Conversation; or, Pilgrim’s Progress
A Novel
I
“… and after many difficulties in boisterous storms, at length, by God’s providence, upon the 9th November following, by break of the day we espied land, which we deemed to be Cape Cod; and so afterward it proved. And the appearance of it much comforted us, especially seeing so goodly a land, and wooded to the brink of the sea; it caused us to rejoice together, and praise God that had given us once again to see land. And thus we made our course S.S.W., purposing to go to a river ten leagues to the south of the Cape; but at night, the wind being contrary, we put round again for the bay of Cape Cod; and upon the 11th November we came to an anchor in the bay, which is a good harbour and pleasant bay, circled round, except in the entrance, which is about four miles over from land to land, compassed about to the very sea with oaks, pines, juniper, sassafras, and other sweet wood.… There was the greatest store of fowl that ever we saw.…”
—JOURNAL OF THE PILGRIMS
“Tirra-lirra, tirra-loo, tirra-lirra, tirra-lee—”
“That doesn’t make sense, daddy.”
“Neither it does. But what does it matter? What’s the difference between a loo and a lee? And now then, young woman, how about getting out of that there bath. It’s late! Look how late it is! It’s autumn! The leaves are falling off the trees! It’s going to be cold, you’ll catch your death of cold!”
“Oh, but it’s so nice in here. Can I do just one handsquirt, just one?”
“Just one. And the leaves came tumbling down—”
“Why do the leaves come off the trees, daddy?”
“Now out you get. Up—!”
He loved to feel the firm small wet body, the compact little chest, between his hands, the legs wriggling and thrusting for the bathmat as he put her down: it was as good as eating, as good as drinking. As good as singing, as good as autumn. The round face, the blue eyes, emerged from the rapid towel to say:
“But why do the leaves tumble off the trees!”
“Listen to them scuttling like mice in the pathway, listen to them blowing!”
“But why, but why!”
“I’ll tell you what it is, Buzzer, it’s a mystery.”
“A mystery!”
They gazed together, turning, out of the little groundfloor window of the bathroom, watched the poplar leaves floating down, streaming on air, wafts and drifts and chains of them, golden and endless—like a kind of music, he thought, as inexhaustible and without origin as music.
“But of course you wouldn’t know what a mystery is, would you?”
“A mystery, a mystery, a mystery—”
“It’s a nice word, and a very important one. It’s one of those words as big as a barn door, as big as a circus tent, as big as a railway station, as big as a hollowed-out mountain, so that you can drive anything you like into it—herds of sheep, flocks of cattle, horses, trucks, armies, wagons, cannons, ideas, stars, worlds, moons—in fact, anything you like. See?”
“Now my hands!”
“Did I forget those hands—? Foo! But you see, my pet, it’s like this. Once a year the trees all get very tired, and very sleepy, and they want to go to bed.”
“To bed! Ho ho, how silly, as if a tree could go to bed! Ho ho!”
“Yes, sir, to bed. They want to go to sleep, and so what do they do? They do just exactly what you do, they take off their clothes.”
“And the leaves are their clothes! But we don’t have leaves for clothes, daddy!”
“Ah, that’s just where you’re wrong. Didn’t you ever hear tell of Mother Eve?”
“Of course! Eve and Adam were the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden. Anybody knows that. Now my toes!”
She lifted one foot, waggled the toes at him.
“Quite right. And you see, Eve wore a fig leaf, that’s what she did—”
“And took it off in the autumn, when she wanted to go to sleep?”
“Well, I daresay. Anyway, that’s what they say she wore—you’d think it must have been a little bit chilly, wouldn’t you! Tirra-lirra, tirra-loo—”
“And then do the trees go to sleep?”
She put her hands on the window sill, to look again at the falling of the leaves, automatically raised them as he lowered the little nightgown over the curled head, and worked them skilfully through the sleeves, the face with primmed mouth once more emerging in triumph, like a seal from a wave.
“The trees, bless their hearts, go to sleep. All winter they just dream and rest, exactly, for all the world, as if they were in their beds. After all, you have flower beds, you know!”
“Ho ho—and who’d like to sleep in a flower bed! Not me!”
He turned her around, opened the door, smacked her small bottom, guided her toward the hall with a firm finger planted in the middle of her back.
“Well, off to your own, then, if you like that better. Quick! March!”
Ahead of him, she scrambled barefoot up the painted stairs, straddling a little to do so, and he followed smiling. Wind-borne and uneven, he heard the church clock striking seven, and listened, as always, for the queer quavering stammer of the final stroke. The Unitarian Church, the village, the main street, the post office, the evening mail—already the loquacious line would be forming in the shabby little post office, the townsfolk would be there for the evening inspection of each other, the evening spying into each other’s affairs. And there might be a letter—his heart began to beat more quickly—he mustn’t think of that. And yet, why not? It ought to seem particularly naughty—just now, just here—with Buzzer reaching up to trip the latch of the dusk-filled bedroom—but it didn’t. No morals in nature, none!
“Tirra-lee!” he said, “and into bed with you.”
“Why did you give me my bath? Why didn’t mummy give me my bath?”
“Because mummy was very tired, see?”
“Well, then, you must tell me a story.”
“I’ll tell you a story about John McGlory—”
“Not that one!”
“I’ll tell you another about his brother—”
“No, no, no, no, no!”
“There isn’t time tonight, my pet. The world’s coming to an end any minute now, and daddy must be there to see it. In with you!”
He threatened her comically, with raised hand, and, pretending alarm, she skipped into the little cot, whipping the pink feet under the blue counterpane, with its embroidered birds.
“Ho ho,” she said, “you can’t fool me! It isn’t coming to an end! Good night.”
“Good night.”
He stooped to kiss the still damp cheek; the blue eyes looked abstractedly past him, she was already dismissing him, she had already begun to sing her night-song. Good lord—he thought—how quickly they do it, how quickly they swoop from one world into another! If it was only as easy as that! Patting her knee idly, and straightening up, he looked through the screened window into the little garden, saw Chattahoochee, the cat, in the act of sitting down demurely under the poor bare-armed little plum tree—if ever a tree had committed suicide, that one had—and beyond it, beyond the low white fence, Mrs. Purington moving about in her kitchen next door. A motor boat was chugging in the river, probably Mr. Riley, the fisherman, back from scalloping, the dirty blue boat, foul with fish scales, approaching the Town Landing—maybe it would be a good idea to go and see. On his way to the post office? Afterward? In case there should be a letter—? He frowned as he turned away and closed the white door behind him, frowned as he hesitated at the top of the stairs. But there was Enid, there was Endor, there was Ee—he could hear her in the kitchen now, the clink of a saucepan on the stove, or the sink—and resentment was unmistakable in the sound, it had been piling up all day. Odd, how one knows—just as one knows a storm is approaching, feels it in the air—the distant mutter even while the sky is still hot and cloudless, the first little sinister breeze turning the silver seams of the poplar trees, a chill draft from the southwest, and then the mounting purple of the clouds, and the Unitarian church steeple turning—suddenly—a livid tombstone white. He took out the watch from the pocket of his khaki trousers—how ridiculous, he knew perfectly well what time it was—and replaced it without looking at it. And now, on top of everything else, this unfortunate business of Jim Connor—
He rattled down the steps, to let Enid know that he was coming—and coming cheerfully—paused at the entrance to the cluttered little studio living room, looked in. The last of the autumn sunlight slanted across the unfinished picture which stood on the easel—the colors jumped out awry, glowed, he felt himself flowing into that shape of ruin, that shape of an old barn on a tangled hill, amongst wild grass, wild lilacs, wild apple trees—but at once the current reversed itself, flowed back on itself, for once more it was unmistakably a failure—a dud, a flop. Impotence, impotence—the hand powerless to shape the actual, the vision powerless to purify its own shafts of light—what was the trouble, what the devil was it? Deep and perhaps inoperable as a cancer, the fine roots untraceably spread and wound in the unconscious, in his whole life—it was perhaps the life itself which was all wrong, wrongly rooted—what was needed was a giant sponge, a new start. But where? Not here. Not with this hall stove which must soon be laid and lit, the coals fetched in from the woodshed in the garden, the ashes dumped on the rain-gutted road that led down to the Town Landing—and yet, why not? Why not indeed! This was rich, real, rank—as rank as the snarled nasturtiums on the river wall at the foot of the garden, as rank as marsh and seaweed, the crawling mudflats at low tide, or the winter, which would presently howl its snows and bitter stars about the small wooden houses of the village, freezing the pipes, sending icy drafts up through the cracks between bare floorboards, chilling the rooms with white light through frosted windows. Real enough, Christ, yes! And as real too as the sound of running water which now came from the kitchen sink.
In the dining room, two silver candlesticks on the table, which had not been set, and Buzzer’s porringer on her own little white table under the window—he picked it up, for it would be an ambassador for him, and went down the two steps into the kitchen lean-to.
“Here’s these,” he said.
“Well, put them down!”
Dark curls turning on the pink smock, the small stubborn head half turning, the liquid green eyes—lovely!—flashing toward and past him, but on a level lower than his own, not meeting his, lowering again to the bright collander in which she was shaking potatoes. The potatoes were very important; she was humming to herself, preoccupied, a cloud of steam rose softly from the kettle on the stove.
“All bathed and abed,” he said, “and went like a lamb.”
“Did you give her a quilt? It’s going to be cold.”
“No, I didn’t think of it.”
“Never mind, then, I’ll do it myself.”
“I thought I’d go for the mail.”
“It couldn’t possibly wait till after supper, I suppose.”
“My dear Ee, you know it would be closed.”
“And is there any such important mail that it can’t wait till morning?”
“Just the same, I think I’ll go, if you don’t mind.…”
She made no answer as he let himself out through the garden door. The screen clacked behind him, he walked slowly around the back of the house, and looked down over the sloping lawn towards the river and the Town Landing. Mr. Riley, on the cabin roof of the blue motorboat, was in the act of stepping across, rubber-booted, to the rotten piles of the wharf—tomorrow there would be scallops—and a car could be heard kicking up the loose boards of the bridge, rumbling and rattling as it came, then accelerating swiftly as it shot up the sandy road past the Bank, scattering dead leaves lavishly to left and right.
Leaves everywhere—the road that led to the Town Landing was ankle-deep with them, they lay in loose golden drifts on the field where Mr. Riley’s nets were spread out to dry, from the tall poplars even now they floated down in lazy parallel chains and curves, they clung about the fading stalks of the chicory, whose last blue flowers glowed like pale stars. Another night, another frost, and the trees would be bare—summer was over. Tirra-loo-tirra-lee! “Shadows rising on you and me”—shadows rising was good, one could imagine the shadows rising like water, like a tide, like these full-moon tides. Coming up about one’s feet, climbing, deepening—but it was no joke, it was all too true! No letter from Nora, not a word in two weeks, and this on top of her refusal—unwillingness? inability?—to see him last time, and the time before that the unfortunate meeting at the hotel in Boston, and now, as if that wasn’t enough, this damned Jim Connor business, and Enid—
Mr. Murphy, getting out of his Ford, just back from the evening train with the mails, waved from his yard, and on the piazza of the Murphy boarding house the old loony was sitting, Miss Schermerhorn, rocking herself intently in a rocking chair, her eyes fixed brightly on the road. She beckoned to him, leaned forward, said mysteriously:
“Did you hear anything, mister?”
“No?”
“It’s the water running, the water running in the cellar, they forgot to turn it off!”
“Oh!”
“Yes, they’d ought to be told, they went away and left it running!”
“Very well, I’ll tell them.”
She looked unconvinced, but also as if it didn’t much matter, and resumed her rocking. What a village! Every other person cracked or feeble-minded—gone to seed. Dear old Mrs. Chandler, the seamstress, stopping everybody in the streets—of course, it was the only trace of anything wrong with her, otherwise she was perfectly normal—to talk about underclothes, and apropos of absolutely nothing. The weather, the news, the children, the yacht races, the taxes, the church supper—and then suddenly the vital, the burning, question, toward which she had been cunningly working all the time, the dark and precious secret. Yes, I like silk, I like silk, but then don’t you think there is something really nicer, really cleaner, about linen? I change sometimes nine or ten times a day! And Mrs. Kimpton, the washerwoman, with her obscure passion for corsets! Always poking about in the town dump for new specimens—no matter in what state of dilapidation—going there day after day—and then putting them up all round her living-room, as one might put flowers, or pictures! What the devil was that all about? A mystery, as Buzzer had said, a mystery, a mystery! But no stranger, perhaps, than wanting to paint.
Two men were standing outside the post-office door, talking, and when he went into the post office, now empty, and peered into Box 67 in the slant light, that too was empty. Nothing. Not a word, not a scrap—nothing. He turned, walked out slowly, paused on the little triangular corner of gravel outside, looked unseeing to left and right.
“When was that, that it became that amount?”
“Just before I went into the hospital.”
“And what did you do, did you tell her about it before you went into the hospital?”
“Sure I did. What do you take me for!”
“Well, I don’t understand it, and that’s a fact.”
He crossed the street, took the long way around the block, scuffed the dead leaves with dusty shoes. Empty again. Empty! But it was himself who felt empty: a slow and hollow pang, a queer mixture of guilt and suffering. But why feel guilty now, if—as it appeared—she had decided to end the affair, to drop him? It didn’t make sense. Understandable enough that he should feel ashamed when he got a letter, to read it and carry it about in secret, or burn it slyly in the fireplace—but why now, when perhaps the whole delicious exciting thing might be over, and his integrity (willy-nilly) restored? Of course, he had seen it coming—it had begun when he moved to the country, and couldn’t see her so often, or thought he couldn’t. She hadn’t reproached him, but just the same you couldn’t blame her! Thought he couldn’t! Ah! of course! The truth was that he could have seen her, and even oftener, if he had then really wanted to; but that he himself had definitely not felt like it. Yes. He had been a little bored, a little depressed, by the continuous necessity for secrecy and furtiveness, had simply wanted a rest. And Nora had seen through it.
Oh, well, maybe it was all for the best. It would certainly simplify things, makes things easier with Enid?… The slow pang hollowed itself out in his breast again—dear delightful humorous Nora!—but he quenched it, looked away from it, looked down through the Puringtons’ garden at the river and the dismasted hulks which lay on their sides on the farther shore—rotting, like so many other things in this sleepy little town—and then, with quicker steps, and a clear sense of relief—or no, not quite that, not quite, but at any rate a sharper sense of detachment and singleness with which to face Enid—he entered his own garden. He walked past the house, toward the back. Terence’s blue wagon stood there, looking very large in the twilight, the horse pawing at the grass, and Enid and Terence were talking at the kitchen door.
“It’s the lilacs,” Enid said. Her arms were folded across her breast, across the pink smock, and she addressed the remark rather to the wagon than to himself.
“Guess you got plenty of ’em, too, Mr. Kane, judging by the looks of those boxes!” Terence took out his clay pipe, grinned, spat.
“A hundred, Terence—ninety-seven plain, and three fancy! What are we going to do with them?”
Enid turned and opened the kitchen door.
“And when you’ve finished—” she looked down toward the river—“there’s some one in the sitting room, the studio, waiting to see you.”
The door clacked shut behind her—why the devil couldn’t she say who it was!
“Well, Mr. Kane, guess we’d better get ’em in tonight. ’Twon’t do ’em no good to lay around here in the frost!”
“You think there’s going to be a frost?”
“A good one. I’ll come over after supper and bring a shovel.”
“Okay, Terence. Let me know and I’ll give you a hand.”
“They sure packed ’em up good. Quite a weight, too. I thought I’d bust a gut!”
The three boxes lay like great coffins on the grass, the torn grass, the sand showing where the box corners had gouged through the thin topsoil, and Terence kicked one of them affectionately with the toe of a heavy boot.
“And where did you have it in mind to put them?”
Together they looked along the sloping garden, now growing dark, the bare little garden which led down to the river. The river gleamed almost unnaturally in the queer light—bat-light, he thought, betwixt-light, the hour of the mosquito—but later, of course, there would be the full moon.
“Wants two nights for the full moon,” Terence added. “Guess we can make out to see, all right!”
“All along both sides, Terence—right from the street on that side and from the back of the kitchen on this. And then a few across the middle there, halfway down, leaving just a sort of gateway through to the lower terrace. Where you built the wall.”
“Never will I forget those fleas!”
“Yes, that was funny.”
“It was all them rats. Yes, sir, it was from them rats they come; foh, I never saw such filth in all my life, no, sir! Why, there was millions of them, that soil and muck and seaweed was full of them, and I begun scratching, and old Bill he begun scratching, we didn’t know what it was. But we found out, all right! Gorry! When I got home, I stood up on the middle of a blanket, without nary a stitch on, and a bucket of water beside me, and hoo didn’t the little buggers hop! It was all right for me, but poor old Bill, he was half blind, he couldn’t see much, and they sure did make him miserable! He was in a torment.”
“I remember those rats; they lived in the cellar-hole, and down in the corner where the pigsty used to be.…”
Terence chuckled, they both chuckled, then Terence took the reins of the horse, and began backing and turning the wagon.
“I’ll be in later, then,” he said.
“All right. Give me a shout. Sure you don’t mind, Terence?”
“Glad to do it. No good putting dead lilacs into the ground, is there?”
“No!”
The reflector lamp had been lit in the kitchen, on the shelf behind the coal stove, and in the dining room the candle flames rose pale and tall on the table, where Enid sat witchlike, her elbows on the polished walnut, her cheeks on her fists. The yellow light narrowed and brightened the green gleam of her eyes, but he couldn’t be sure whether they quite looked at him. She was waiting, visibly waiting, and at once it was as if some obscure current had stiffened and frozen between them.
“Who is it?” he said.
“George.”
“Why couldn’t you have said so!”
“Was there any necessity? He’s got something of considerable interest, you’ll find, to say about your friend Jim Connor.”
“Oh, he has!”
“Yes. And might I remind you that dinner is ready? I think he could have chosen a better time to call. He knows perfectly well what time we have dinner.”
“Very well, you needn’t wait for me.”
“Thank you, I’ll wait!”
“I don’t think you’d better.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, nothing. But it might take some time!”
He made this remark as if humorously, over his shoulder, looking back from the doorway. She still sat unmoving, but now the green eyes were subtly lifted and turned towards him, with an expression, however, which he hadn’t time to fathom. Good lord, he thought quickly, how lovely she is, it isn’t fair! Not fair to man or beast. Nobody has a right to be as beautiful as that, or if they have, they shouldn’t be allowed to sit in candle light.
The studio was half dark, and George stood tall and white as a ghost by the fireplace, his striped palmbeach suit immaculate as always, the Panama hat in his hand. He was on his dignity, a little formidable and formal, the man of property come to uphold his rights.
“Hello, didn’t Enid give you a light?”
“Ah, I’m afraid I’ve come at an inconvenient moment, Tip, but I thought as you’d be going up to town tomorrow I mightn’t catch you—”
“Not till the day after. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays!”
The bright blue eyes twinkled mischievously behind the black-corded glasses, the magisterial headmasterly head, with its close gray curls, inclined just perceptibly forward in the ghost of a bow. He slapped his hat, as if irritatedly, against his knee, turning slowly towards the struck match, the lighted candle on the mantel, the piled pine logs and pine cones in the wide fireplace.
“Forgive me, old fellow—how stupid of me. Of course.”
“Sit down. What’s on your mind?”
“Didn’t Enid tell you?”
“Well, she murmured something about Jim Connor—”
George motioned with his hat towards the picture on the easel, as he sat down.
“Looks kind of familiar,” he said. “Charming, my boy! Weir Village, isn’t it?”
“Large as life.”
“And twice as natural!”
He crossed his long legs, first carefully pulling up the exquisitely creased white trousers.
“Well, what about Jim Connor?”
“That’s what I want to know. What we all want to know.”
“Who is ‘all’?”
“I won’t mention any names, if you don’t mind, but I’ve talked it over with several people—”
“The town fathers, I suppose?”
“No, not yet. Of course not, Tip. I wanted first to see you.”
“Very kind of you.”
“Not at all. And you needn’t be sarcastic!”
“All right, go ahead.”
“Perhaps you could tell me something about him. I think we have a right to know a little more—unless, of course, you want to be responsible for him, which personally I wouldn’t recommend! There is such a thing as being an accessory before the fact, you know—you’d be conniving!”
“How so? I don’t know a thing.”
“You know he’s a thief! And we hear that he’s going to continue being a thief while he’s living here.”
“You know more than I do then!”
“I judge merely from what Enid said.”
“Enid’s only source of information, as far as I am aware, is myself.”
“Well, my dear fellow, you must realize what we feel about it. We can’t allow thieves around, you know—there is such a thing as law, after all! Just the same, I don’t want to be unreasonable, and as he’s a friend of yours, I thought it only fair to give you and him warning.”
“Warning?”
“Exactly. It will be my duty as a citizen to notify the police.”
(Damn! So that was what they were up to—! And Enid too.)
“Now look here, George—”
He broke off, gave an angry little laugh. It was funny—it was really too funny. The upright but misguided Jim—and yet, was he misguided?—causing all this fuss. And the idea of notifying poor old bewildered Uncle Cy William, the Town Constable, who had never made an arrest in his life! But George was leaning back in his chair, smiling cynically, his curled leonine head outlined against the open window—he was going to be difficult, he was going to be truculent. The defender of the faith—confound his impertinence! And the worst of it was that, within his limits, he was perfectly right.
George was saying, twirling the Panama hat round a raised forefinger:
“How long exactly have you known him, by the way, Tip? It isn’t as if he was really an old friend of yours, is it?”
“I think I told you. He came up to town with my friend Karl Roth, the painter—that was last spring. I liked him. He struck me at once as one of the few honest people I ever met.”
“Honest!”
“Yes. I mean it. The stealing is only an idea, a protest—he’s an anarchist and unlike most anarchists he practices what he preaches—doesn’t believe in trade for profit or in property being used for profit by barter. And so he steals merely in order to redistribute goods which he thinks are unjustly divided—he doesn’t make anything out of it himself—not a cent—gives it all away to the poor and deserving. With a special weakness for helping starving painters and poets.”
“And you believe that!”
“Of course I do. He’s perfectly candid about it—he even notifies the police himself, sometimes in advance, when he’s planning a haul, so as to get himself arrested and air his views in court. Sends the district attorney a picture postcard! They’re tired of him. They’d much rather look the other way, I can assure you! And he’s actually done a lot of good—he’s helped some of the poor creatures a great deal.”
“The whole thing’s a fake, my dear Tip, and I’m surprised you don’t see through it, I really am! Why, those dingy little poets and painters are nothing but parasites, it’s just a dishonest and easy living for the whole lot of them. Mind you, I don’t care what he does in New York or Greenwich Village—let him do it all he likes down there! But, by gosh, it’s another thing when he comes up here, and takes the most expensive cottage in town with his ill-gotten gains, and proposes to use this as his center of operations! That’s too much, yes, sir, that’s a bit too much.”
“You’re quite safe. He doesn’t rob houses, and you won’t miss any of your silver. You can reassure Mabel!”
“It doesn’t make any difference, as far as I can see, what he steals.”
“Only department stores. He specializes in robbing big department stores. I think it’s kind of nice, at that!”
“You’ve got a right to your own opinion, but, my dear boy, I beg you to consider your position very carefully. I don’t want to see you get into any trouble.”
“Who’s likely to make trouble?”
“I am! And you can tell him that from me. And you can tell him he’d better keep out of my way. I don’t want to meet him. Nor his houseful of very peculiar-looking friends.”
“There’ll be no occasion, I assure you.”
“They all look like crooks to me!”
“They’re quite harmless, they’re just a little crazy.”
“Every man to his own taste, said the farmer, as he kissed the pig! Anyway, you tell your friend Connor that I’ve warned him, and that I reserve the right to inform the police without further notice. I trust that’s quite clear?”
“Quite, my dear George. I’ll take Connor your tender message. Not that he’s really a friend of mine—I hardly know him!”
“If you’ve got any sense, you’ll drop him. But I must be going.”
“I’ll walk down to the bridge with you.”
Good old George—so well-meaning, but such a righteous idiot! Hopeless to expect anything else of him, of course—one had only to look at the beautiful suit, the hat, the suède shoes, the neat black spectacle cord—but how damned exasperating. And what had he been saying to Enid? Or she to him? The thick was plottening, and with a vengeance, it looked like being a first-class mess. The property instinct—this was what came of owning a colonial mansion and a Pierce-Arrow car, by god! You couldn’t blame him, but all the same he was somehow less pleasant to consider than poor honest Connor, for all his crack-brained confusions and inconsistencies. Connor was at least generous.
They walked down the Town Landing lane in the dark. The big moon was just rising over the pine woods across the river, the crickets were chirping like mad, faster and faster, doubtless in a last passionate effort to keep themselves warm. Already the night smelt of frost. He turned his head, saw the dim light between the dining-room curtains—a shadow moved briefly across them, Enid must have decided to begin without him. But no—she was playing the piano; the little Brahms Op. 39 waltz came plaintively into the night, across the rustling of the trodden leaves and the iterated zeek-zeek-zeek of the doomed crickets—it was, of course, a protest. He smiled, and said:
“A pity you won’t meet them, though—Roth would amuse you. And those gals are a scream. Gosh, what a night!”
“Jove, yes! My dear fellow, of course there’s nothing personal in it, and I’m thinking as much of your good, yours and Enid’s and even Buzzer’s, as mine. A fine sort of scandal to get your family mixed up in! But never mind.… I hear your lilacs have come.”
“Yes. Terence is coming over to put them in before the frost.”
Covered