“I want to leave,” Audrey said. “I’ve got Dan’s car. Oh, Jimmie, I wish you had knocked! I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for thinking I might have been—laughing.”
“You going to Dan’s still? It’s late.”
“I live there.”
“Live there!”
She walked across the foyer. The doorman produced her raincoat and umbrella.
“Certainly. We’ve kept it quiet, but it’s bound to spread around, sometime. Didn’t you see the affectionate regard with which Dad greeted me? Didn’t I tell you he’d throw me out for seeing you? Well, I told him I was going to—and he did throw me out. So Dan and Adele have given me sanctuary. And Mother, I understand, has taken to her bed.”
Jimmie said, “Hey! Wait! You can’t leave now!”
She smiled and whispered, “Night, Jimmie.” The man opened the big front door.
Wind skirled like bagpipes. Her skirts rippled. A sheet of rain splashed across the porch.
The door closed with a solemn bang.
CHAPTER XII
AGAIN, THE WEEKS ground. Jimmie felt like a hard lump in a dull-edged mill.
No word from Audrey. He had taken to chasing her, failed to catch up, and decided that this was a new act. Flight. Dan and Adele were always polite, on the phone or at the door.
She’d gone out—they didn’t know where. She’d run up to Chicago for the week end. Out.
Away. He hunted for her among her friends without success. He wrote a note to her. No answer. So he quit. The kind of game she played was too intensive, too unfunny, too exhausting. He heard that she had flown East, finally. Visiting somebody in the Carolinas.
Biff came home. Jimmie heard all about that, too, from the rant and waggle of Muskogewan tongues. Biff was healed—even could drive a car. But he was not well. The accident must have injured his head, or something, they said. Jimmie was worried about that—until he heard the rest of the story. Biff couldn’t sleep, had terrible headaches, demanded constant care. And so—he’d brought home a special nurse.
Genevieve, of course.
Jimmie smiled wryly inside himself. Outwardly, he shook his head and said it was too bad. He wondered what his father and mother would do if they found out the reason for Biff’s malingering. Dalliance. The moron!
The one bright spot in all that creep of time was a mere flash: Sarah’s call, with Harry—to introduce a new husband and rapturously to thank an older brother. Sarah’s good looks were that day organized into meaning. All the meaning was focused on Harry.
He was a nice chap, Jimmie thought. Humorous, clever, and violently but adroitly in love with his wife. They stopped at the club for a quarter of an hour and hurried away—in the midst of laughter. Honeymoon on the West Coast. From the rice-dripping new roadster, Sarah yelled to Jimmie, “Tell Audrey we love her to pieces! We couldn’t reach her or we’d have had her at the wedding!” Gears meshing. Tires slipping. Old shoes kicking on the gravel.
That was all. His work was going badly. Three weeks to learn that a process was misconceived. Another three, before that, spent only to be beaten to the same objective by a Czech chemist in New York.
Then the letter came.
A letter opened by the Censor. A letter from Froggie, in the lab, in London.
Jimmie snatched it from the desk clerk and vaulted up to his room, where the chintz curtains stood bright and stiff against a backdrop of muddy fairways, snow blotches, and the hanging smoke of far-off freight car locomotives.
“DEAR JIMMIE:
“We discovered last night that not one of us had written you yet. Covered the whole staff with humiliation. Now we’ve set up a routine. Drew lots—I’m first on the list—drank you a ripping toast, the gist of which I will not tell you because, I understand, the censors are sometimes ladies—and you ought to get word from the Smythe Lab regularly now.
“I was about to say that there wasn’t much news and no change to speak of. But I looked at the calendar—back over the time between the party we threw for your going-away at the Ritz, and now—and there’s quite a packet of news, after all. It’s a long time, these days. Binnie got it. Went over with some new—” the next line was missing from the letter—“and the flack caught him over a town you have seen, which the Russians would have called H in their dispatches. The bomb load blew—so it was quick and painless.
“Sommes is minus the left pinkie—very proud of it—thinks they ought to decorate him. He stirred up one of those fabulous messes he is famous for—the kind you used to call ‘blue sky’ chemistry—and it didn’t precisely explode, but it got hot and spattery and a chunk of it burned away the pinkie neatly at the second joint. We gave him a little dinner at Gigli’s last week, and had the dessert served with ladyfingers Gigli himself baked, the replica of the missing digit—very realistic—said patisserie requiring no end of food coupons. Great success. Pinkie made a speech about the Empire and so on after the sixth double brandy—the last, incidentally. Very fine oration—and cribbed, in toto, it later proved, from an early treatise by the PM. Serious little blighter, but a lot of chemist. Girls dancing attendance at the affair: Maude, Ginger, Tess, Evelyn, Daisy, Rochelle, and Therese. Missed you—had an empty chair with a stuffed chimp in it for your proxy. ‘That’s all our casualties. Over at the field, there’s—” more words were missing—’and the list, since your time, is this: Gone—Waite, Petherbey, Pondonce, Bruntie, Tavis, Evans. Prisoners of war—Cochrane, Simms, Bort, Crummin. In the hosp. and slated to pull out in decent shape—Tedwell and Melby. In the hosp, and not to pull out much—Coates, with burns, and Timmens, all broken up like matchsticks.
“Guess you knew most of them. It’s depressing and maybe you’d rather not have the list, but we all decided you’d prefer to know. We’ve been giving the Jerries raw hell, in stepped-up doses, for a long while now, and the hell comes at a high price, both ways—which you’re aware of anyhow and I’m an idiot for saying.
“Cullen had an argument with Betsy Pell in the tea garden the other day. She poured a whole tray of dishes over his bean. Sommes went under the table like a fancy diver—thought the clatter was some new present from Jerry. Cullen brushed off the crockery and caught Betsy with a siphon—full on. They’re apart, now. Evelyn got Cullen on the rebound. And Betsy got Evelyn’s Edgar. Which will calm down life in the university set here for the winter, as you can imagine.
“Davis hasn’t come out of his cubicle for a week and a half—they sent in a cot and food goes through the door, regularly. So we’re all expecting something big any minute. You know what he was working on, and there’s about ten quid up, all told, on whether he gets it or not. If the answer is yes, and if I were a Berliner, I’d leave the city for the Christmas holidays—and stay away for the next year or two.
“Meanwhile 500 kgs. of Jerry’s best caught the west wing of the old lab last Thursday night. Nobody in it, thank God. Just a stray ship with one big bomb—and a lucky hit, I think, though the head insists it was the result of a fifth column steer. Nothing undone we can’t do over. If you find time, drop us a note about America. Any little thing you think of—how it feels not to have a war going on and a blitz around the corner every second. Send a snapshot of your ugly phiz. We haven’t one, we find, to our dismay. There are forty-odd million of us on this not-so-right and certainly not-tight-little-isle, who get misty these days thinking about your America. If there was a song called ‘God Bless the Yankees’ it would damned near replace ‘God Save the King’—certainly rival it. I know you don’t like tosh, but can’t restrain a note of it. I saw one of your convoys come in at—you may guess where—a fortnight ago, and I jolly well cheered myself into a laryngitis.