Their voices hung suspended in the night, time ceased for them, for an eternal instant they were happy. When at last they parted it was by tacit agreement on a note of the ridiculous.
“Be a good boy and take your bromide!” she said.
“Yes, mother, I’ll take my medicine!”
In his stateroom, he mixed himself a strong potion of bromide, a very strong one, and got into bed. He would have no trouble in falling asleep; he felt more tired, more supremely exhausted, than he had ever been in his life; nor had bed ever seemed so delicious. And that long, magnificent, delirious swoop of dizziness … the Great Circle … the swift pathway to Arcturus.…
It was all as before, but infinitely more rapid. Never had Mr. Arcularis achieved such phenomenal, such supernatural, speed. In no time at all he was beyond the moon, shot past the North Star as if it were standing still (which perhaps it was?), swooped in a long, bright curve round the Pleiades, shouted his frosty greetings to Betelgeuse, and was off to the little blue star which pointed the way to the Unknown. Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella! Have you got your garters on? Mind your hat! In no time at all we’ll be back to Clarice with the frozen rime-feather, the time-feather, the snowflake of the Absolute, the Obsolete. If only we don’t wake … if only we needn’t wake … if only we don’t wake in that—in that—time and space … somewhere or nowhere … cold and dark … “Cavalleria Rusticana” sobbing among the palms; if a lonely … if only … the coffers of the poor—not coffers, not coffers, not coffers, Oh, God, not coffers, but light, delight, supreme white and brightness, whirling lightness above all—and freezing—freezing—freezing.…
At this point in the void the surgeon’s last effort to save Mr. Arcularis’s life had failed. He stood back from the operating table and made a tired gesture with a rubber-gloved hand.
“It’s all over,” he said. “As I expected.”
He looked at Miss Hoyle, whose gaze was downward, at the basin she held. There was a moment’s stillness, a pause, a brief flight of unexchanged comment, and then the ordered life of the hospital was resumed.
THE BACHELOR SUPPER
I.
“You’ve got to be well oiled,” Kit had said. “If you’re well oiled, it’s all right. You come over to my place before it, and we’ll shake up a couple of good potent cocktails, and then you won’t mind it.… Good God, why do you take it so seriously? It’s all in a lifetime!”
No doubt. So was everything, perhaps. But why did it have to be? Why was it a part of the social scheme of things? It seemed to be compulsory—everyone was agreed about that. They all did it. Loo had had one—so had Bill—Everett had got out of his only because he was in Cuba, and hadn’t been able to come home in time for anything but the wedding itself. There seemed to be no escaping it. In fact, it seemed to be a sort of social appendage to the wedding, indispensable preliminary. And the cost!… He had been staggered. A party of twenty, many of whom he would just as soon not have invited, but who—as his mother had said—had to be asked.
And why indeed did he take it so seriously?
He asked himself the foolish question as he took a last look at his necktie and the parting in his hair. It seemed to be—it seemed to be—well, a kind of smirch on the whole thing. A deliberate sort of mud-slinging. What must the girls think of it? What would Loo’s wife think of it, if by any chance she could have known what had gone on at Loo’s bachelor supper? or how it ended, and where? What had Evelyn thought, when she heard next day that Bill had been picked up in a gutter by a taxi-driver, minus most of his clothes? Of course, most of these girls nowadays were pretty “hard-boiled.” But what would Gay think, if the same thing were to happen to him?
He winced at the idea, as if it had been something physical. He knew what she would think. He knew what he would think himself. The next meeting between them would be more painful than he could bear. She would be subdued, silent, hurt, forgiving; she would say nothing about it; neither would he; but there it would be, a kind of ominous shadow. They would be embarrassed and silent; they would talk about other things, but with a horrible sense of not talking about the thing that most mattered to them.… And it might well be that the delicate balance between them would never again be quite as fine as it had been before.
Perhaps there was something wrong with him. Perhaps, as Kit had kept saying, it was simply that he wasn’t mature about it. What did it matter? Men and women were profoundly different about these things—much better to face this fact and make the most of it or the best of it. Was there no romanticism in men? none at all?—or at any rate in the average man? Or was it true that in men the romanticism could exist side by side with this extraordinary “something else”? This queer, bare, hideous propagative instinct, which of course must have a sort of “tribe” sanction?
Frowning, he went slowly down the stairs and out to his car, which he had left in the drive at the side of the house. Fortunately, nobody was about. Mother was playing bridge at the golf club, Father hadn’t come home yet from town. He drove slowly down the Avenue, took an extra turn round the Square, for no particular reason, and then got out and went into the apartment house in which Kit lived.
Kit had the cocktails all ready. Bacardi, and lots of it.
“These will put you right,” Kit said. He gave the frosted shaker an extra rattle, and poured the frothed and pinkish liquid into two green glasses. “Here’s to everything, God included. Bottoms up. Here’s to Gay and Tom and all the little Gays and Toms.”
“Fortune.”
Kit smacked his lips.
“Pretty good, if I do say so myself. Why in hell, Tom, do you have to get into such a funk about it? They’re all good eggs, you know. They won’t hurt you. It’ll be a good party, if you take it right. Here, have another. There are three apiece.”
Feeling the glow in his belly, Tom walked to the window and looked down at the street. A balloon man was passing, with his bobbing cluster of multicolored bubbles. A small fox terrier circled the balloon man rapidly and suspiciously, then sped westward with an air of urgent destiny. A lot of sparrows were chattering in a tree.
“I suppose,” he said, without turning, “I’m a sentimentalist. And of course I’m also, as you know, unsocial. To begin with, I hate, really hate, the god-awful publicity of the wedding ceremony; it’s practically like going to bed in the middle of Boston Common. Does it seem decent to you? It certainly doesn’t to me.… And as for this damned bachelor supper—that’s worse and more of it. Do you know what I suspect?”
Kit shook the cocktail shaker again, listening to the rattle of ice with his head amusedly on one side.
“No. Don’t tell me you’ve gone paranoid under the strain, and suspect us all of some deep plot against you!… You take life too hard.”
“You bet I do.”
“Well, don’t.… But tell me what you suspect.”
They looked at each other, smiling. The light curtains blew inward from the window on a warm current of air, and the room seemed suddenly to fill with the voices of the sparrows. The sound was multitudinous, idiotic, like life itself. But how was one to say it? Or how was one to be sure that it wouldn’t simply be laughed at?
He looked aside, feeling almost guilty at the doubt—guilty and helpless; as if the constellation of his thought were as incommunicable and unanalyzable as that absurd chorus of little voices; as if one were to try to present, atom by separate atom, an ocean, or the world. Would Kit, with two cocktails fuming in his brain, grasp this idea, or all that depended on it?