The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (4 page)

They looked at each other gravely for several seconds.

“Well, I suppose that does it,” she said, smiling. “I'll have to marry you now.”

He raised his hand. “Wait a moment!” he warned her. “First you've got to be asked. And after that you've got to think it over. For several days. I want no fly-by-night answer.”

Halsted did things in his own way, and he adhered strictly to a program laid down by himself. Three days later she received a telegram from Chicago, where he had gone on business, saying: “This is the formal offer. Think it over. See you Friday.”

Maud did think it over. In fact, she had thought of nothing else since it had first occurred to her that he might do this. She examined the state of her heart and asked herself if her feeling for Halsted could, even by the watered-down standards of her own emotions, be called love, and she decided that it probably could not. She then tried to analyze what it was that she did feel for him; it was certainly the friendliest feeling that she had ever experienced for another human being. She asked herself if she was not lucky indeed—miraculously lucky—to have run into the one man, probably in the whole country, who wanted her as she was. She visualized the joy of sudden and final liberation from her family. And then too, undeniably, she felt stirring within her the first faint manifestations of a new little pride in her own self that she could pull this off, that she could mean so much to a man like Halsted, a good man, an able man, a man whom people looked up to; she thought of Sammy and his silly little fiancee, and of her worried parents and their hopelessness about her; she pictured the amazement of the family friends. She stood before her mirror and pushed the hair out of her face and tossed her head in sudden resolution.

When Halsted called for her on Friday night she was waiting for him in the front hall with her hat and coat on. She was so nervous that she didn't even allow him to speak.

“Halsted,” she said, and the words tumbled out. “I've decided. I will. Definitely.”

He walked slowly across the front hall to the bottom step of the circular stairway where she was standing and took both her hands in his. For a long tense moment he looked at her.

“Darling,” he said and then laughed. “I thought you'd never make up your mind!”

Halsted's courtship occurred during the winter of the first year of the war in Europe. It was the period of the “phony war,” which, however much it may have bothered Halsted, was of little concern to Maud. For her the fall of France had as its immediate consequence the precipitous return of her father's sister, Lila Lane, from Paris. Aunt Lila took up her residence, as was to be expected, with her brother, and family meals came to be held in respectful silence while she expounded in her own graphic fashion on her hasty departure from Paris, the forced abandonment of her Renault in a roadside ditch, and her successful arrival, half-starved but with all her diamonds, in an unfamiliar and unfriendly Madrid.

It was not an easy time for her unenthusiastic sister-in-law. Mrs. Spreddon was hardly able, in the untroubled safety of her New York home, to debunk these experiences, simply because they had happened to Lila. She was obliged to give lip service to the family idea that Lila for once in her life had come up against the fundamentals, things that in the Spreddon mind loomed as vast round bollards on the long dock of a routine existence. Maud's mother could only bide her time, provoking as it might be, and stop for a bit to listen to Lila's tales.

Maud, as might have been expected, did not think as her mother did. Feeling as she had always felt about the restricted atmosphere of her family life, she thought of this aunt in Paris, with perfect clothes and no children, as the desired antithesis of the boisterous and the vulgar. The vision of Lila's garden and the marble fountain surrounded by the bit of lawn, so closely cut and brightly green, which Maud had seen as a child from the grilled balcony of the exquisite house on the rue de Varenne had always lingered in her mind as the essence of everything that was cool and formal and wonderfully independent. It was no wonder that she hovered expectantly before the exotic gateway of her aunt's existence. And Lila, in her turn, appreciating this silent devotion, particularly from a Spreddon, and having always regarded Maud's troubles as the result of a life spent in the limelight of her sister-in-law's exuberant wealth and bad taste, turned as much of her attention as she could spare from hats to Maud and her singular love life. There were long morning conferences in Lila's littered room over a very little toast and a great deal of coffee.

She had, of course, insisted on meeting Halsted; they lunched, the three of them, one Saturday noon at a small French midtown restaurant, and, as poor Maud could clearly see, it had not gone well. Lila had spent the meal telling Halsted the well-known story, already published in a women's magazine, of her arduous escape from the Germans. Halsted, taciturn and obviously unimpressed, had said almost nothing. But it was later, when Maud was having tea and an early cocktail alone with her aunt, that the important conversation occurred.

“I hope you like him, Aunt Lila,” Maud said timidly. “Mother and Daddy do, but, of course, they would. He's a wonderful lawyer. But you've lived abroad and know about people.”

Lila Lane inserted a cigarette in her holder and surveyed her niece's almost expressionless face. She prided herself on being the one member of the family who had a kindred sense of the deep antipathies that had gone into Maud's make-up, and she saw her niece's solution along the lines of her own life. “I certainly like him, my dear,” she said in a definite tone. “He's obviously a very fine and a very intelligent man. In fact, I shouldn't be surprised if I'm not a little afraid of him. He's
un peu farouche
, if you see what I mean. But attractive. Undeniably.”

“Oh, he is, isn't he?”

Lila hesitated a moment before trying a stroke of sophistication. To clear the air. “All in all, my dear,” she said with a smile, “an excellent first marriage.”

“Oh, Aunt Lila!” Maud's eyes were filled with protest. “What do you mean?”

Her aunt reached over and patted her hand. “Now there, dear, don't get excited. You must let the old Paris aunt have her little joke. You see, Maud, as you say, I've lived abroad. A long time. I've been used to people who are, well—to say the least—stimulating. Your young man, who isn't, by the way, so frightfully young, is more of your father's world. Of course it was my father's world, too. But it's certainly a world that I myself could never be happy in. And I hope you'll forgive me for saying so, my dear, but I have my doubts if you ever could, either. It's a dull world, Maud.”

“But I'm dull, Aunt Lila!” Maud protested. “I'm a thousand times duller than Halsted!”

Her aunt looked suddenly stern. “Don't let me ever hear you say that again!” she exclaimed. She got up and took Maud to the mirror over the mantel. “Take a good look at yourself! Your skin. Those eyes. They're good, my dear. Very good.” She took Maud's long hair and arranged it in a sort of pompadour over her forehead. “You haven't tried, Maud. That's all. You could be beautiful.”

Maud stared at her reflection with momentary fascination, and then turned abruptly away. She shrugged her shoulders. “I'd still be dull.”

“Beautiful women are never dull,” Lila said, sitting down again at the tea table. “But now I'm sounding like a rather bad Oscar Wilde. Tell me, my dear. In all seriousness. Are you in love with this wonderful lawyer?”

Maud's face was filled with dismay as she stared down at the floor. Neither her mother nor Halsted had presumed to ask her such a question, but there was no escaping it. Now she had to hear it from the lips of Aunt Lila, who spoke, she felt, with an authority that could not be resented. Whatever love may have been to the Spreddons—and Maud, when she thought of it, had a sense of something thick and stifling like a blanket—to Aunt Lila it was a free and glorious emotion that knew not restraint and graced those whom it touched. She was not sure that Aunt Lila had been one so graced, but she had infinite faith in her aunt's ability to observe. Venus had risen, so to speak, on a shell from the sea and was awaiting her answer.

“I really can't say that I am,” she answered at last in a low voice. “The way you use the word, anyway.”

“The way
I
use the word, Maud! But there's only one way to use it. Either you are or you aren't.”

“Oh, Aunt Lila.” Maud's eyes filled with tears.

“Listen to me, Maud.” Lila had moved over to the sofa and put her arm around her niece. “You know that I love you dearly. Do you think I'd have asked you such an impertinent question if I hadn't been sure that the answer was no?”

Maud shook her head. “Everyone knows about me,” she said despairingly. “What should I do?”

“Do?” Lila queried. “You don't have to
do
anything at all. You certainly don't have to marry Halsted because you're
not
in love with him. Maud, darling, if you only knew how I understood! You think you're always going to be bottled up like a clam and that this is the way to make the best of it. But it's not. You're just beginning to stick your head out and peer around. It's absurd to be snapped up by the first one of your father's partners who comes along! Before you've even had a chance to take your bearings!”

But if Maud accepted her aunt as an expert in love, it did not mean that she accepted her as a judge of her own character. She had no interest in her own future, but a very deep interest in her duty to Halsted. Getting up, she went to her room. She sat there by herself for an hour. Then, for the first time in her life, she went to her mother for advice. Mrs. Spreddon was sitting at her dressing table, getting ready for dinner.

“Mother, I'm going to break my engagement to Halsted,” she said abruptly.

Mrs. Spreddon eyed her closely in the glass as she fastened a pearl bracelet on her wrist. “May I ask you why?”

“I'm not in love with him.”

Mrs. Spreddon was silent for a moment. Then she nodded. “Let me ask you one thing,” she said. “Have you been talking to your aunt?”

“I have. But it's not her fault. She said nothing I didn't know already.”

“I see.”

There was a pause. Then poor Maud blurted forth her appeal. “Mother, what should I do?”

Mrs. Spreddon stood up, very slowly, and turned around. She faced her daughter with dignity, but her voice was trembling. “I'm sorry, Maud,” she said. “I'd give anything in the world to be able to help you. You know how your father and I love Halsted. We think he'd be the perfect husband. But this is your life, my dear. Not mine. If we'd had more of a relationship, you and I, we might have been able to work this thing out. God knows I've tried. But parents can take only so much, Maud, and then they're through. You've always wanted to work things out your own way. I'm afraid that now it's too late for me to butt in.”

For a long moment they looked at each other, almost in surprise and a little in fear at the sudden reclarification of the gulf between them.

It was dark and cool inside the little restaurant where she was to meet Halsted for lunch. When her eyes were adjusted to it, she saw him sitting at the bar talking to the bartender. She went up and sat on the stool beside him, and he smiled and ordered her a drink. Then she told him, straight away. She did it very clearly and rather coldly; she was sure as she looked into his large hurt eyes that she had been convincing.

“But Maud,” he protested in a tone almost of exasperation, “we've been through all this before! You know I don't expect anything of you. We can leave that to the future.”

“I don't trust the future,” she said. “I want to know more about it first.”

“Maud, have you gone crazy?”

“It may well be.”

There was a pause.

“How can you talk that way, Maud?” he asked suddenly. “How can you be such a smug little—? Good God! Maud, have you really never given a damn about me? Even one little damn?”

She looked at him steadily. From way back in her past she felt the stirrings of that almost irresistible tide of surrender, the tide that she had dammed so desperately and so decisively on that long ago Christmas Eve. But once again she was the mistress of her fate. “Not in that way, Halsted,” she said.

He turned to his unfinished cocktail. “Well, I'll be damned,” he said, almost to himself. “I'll be damned.”

“You believe me, Halsted, don't you?”

He turned back to her. “I guess I'll have to, Maud,” he said. “Maybe I had you doped out all wrong.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Lawyers can be persistent,” he continued, “but even they know when the game's really up. You'd better go home, Maud. I'll get you a taxi.”

He got up and left her, and she knew, as she stared at her reflection in the mirror across the bar, that she was at last doing penance for what she had done that Christmas Eve.

Halsted disappeared from her life as suddenly as he had come into it. Shortly after the fateful meeting, he came into Mr. Spreddon's office, sat down, and putting one leg as usual over the arm of the chair, asked, “Got another litigator around here, Bill? You'll be needing one.”

“Oh, Halsted. You too?”

“Me too. I've decided to take that War Department job, after all. Maybe after I've been around there a few months they'll give me a commission. Just to get rid of me.”

“Can't you get a commission now?”

“Eyes.”

Mr. Spreddon looked broodingly at the photograph of his daughter which stood on his desk between him and Halsted. His heart was heavy. “You must do what you think best, of course,” he said sadly. “We'll make out. I'm not trying to hide the fact that it'll be difficult. You know how we stand. This is your firm, Halsted.”