. If you stay around under the circumstances it will only agitate her and make things worse. I'll be coming back in an hour... as soon as I've packed up. You'd better go separately. Just hire a car and disappear." Then he picked up his little bag and put one hand on my shoulder and said, "Sorry, old man."

He turned away to go and I felt tears coming into my eyes in spite of everything... or because of everything. And suddenly he said, "Perhaps you've gotten in too deep... where you don't belong. If you go quickly it will be better for Mary and everyone."

I managed to say, "Thank you, Doctor," and suddenly he was gone.

The hardest thing was to get up the stairs and into the room again. I think it was because I was going up the stairs to find a different person from the one I had left a little while before and because somehow the shame of the whole thing had touched me as well. I was ashamed to see Mary. And yet I loved her still, as much as before. But something curious had happened to that love. The elements of it had become precipitated and separate. The sensuality which I know now was the core of that love had become a separate thing, something to be practiced coldly and with calculation. I saw it clearly now. I was not properly a lover but a voluptuary; which I suppose is what happens to men of my age who lose their heads. Mary had given me something I had never known before and possibly would never know again, but I never again would be free from the thought and the memory of it. Perhaps the tragedy was that the knowledge and the experience had come too late.

When I came into the room Mary was lying quite still and calm. She said, "Dick Wyndham told you?"

I came and sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand, but in an odd way it was a different hand from the one I had held a little while before as we waited for the doctor to arrive, I felt no emotion of any kind but only a curious shocked coldness.

"Yes," I said.

She looked away from me rather like a shamed child. "I'm sorry."

"It's all right," I said.

"He told you he's taking me back to New York?"

"Yes."

"I don't want you to come. When I'm straightened out a bit we can get together again."

"Yes."

"You want it, don't you?"

"Of course, my dear."

"It'll be different... your knowing. It won't be the same ever again."

"Yes." And then I lied, "It doesn't change anything really."

"Not really, I suppose." She drew her hand away and raised herself on her elbows. "Now get yourself packed up. I'm to be ready to go in an hour or two. You'd better be gone when the doctor comes back."

I dressed and packed quickly without a shower, without even shaving, partly I know now, because I did not want to look myself in the eyes again in the mirror. I had had too much of that.

When I came back into the room she was up wearing a dressing gown and packing her own things. She said, "Of course, you know, this is all Nicole's fault."

"Yes."

"She did it once before out of jealousy."

When I had finished packing and closed my bag she came across the room and put her arms about me, laying her head against my chest, and at the contact of her body the old fierce desire returned and more acutely than before I understood the fashion in which the elements of the whole affair had been precipitated. This was my body over which neither my mind nor its reason had any control. I was ready to begin all over again, at once.

"No," she said softly. "Not now. It will be all the better when we see each other again." A faint sigh escaped from her, and with her face still buried on my chest she said in a low voice, I've done a dirty thing to you. Have you forgiven me?"

"There's nothing to forgive."

"Good-bye then for now. I'll write you at once. Kiss me."

I kissed her and it was exactly as before and I knew then that I could never give her up, that I would come back again and again, for I had been corrupted. And I understood everything about Nicole and the peculiar relationship between her and Mary, It was Nicole who got her the stuff. That was why Nicole could never be sent away for good.

The sense of doom, of unreality, of a gray fog which seemed to envelop everything, remained with me during the whole of the trip home. I had no other thoughts but those which concerned Mary and myself, and once or twice it occurred to me that it might have been better if everything had ended cleanly in death without my ever having known. What had happened was a kind of death without any of the finality to which one must become reconciled or perish. What was to happen now? What would it be like when I returned to her? There began to arise in my mind every sort of suspicion as to what Mary's life had been in the past, and I kept hearing the voice of the man called Basil "Why have you become so nasty nice after taking on everybody, even jockeys?" I saw myself as a fool and a naive fool, so that I found myself actually blushing. Perhaps the whole thing had been on my side merely an illusion. Perhaps I had been merely used as a convenience the nearest man at hand.

What troubled me most was the consideration of what it would be like when I returned to her. Very likely it would become no more than a sensual adventure now that the curious precipitation into elements had occurred in my mind. I could not forget what the kindly doctor had said, "I do not think that she wants to be cured."

Mechanically I had headed for home, why I do not know, except that it seemed the only place to go. I was returning then, exactly as Enid had planned it, exactly as the sob sisters had advised her I would do in their columns. Maybe, after all, they were right about most men and what was I but Mr. Smith, having his fling as middle age approached, believing that this had never happened before to any other man? Perhaps I was just another of the myriad Mr. Smiths who should have had all this experience and knowledge in my twenties when it was proper and natural for a man to have it, and was trying now to make up for lost time when it was too late.

I could of course throw everything out of the window and clear out for good to join Mary, but I knew that this was not what Mary wanted and I saw clearly enough even through the gray fog where such an action would lead. We would wander about here and there and it could never be the same again, and whatever there was of stability in me would presently deteriorate and at last disappear. I took too easily to drink. Why should not that point arise at which I too began to take drugs? But despite seeing all this clearly, through the fog, I could not help thinking, 'Why not? Maybe thafs die best solution." The prospect of going back to Oakdale to disappear once more into the curious kind of conforming anonymity which existed there seemed intolerable.

I took a taxi from the airfield. I had not troubled to send Enid a wire that I would be home earlier than I expected. I had not thought of it at all. And now I would arrive home about five in the evening as a surprise. The thought occurred to me that this was frequently the fashion in which men discovered the infidelity of their wives, but the idea that I might find Enid with a man seemed only ludicrous. Certainly that was not what she wanted.

And of course I found no man. I found Enid playing bridge on the veranda with three women. As she saw me emerge from the taxi she put down her cards and came to meet me on the terrace in full sight of the women crying, "Darling, what a surprise!" and before I knew what was happening she had kissed me violently on the lips and mechanically I had put my arm about her something which had not happened in months.

I said, again mechanically, "I got through things sooner than I expected," and heard the sentence echoing in my brain as if it were an ironic comment on the whole of the situation. Then the women called out greetings to me and I knew what they were thinking. They were thinking, "He's come back. Enid was right! They all come back in the endP And they were speculating desperately as to what had happened and about what went on between Mary and me and they would be itching to get home and telephone all their friends. Enid's gesture had covered everything.

I stopped by the bridge table for a moment, acting and talking as if nothing whatever had happened, and then went up to my room followed by the red setter who could not get enough of me, and when I sat on the bed he came over, jumped up, and licked my face. I rubbed his ears and lay down, and presently without being aware of it I fell asleep. I had not slept in thirty-six hours.

It was dark when I wakened and hazily everything came back to me and the pain seemed worse, and now, rested, I wanted to leave at once and go back to Mary. Nothing else mattered. But I did not know where to find her in "that private secret world made for such people." All the unsatisfied desire returned to me and I saw again, with that new understanding, how much of the attraction had been pure sensuality. Again it was my body which wanted to return again and again. It was not really me. My body, my nerves, my sensuality had taken over, then dominated me as the drugs dominated Mary. Even now, here on this island, my body, dominating, cries out in anguish to return. But there is no means of return. I must satisfy it as best I can, to be rid of it I went downstairs at last, meaning to take out the car and drive off. I had no objective. I would just drive anywhere at all. And just as I was escaping I heard Enid's voice saying, "Darling, I've kept your supper hot. It's in the oven."

I said, "Thanks. I don't want anything."

She was quite near me now and she said, "If there's anything I can do to help, let me know. I want to help."

I was astonished by the speech but more astonished by the obvious air of sincerity. It was one of the few times in all our life together that she had, I felt, meant what she said. I really think that she meant it all. If things had been different she might have won out for good then and there. I might have gone back and begun all over again and finished out my life in the pattern of Oakdale. But there was too much in the past and I was too wary. I had been betrayed too many times and was unwilling to be trapped and betrayed again into that falsity, that spurious intensity which long ago had become unendurable. Too many memories rushed through my brain.

I was sorry for her, genuinely so, but I said, "Thanks, Enid. I'm just going out to get some air. I'll probably be home early."

She knew that something had happened although she could not in the wildest stretch of her imagination have divined what it was. She hoped, of course, that it was all over between Mary and me, but I think also that she understood in that moment that even if I returned physically to spend the rest of my life in the house with her and the children she had lost me forever.

The next day I went to the office and went through the motions of picking up the loose ends of my business. I was more efficient than usual and demanded perfection from my secretary and the file clerks. And at four I left and stopped by the hotel bar to have a drink, and by the looks on the faces of my friends I knew that the three bridge-playing women had done their work well and the news had spread that I had come back for good, although how they suspected or knew that something serious had happened I cannot even today understand. I think there was sympathy in the faces of some of my friends. They had looked on me as a wild devil and envied me, and now it was over and I was back in the fold again.

It was after six when I arrived home and I found the letter from Mary. She had never written me at home before. The most had been a telegram judiciously worded and sent to my office. Enid, I doubt, could possibly have known her handwriting, but she had left the letter lying on the bed in my room, as if she had wanted to give it an added and urgent importance. My hands shook as I tore it open, and all the desire to be with Mary came rushing back in a great and submerging wave. The emotion was a purely sensual one.

This is what I read:

My Darling:

This is a line to say good-bye. I'm going away tonight and I'm not coming back for a long time. Very likely I shall never go back again to the old house that was the only place which ever seemed like home. I shan't see you again.

It hurts me to write this, but there are so many reasons so many that you know nothing about, even beyond what you discovered in Virginia. It was all wrong from the beginning, you understand, and I knew that it was all wrong. That's what made it the worse and the more wicked on my part, for I could have stopped it at one point or I could never have begun it all. There has been something wrong about me since the very beginning, something which was evil and corrupt, and I can't begin to tell you when it began or why it ever existed. It began when I was quite young and the world in which I was brought up didn't help it much, and when I married it was... like touching off an explosion. It is something which I cannot control and long ago I gave up trying to control it.

It is like tearing my heart out to write you this because I really loved you, and still love you, darling. You might once have been the means of my salvation, but it's too late for that. Too much had happened long before we ever met that day on the road. It's as if I were two people, one of whom is my enemy whom I cannot trust, who betrays me, who kidnaps me, and does with me as he pleases and then goes away leaving me spent and wretched and shamed and with no peace. I know by now that my enemy will always come back when I am not on my guard and claim me and it will begin all over again. You were not the first man in my life nor the second or the third. There have been many... so many that when I am tired I sometimes cannot remember them all. What the man shouted at me on the veranda in Kentucky was true. There have been all kinds of men, yes, even a jockey whom he knew about.

I used to come back home to the big old house for a rest, because for a little time I could escape and because such things were very difficult there. But it happened even there, swiftly and fiercely, never for long, but it happened as if I were nothing but an instrument for my own destruction. It happened with men that you perhaps know. Naming them would do no good. It would only make things worse. It happened there first many years ago with the golf instructor at the club. I cannot even remember his name. So I am a monster and that is how I want you to think of me, always.

It was an evil chance that you picked me up on the day that I had the accident on the road. The thing was coming on again and what happened might have happened with any man who came along at that moment, but with you the worst of all things happened, I saw suddenly that you looked very like my father and after that I no longer had any control. I had to do what I did. You understand that I came back willingly every year from Europe. I kept the house exactly as it was because of him. And now I am free of the place. I need never come back again. Something has happened to me and I think you are the one who has set me free because you gave me what no other was ever able to give and now I needn't ever see the house again. They can tear it down. They can burn it. It can rot away. I am free. And it was you who set me free although you knew nothing of what you were doing.

But I loved you for yourself as well, perhaps more than I have ever loved anyone. Why? Because you seemed decent and clean and you were such an innocent when you came to me. You were all the things I had not known for so long, all the things indeed which I have never known and never experienced with any man. You needn't be ashamed of your innocence. You were the most wonderful lover I have ever known and I do not speak without experience. Giving you up forever is the hardest thing I have ever done, but it must be done. If it went on it could only progress into corruption because I am at heart corrupt and long since beyond salvation or redemption. I only hope that I have not already corrupted you beyond saving.

Oh ? darling, I am so confused, so wretched, so frightened. When I cried out that night that I was tired, it was a cry from the heart, from beyond the grave. I am tired of struggling, tired of forever failing myself and everyone else. For a time you lifted me above all of that, but it could not last because I am what I am.

You will not see me again, even if you tried to follow me. I would not see you even if I had to destroy myself to prevent it... and that would be much easier than you think. I go to sleep every night not caring in the least whether I waken in the morning. I am only afraid of physical suffering. You must have seen what a coward I was that night in Virginia. Perhaps if that had not happened it might have gone on a little longer... but after that night I knew that it would never be the same again that something was changed and that from then on everything would only become progressively more evil and more corrupt. Why do I know this? Because that same knowledge all happened to me once before in Italy when I was much younger. Only then it was myself who was the innocent and the corrupted. That is how I came to begin the whole business of taking drugs. That time I was not the corrupter but the corrupted.

Somewhere in a book I once read a quotation which I memorized and have never forgotten. It was written in French and runs thus: "Dans la damnation le feu est la moindre chose; le supplice propre au damné est le progrès infini dans le vice et dans le crime l’âme s’endurcissant, se dépravant toujours, s’enfonçant incessamment dans le mal de minute en minute en progression géométrique pendant une éternité."^[1]

It is a pity that you do not understand French, for it is very terrible and very beautiful in French. I will try to translate it for you, badly. It runs something like this, "In the course of damnation the fire is the least thing; the real punishment of the damned is the infinitely slow progression into vice and crime, in which the spirit grows constantly more brutish, more hardened, constantly more depraved, losing itself through necessity again and again in the transient evil of the moment, in a geometric progression throughout eternity."

Do you understand what that means? No one who is not damned can really understand it, hut perhaps after what has happened between us you are enough damned to fathom a little its meaning.

When we were together I tried not to tell you anything, to let you see anything, even the smallest thing, and that was all right so long as we loved each other in a world in which no one else existed or came near us. Perhaps if we had gone on as we began, in that old house, I might have managed it... I mean loving you without corrupting you too much. I don't know why I have written what I have just written because it could never have gone on like that and because what I have written is not true. It is only that while we were together I tried perpetually to deceive myself as well as you, and out of that deception no good could ever come.

The terrible thing is that I cannot see the end or indeed any end. I am alone and each year I grow a little older and a little more desperate. What happened between us was a blessed respite which I knew always in my heart could not last.

I could not have written you thus if I were not at heart an honest woman and a fairly intelligent one. I could not have written you as I am doing if I had not loved you and, God help me, did not stnl love you. I am writing you this because I want you to understand, if only a little, that I am both better and worse than I must have seemed to you.

So I am going away. Do not try to find me. Remember or forget me whatever is easiest for you and best. I ask you only to remember one thing that you were not like all the others. The beginning perhaps was the same and then something happened. It was not like anything that ever happened before. I loved you. That is what made it different. And I shall be forever grateful to you because for a little time I came alive. For a little time everything came together into a pattern that might once have saved me. And then I discovered that it was too late for salvation.

I shall go on, distracting myself. I shall perhaps at times find life possible and I shall even know the fierce, evil, physical pleasure of the act that has been my damnation... the act alone! Do you know how terrible that can be, how vicious and degrading and calloused? And for a woman it is so much worse.

I could not debase myself more than I have done in this letter, and somehow the lacerating confession has made me for a little time at least feel cleaner, as if I had atoned and been absolved. But perhaps I am only a fool and fancy that what you gave me was more than the others gave and that I only think you are different and that what you gave me was different. When I kissed your hand that night I was trying to say in a futile meaningless gesture what I have written here... all of it. You know that I am a proud woman and a fiercely independent one and that such a gesture could only have come from the depths of my heart out of the most profound gratitude and emotion.

And so good-by. I shall be all right. I hope you will be. I think everything has changed for you. I know it, for I watched it happen without your ever knowing. I was aware of what was happening. You see, darling, there are so many things I know that you never knew and may never know. I think I must have been born knowing them. It made me a lonely young girl and later a lonely woman. Good-by again... and God bless you.

Mary