The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (3 page)

***

At one of these dinners, she found Halsted Nicholas seated on her right. She remembered him from earlier days when he had spent a summer with them as her brothers' tutor, and her memories of that summer were pleasanter than most. He was, of course, no longer a boy, being close to thirty-five, and a junior partner now of her father's; but his face had lost none of the sensitivity and charm, none of the uncompromising youth that she dimly remembered. He seemed an odd combination of ease and tension; one could tell that his reserve and even his air of gentle timidity were the product of manners; for when he spoke, it was with a certain roughness that indicated assurance. This was reinforced by the intent stare with which he fastened his very round and dark eyes on his plate and the manner in which his black eyebrows seemed to ripple with his thick black hair. She would have liked to talk to him, but that, of course, was not her way, and she watched him carefully as he crumbled his roll on the thick white tablecloth.

“You've certainly been taking your own sweet time to grow up, Maud,” he said in a familiar tone, breaking a cracker into several pieces and dropping them into his soup as Maud had been taught never to do. “This makes it six years that I've been waiting for you.”

“Six years?” she repeated in surprise.

He nodded, looking at her gravely. “Six years,” he said. “Ever since that wonderful Christmas Eve when you told the assembled Spreddon family to put on their best bib and tucker and jump in the lake.”

Maud turned pale. Even the heavy silver service on the long table seemed to be jumping back and forth. She put down her spoon. “So you know that,” she said in a low voice. “They talk about it. They tell strangers.”

He laughed his loud, easy laugh. “I'm hardly a stranger, Maud,” he said. “I've been working as a lawyer in your father's office for twelve years and before that I was there as an office boy. And you're wrong about their telling people, too. They didn't have to tell me. I was there.”

She gasped. “You couldn't have been,” she protested. “I remember it so well.” She paused. “But why are you saying this, anyway? What's the point?”

Again he laughed. “You don't believe me,” he said. “But it's so simple. It was Christmas Eve and I was all alone in town, and your old man, who, in case you don't know it, is one prince of a guy, took pity on me and asked me up. I told him I'd come in a Santa Claus get-up and surprise you kids. Anyway I was right in here, in this very dining room, sticking my beard on and peering through the crack in those double doors to watch for my cue from your father when—bingo!—you pulled that scene. Right there before my eyes and ears! Oh, Maud! You were terrific!”

Even with his eyes, his sure but friendly eyes, upon her as he said all this, it was as if it were Christmas again, Christmas with every stocking crammed and to be emptied, item by item, before the shining and expectant parental faces. Maud felt her stomach muscles suddenly tighten in anguished humiliation. She put her napkin on the table and looked desperately about her.

“Now Maud,” he said, putting his firm hand on hers. “Take it easy.”

“Leave me alone,” she said in a rough whisper. “Leave me be.”

“You're not going to be angry with me?” he protested. “After all these years? All these years that I've been waiting for the little girl with the big temper to grow up? Maud, how unkind.”

She gave him a swift look. “I've been back home and grown up for several months,” she pointed out ungraciously. “If you know Father so well, you must have known that. And this is the first time you've been to the house.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Lawyers are busy men, Maud,” he said. “We can't get off every night. Besides, I'm shy.”

She was not to be appeased so lightly. “You didn't come to see me, anyway,” she retorted. “You came because Daddy begged you to.” She smiled sourly. “He probably went down on his knees.”

“Nothing of the sort,” he said coolly. “If you must know, I came because I heard we were going to
Roll Out the Barrel
.”

Maud stared at him for a second and then burst out laughing. “Then you're in for a sad disappointment, Mr. Nicholas,” she said, “because Daddy couldn't get seats. We're going to
Doubles or Quits
. I do hope you haven't seen it.”

He covered his face with his napkin. “But I have,” he groaned. “Twice!”

Maud, of course, did not know it, but Halsted Nicholas was the partner who, more than any other, held the clients of Spreddon & Spreddon. Mr. Spreddon increasingly accepted positions of public trust; he was now president of a museum, a hospital, and a zoo, all the biggest of their kind; he represented to his partners that this sort of thing, although unremunerative and time-consuming, “paid dividends in the long run.” If anyone grumbled, it was not Halsted, whose industry was prodigious. What drove him so hard nobody knew. He never showed ambition of the ordinary sort, as, for example, wanting his name at the top of the firm letterhead or asking for paneling in his office. He felt, it was true, the deepest gratitude to Mr. Spreddon and to his late father, the Judge, who had seen promise in him and who had sent him to college and law school, but this he had already repaid a hundredfold. He loved the law, it was true, but he was already one of the ablest trial lawyers in the city and could certainly have held his position without quite so liberal an expenditure of energy. No, if Halsted was industrious it was probably by habit. He may have lacked the courage to stop and look into himself. He was a man who had met and undertaken many responsibilities; he had supported his friends with advice and his parents with money; he was considered to be—and, indeed, he was—an admirable character, unspoiled even by a Manhattan success; but whatever part of himself he revealed, it was a public part. His private self was unshared.

He left the theater that night after the second act to go down to his office and work on a brief, but the following Sunday he called at the Spreddons' and took Maud for a walk around the reservoir. A week later he invited her to come to Wall Street to dine with him, on the excuse that he had to work after dinner and could not get uptown, and after she had done this, which he said no other girl would have done, even for Clark Gable, he became a steady caller at the Spreddons'. Maud found herself in the unprecedented situation of having a beau.

He was not a very ceremonious beau; he never sent her flowers or whispered silly things in her ear, and not infrequently, at the very last moment, when they had planned an evening at the theater or the opera, he would call up to say that he couldn't get away from the office. Maud, however, saw nothing unusual in this. What mattered to her was that he expected so little. He never pried into her past or demanded her agreement or enthusiasm over anything; he never asked her to meet groups of his friends or to go to crowded night clubs. He never, furthermore, offered the slightest criticism of her way of living or made suggestions as to how she might enlarge its scope. He took her entirely for granted and would, without any semblance of apology, talk for an entire evening about his own life and struggles and the wonderful things that he had done in court. She was a slow talker, and he a fast one; it was easier for both if he held forth alone on the subjects closest to his heart. In short, she became accustomed to him; he fitted in with her riding and her hospital work. She had been worried at first, particularly in view of his initial revelation, never thereafter alluded to, of what he had once witnessed, but soon afterwards she had been reassured. It was all right. He would let her be.

Mr. and Mrs. Spreddon, in the meantime, were holding their breath. They had almost given up the idea that Maud would ever attract any man, much less a bachelor as eligible as Halsted. It was decided, after several conferences, that what nature had so miraculously started, nature might finish herself, and they resolved not to interfere. This, unfortunately, they were not able to do without a certain ostentation, and Maud became aware of an increasing failure on the part of her family to ask their usual questions about what she had done the night before and what meals she expected to eat at home the following day. If she referred to Halsted, her comment received the briefest of nods or answers. Nobody observing the fleeting references with which his name was dismissed at the Spreddon board would ever have guessed that the parental hearts were throbbing at the mere possibility of his assimilation into the family.

Maud, however, was not to be fooled. The suppressed wink behind the family conspiracy of silence was almost lewd to her, and it brought up poignantly the possibility that Halsted might be thinking of their friendship in the same way. It was true that he had said nothing to her that could even remotely be construed as sentimental, but it was also true, she realized ruefully, that she knew very little of such things, and the effusive, confiding creature to whom her brother Sammy was engaged, who frequently made her uncomfortable by trying to drag her into long intimate chats “just between us girls,” had told her that when men took one out it was never for one's society alone and that this went for a certain “you know who” in the legal world as well as anyone else, even if he
was
somewhat older. Maud seemed to feel her breath stop at this new complication in a life settled after so many disturbances. Was this not the very thing that she had always feared, carried to its worst extreme? Was this not the emotion that was reputedly the most demanding, the most exacting of all the impulses of the heart? She had a vision of bridesmaids reaching for a thrown bouquet and faces looking up at her to where she was standing in unbecoming satin on a high stair—faces covered with frozen smiles and eyes, seas of eyes, black and staring and united to convey the same sharp, hysterical message: Aren't you happy? Aren't you in love? Now, then, didn't we
tell
you?

The next time Halsted called up she told him flatly that she had a headache. He took it very casually and called again about a week later. She didn't dare use the same excuse, and she couldn't think of another, so she met him for dinner at a French restaurant. She nibbled nervously on an olive while he drank his second cocktail in silence, watching her.

“Somebody's gone and frightened you again,” he said with just an edge of roughness in his voice. “What's it all about? Why did you fake that headache last week?”

She looked at him miserably. “I didn't.”

“Why did you have it then?”

“Oh.” She raised her hand to her brow and rubbed it in a preoccupied manner. “Well, I guess I thought we were going out too much together.”

“Too much for what?”

“Oh. You know.”

“Were you afraid of being compromised?” he asked sarcastically.

“Please, Halsted,” she begged him. “You know how people are. I like going out with you. I love it, really. But the family all wink and nod. They can't believe that you and I are just good friends. They'll be expecting you—well, to say something.”

He burst out laughing. “And you're afraid I won't. I see.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said gravely, looking down at her plate; “I'm afraid you will.”

He stopped laughing and looked at her intently. Then he gave a low whistle. “Well!” he exclaimed. “So that's how it is. And this is the girl whose father used to say that she had no self-confidence! Well, I'll be damned!”

Maud blushed. “You mustn't think I'm conceited,” she said with embarrassment. “It's not that at all. I just don't understand these things. Really.” She looked at him, imploring him not to take it amiss.

“Look, Maud,” he said more gently, taking her hand in his. “Can't you trust me? I know all about it. Honest.”

“All about what, Halsted?”

“What you're afraid of. Listen to me, my sweet. Nobody's going to make you do any falling in love. Nobody could. Yet. Do you get that? It's just possible that I may ask you to marry me. We'll see. But in any case I'm not going to ask you how you feel about me. That's your affair. Is that clear?”

She looked into his large and serious eyes and felt her fears subside. It was true that he was completely honest. He did not even tighten his grip on her hand.

“But why should you ever want to marry me?” she asked. “Nobody likes me.”

“Give them time, darling,” he said, smiling as she withdrew her hand from his. “They will. You want to know why I should be thinking about marrying you? Very well. That's a fair question. I'm thirty-four. There's one reason. It's high time, you'll admit. And I'm not so attractive that I can pick anyone I want. I have to take what I can get.” And again he laughed.

“But don't you feel you could do better than me?” she asked seriously. “I'm really a terrible poke. Besides, Sammy says you make all sorts of money. That should help.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, I haven't quite given up,” he said cheerfully. “Don't get your hopes too high.”

This time she smiled too. “You mean I'm only a last resort?”

Again he put his hand on hers. “Not quite. There's another point in your favor, Maud,” he said. “If you must know.”

“And what's that?”

He looked at her for a moment, and she suddenly knew that they were going to be very serious indeed.

“I wasn't going to mention it,” he continued, “but I might as well now. I'm in love with you, Maud.”

She could only shake her head several times in quick succession as if to stop him. “Why?” she asked. “What do you see in me?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows?” he said. “Call it the desire to protect. Or the mother instinct. Or just plain middle-aged folly. It might be anything. But, Maud, you wouldn't believe it. I can even catch myself thinking about you in court.”