The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (5 page)

Halsted's face clouded with embarrassment. “Cut it out, will you, Bill!” he protested. “You're the whole business around here, and that's the way it should be.”

Mr. Spreddon shook his head. “Just a name, my boy. But I won't embarrass you. There's only thing I'd like to know. Your going to Washington isn't because of Maud, is it?”

Halsted stood up and sauntered around the big office. “Like everyone else,” he said in a rather rough tone, while his back was turned to Mr. Spreddon, “I have my own feelings about this war. And they happen to have nothing under the sun to do with your daughter.”

“I'm sorry,” Mr. Spreddon said meekly. “I shouldn't have mentioned it. But you know how I feel about that. It was the hope of my life.” Halsted shrugged his shoulders and left the room.

Mrs. Spreddon said nothing to Maud when the engagement was broken. She gave her a kiss and offered to send her on a trip. She was seething, however, against her sister-in-law, who, she felt, had betrayed her hospitality. She determined to break openly with her and debated for two days how most cuttingly to accomplish it. Then she went, without consulting her husband, to her sister-in-law's room.

“I hope, Lila,” she said in a voice that trembled slightly, “that it gives you some satisfaction to reflect that in all probability you've ruined whatever slight chances Maud may have had for a normal and happy life.”

Lila flushed deeply. “I wouldn't expect you to understand, Mary,” she answered in a hurt but lofty tone. “All I can say is that anything I may have said to Maud was with her best interests at heart. We differ too fundamentally to make explanations worthwhile. Under the circumstances I think it would be best if I moved to the Pierre.”

“Under the circumstances, I must agree with you.”

And so it ended. Halsted wrote Maud from time to time, amusing, impersonal letters, but he never called at the Spreddons' when he came to New York. Then we entered the war, and he got his commission and was one of the first to be sent overseas. Lila tried to cheer Maud up by giving a cocktail party for her at her hotel, but Maud would not even go. Despite what her aunt had said about beautiful women, she still knew that she was dull.

Maud joined the Red Cross shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. She worked for two years in New York, after which she was sent to Southampton, England. She worked hard and well, serving coffee to literally thousands of young men. When she looked back over her time in uniform she pictured a sea of faces, young and healthy faces; it seemed to her as if there would never be an end to the pressure of youth and vigor and courage upon the barred doors of her heart. But she never yielded, never opened—and anyway, she sometimes wondered, did it matter? They kept passing her tumultuously, and if she had opened the door, just the tiniest crack, and peered out for a glimpse of the surging throng, would anyone have stopped to look or listen, to reach out a hand to her and cry: “Maud, come on! Can't you see us? We're on our
way!
”

If Maud, however, was uncompromising in her attitude towards the future, she was learning, nonetheless, a new latitude in the examination of her past. She was perfectly willing, even eager, to entertain the possibility that she had, after all, been in love with Halsted from the beginning and still was, but she was afraid to fall into the oversimplifications of wishful thinking. She still had no referent by which to judge love, and though she realized from time to time that she might be losing herself in the forests of introspection, she was capable, in spite of her doubts, of a fierce single-mindedness. There could be no question of other men. If Halsted had been dead she would still have felt an obligation to resolve the incomprehensible problem of her own determination.

Halsted, however, was far from dead. He was in London, and she actually had his address, though she dared not go to see him. She had not even let him know that she was in England. Their correspondence, in fact, had entirely ceased. Now she could see dimly that life might be offering her that rarest of all things, a second and final chance, and she hardly dared face the fact that, in her usual fashion, she was going to let it pass.

Her brother Sammy's destroyer had put in to Southampton at this time, and she was seeing a good deal of him. They had had little enough to say to each other before the war, but now that they were both three thousand miles from their family, they met in the evening in pubs and exchanged confidences with some of the excitement that is shared by new and congenial friends. They drank gin when they could get it and ale when they couldn't, and discussed their parents and themselves with detachment and impartiality. Sammy and his wife were not getting on, and this lent to his conversation the flavor of a superior disillusionment.

“The trouble with you, Maud,” he told her one night, “is that you take everything too seriously. You're always analyzing your own emotions. Hell. The thing to do is to grab fun where you can get it. You ought to write Halsted and tell him you're crazy about him.”

She looked skeptically at his blond, undoubting face. “But do you really think I am?” she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I think you want to be,” he said. “Which is just as good.”

“But is that honest, Sammy?”

He laughed. “Do you want to be an old maid, Maud?” he demanded. “A sour, bitter old maid?”

She shook her head. “Not particularly,” she answered.

“Well?”

“But I am what I am, aren't I, Sammy?”

“Sure. And you will be what you will be.”

He was essentially indifferent, of course, but it was only the indifference of one adult for another. It filled her nonetheless with a bleak loneliness.

“I'm an idiot, Sammy,” she said abruptly. “And I'm an idiot to think anyone cares whether or not I'm an idiot. I'll go to London. I'll be like the rest of you.”

“That's better, Maud. Much better.”

When she got her next leave she actually did go to London. She left her bag at the Red Cross on Grosvenor Square and walked down the street to Army Headquarters. It was some time before she found Halsted's office, and then she was unable to send a message to him because he was in conference. She waited in the main hall for an hour and a half.

“He may not even come out for lunch,” the sergeant told her.

“I'll wait,” she said, and he smiled.

When Halsted, now a lieutenant colonel, looking thinner and serious, walked through the hall he was with several other officers, and there was a preoccupation about their quick stride that made her suddenly feel small and unwanted. She was shrinking back in her chair when he spotted her and stopped.

“Maud!” he exclaimed in astonishment. “Well, I'll be damned!”

He went up to her, holding out both arms, and there was a funny little smile on his face.

“I just dropped in to see you,” she stammered.

“Been waiting long?”

“Oh, no.”

“Like to go out on the town tonight?” he asked. “For auld lang syne?” He looked at his watch. “I guess I can make it.”

She nodded eagerly.

“You're at the Red Cross?” he said. “I'll pick you up at ten.”

And he was gone. During the rest of the afternoon, as she wandered through the great and empty rooms of the Victoria and Albert Museum, she speculated in vain on the significance of his smile. He did not pick her up that night until long after ten, for he was again in conference. They drove in his jeep to an officers' club which had formerly been a private house, and a rather elaborate one, and sat at a table in a corner of the large Tudor front hall near the stairway, under which a bar had been installed. Halsted did not seem at all nervous, as she was, but he looked tired and older. He talked about the general aspects of the war in a rather learned way and drank a good deal, but she was too excited to take in a word that he said. He was speculating on the possibilities of a revolution within Germany when she interrupted him.

“Halsted, aren't you going to ask about
me?
And the family? I'm dying to tell. And to hear all about you. But not about the war. Please.”

He smiled, just a bit wearily. “How have you been, my dear?” he asked.

“Well, not so terribly well,” she began nervously. “But better now. Oh, much better, Halsted. I'm not the fool I was.”

It was perfectly evident that he had caught the full import of her words, for he frowned and looked away from her. “When you say you're not the fool you were, Maud,” he said in a distant, even a superior tone, “does it by any chance mean that you've changed your mind about me?”

She felt the chill in his voice and hesitated. She held her breath for a moment. “Yes,” she said.

He turned and looked at her fixedly, but she could not read the expression in his eyes. “Then as far as you're concerned,” he said, “it's on again?”

“Oh, no, Halsted,” she said hastily. “Of course not! What do you take me for? It's not ‘on' again. I have no claim on you. I've had my chance. Making a mess of things hardly entitles me to another.”

“Oh, ‘entitles.'” He shrugged his shoulders, almost in irritation as he repeated her word. “When women say they're not ‘entitled' to something, what they usually mean is that any man who's not an utter heel would make sure that they get it.”

The tears started to Maud's eyes. It was the tone that he had sometimes used in court, or to people whom he thought little of, like Lila, or to the world. Never to her.

“Halsted,” she protested in a low voice. “That's not fair.”

He looked down into his glass. “Maybe not.”

“And it's not like you to be unfair,” she continued. “It isn't as if I were expecting you to fall all over me. I know it would be a miracle if you had any feeling left.”

He looked even more sullen at this. “But you still feel sorry for yourself,” he retorted.

Maud put her napkin on the table and reached for her cigarettes. “Good night, Colonel,” she said crisply. “There's nothing like auld lang syne, is there?”

“Nothing.”

She got up. “You needn't worry about taking me back,” she said. “I can find my way.”

“Oh, sit down,” he said roughly, but in a more human tone. “We've got a whole bottle of whiskey here. I don't suppose you expect me to get through it alone?”

“I'm sure,” she said with dignity, “that I don't care how you get through it. There must be plenty of other officers with desk jobs in London who can help you out.”

He caught her by the arm and pulled her back into her chair. “Desk jobs, hell,” he muttered and poured her a drink. “Now drink that and shut up. I wish to hell I did have a desk job. Would you like to know where I was last week?”

“We're warned,” she said, “not to encourage officers who drink too much and start revealing military information.”

He finished his drink in a gulp and leaned his head on his hands. “Oh, Christ, Maud,” he said.

She said nothing.

“I don't know why you had to come back,” he continued. “The same prim little girl. Just a bit older, that's all. I'd gotten over you, you know. I mean it, God damn it. And I was enjoying my melancholy. I liked feeling a hero and thinking of the little girl back home who didn't give a rap about me, and wouldn't she be sorry now? Oh, I could spit.” He reached again for the bottle and poured himself another drink. “Now I don't know what I feel. I wish like hell, Maud, that I could say it's all the way it was, but I'm damned if I know.”

She believed him, believed him absolutely, but there was no humiliation or pain in it. For her the long uncertainty had ended. In her excitement his doubts seemed almost irrelevant.

“You needn't worry about it, Halsted,” she said. “It seems so fair.”

He looked at her suspiciously. “Fair?” he repeated. “You must be an icebox, Maud. How else could you talk that way?”

“It's just that I don't know how to talk,” she said humbly. “You know that.”

He smiled at her. “Oh, you can talk, Maud.”

“You can make your life very difficult by being complicated,” she went on. “I ought to know something about that. You can think you ought to be feeling all sorts of things that you don't. The people around you don't help. I've been through that. I was a fool.”

He stared hard at her for a moment, but as if he were concentrating on something else. He opened his mouth as if he were about to say something and then closed it.

“Maud,” he said finally, looking down again at the table, “would you marry me? If I were to ask you again?”

She nodded gravely. “I would.”

“After all I've said?”

“After all you've said.”

There was a pause, an interminable pause. Then he suddenly smiled and put his hand on hers. “Well, nobody would be able to say,” he said, “that we were rushing into this thing without having given it thought. And yet, somehow, I feel that's just what we would be doing.”

She took out her handkerchief at last and wiped her eyes. “We've tried waiting,” she pointed out. “And that didn't work.”

He laughed.

“Well, I'm game,” he said. “I'm always taking chances with my future in these days. I might as well take a fling with my past.” He put his hand suddenly around her shoulder. “Poor little Maud,” he said, smiling. “Poor helpless little Maud. This is only the second time you've trapped your victim. But don't worry. You won't be able to get out of it this time.”

“The only thing I'm worrying about,” she observed, with an eye on the diminished bottle, “is getting you back to your quarters sober.”

“I see you're starting right,” he agreed more cheerfully. “Well, I asked for it. Or did I?”

How it would have worked out they never were to know, for Halsted was killed two days later when his reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cherbourg. They had met only once in the interval, at lunch, for Halsted had been in conference or flying day and night in preparation for the great invasion of France that took place only a week after his death. Into the blackness of Maud's heart there is no need to penetrate. It was fortunate for her that her work increased in intensity during those days.