The Mulberry Bush (2 page)

“Not always. Not now so much. Politics bore me.”

“All right—I'm off politics. What interests you? Bones flung out on an Oaxacan hill because the relatives haven't paid the grave-rent—or a little Chinese girl boiling toadstools in the tea when the Jap officer is knocking at the door? Just give your order and I'm off.”

There it was, the winged look. The look of the land-bound primitive, seeing the wind lift his skin-sail. Walls would always imprison Mike Paull, cities could not hold him.

Could a woman hold him? Virginia wondered, thought not. She let her breath out slowly, made her hands be still. But she could not keep the taut, small pulse in her throat still. It tightened to agony though her voice came, even and toneless.

She said, “Goodbye, Mike. My regards to the blondes you see hanging out of windows.”

He pushed back his chair and set down his cup with a little click. He looked young and puzzled, and then suddenly old and somehow weary. All that his life had done to him, all the freezing nights, the burning days, the tense hours of hiding, creeping through forbidden ground, the loneliness of seas, the loneliness that was Mike himself—eagle-loneliness, aloof, challenging, impatient, was in his eyes.

He said harshly, without preamble, “This is a hell of a life, Ginny Warfield. Why don't you marry me and make a human being out of me?”

She wanted to cry and she wanted bitterly to laugh. There was a queer anger in the air, and a singing, sweet, wild danger. She did love Mike—there was no use lying to herself, no use evading—Oh, sweet heaven, save her now! Unsteadily she smiled. Her voice had a reedy falseness in it.

“I think,” she said, carefully, “that that might be a good idea—but for one thing—but for two things—”

“What two things?” demanded Mike.

“You've never been exposed to this intimate atmosphere before. Domesticity—a lady in a smock, coffee for two. You're susceptible, Mike, and I never would have believed it. But for two things it might work—but for the fact that you'd hate being married to me—or to any woman. And but for the fact that I'd probably hate being married to you.”

Mike glared at her. “What's the matter with me? I'm kind to dogs and children. I don't get drunk. I shave every day. I wouldn't beat you.”

“You'd hate being possessed, Mike. You'd fight it. You'd be frantic, in no time at all, to be free. And running a jail never did appeal to me as a lifework.”

“Marriage doesn't have to be a chain gang, Ginny. That's what people think—that's one of the magnificent stupidities that has made the world the quarreling mess that it is. I'd be good to you, Ginny—and we'd both be free.”

She shook her head. The wan, dying sunlight slanted through a blind and touched her hair, brightening it suddenly to an aureole of flame. Mike had seen pale images shrined in dark temples, with faces carved into the mystery of dead centuries. He remembered them now, looking at this quiet girl across the table.

“Love can't be free,” she said. “Not my kind of love.”

“Then your kind of love is wrong.” He was grim. “What difference would it make if I were in Tarragona, or Acapulco, or Timbuktu—if we had something everlasting that belonged only to us—to you and me and to nobody else on earth?”

She could not say the words that stung her tongue, could not free the doubt that was tearing miserably at her—she could not say, “Nothing would ever be everlasting to you, Mike.” She could not hurt Mike that way.

So she said, with a kind of desperate patience “Women are different. They want to hold things close. They've had to guard the goodness and the beauty of the world so long, while the men went out to work and to fight. Their minds haven't been trained to be content with ideas only. They want something they can hold in their hands—they want nearness, they want warmth.”

“That isn't love. I don't know what it is—some kind of maternal thing run wild, a kind of female tyranny. Women want to build fences around happiness and then sit outside the gate with a flaming sword in their hands or a shotgun on their knees, and it won't work. Can't they see that happiness has wings and takes to the air and flies away, if you wall it in?”

“You mean—that if I set you free—you'd come back, Mike?”

“Of course I'd come back. Straight back to you. But if you tried to chain me I'd hate the chain—and so would any other man.”

“But if you were free—I'd be free, too. Suppose you came flying back, all expansive and triumphant and complacent with grand impulses, graciously ready to give me an hour or two and a smile—suppose you came back like that and I weren't there? How would you like that—if I liked freedom, too?”

“You know too darned many long words, Ginny,” he said, scowling, sitting on the edge of his chair, his hands in fists between his knees. “You make a simple thing into something like a metaphysical problem out of a book.”

“I make it into the problem we'd have to live with. You don't want to marry me, Mike. Not really. And I don't want to marry you—not that way,”

“You know everything, don't you?” He walked to the window, drew the curtains together, shot them back again, intrigued by the mechanism.

He was a boy, she was thinking. She was older before she learned, that all men are boys, that it is the youth in them that will not be tamed, that has built nations and linked them together by wings and steel and the crackling magic of science.

When he was gone, she sat for a long time at the window, looking out, seeing nothing, while dusk fell over the river and the room grew dark.

Not once had Mike Paull said that he loved her.

If he had said it—she caught her breath and knew how close to danger she had been. If he had said it, she would have been lost.

She did love Mike—and loving Mike was like loving the roving trade wind that no woman can hold with her hands or with her heart!

Mike Paull walked a long way over the rough, sunken brick sidewalks of old Georgetown, down the hill to the roaring corner where Sunday-evening traffic struggled for passage over the Key Bridge. He walked out on the bridge and stood for a little, leaning on the rail and looking down into the languid churning of the river.

The turmoil of water below him, the pushing of that yellow current, might have been the Segre flowing siltily and languidly under a bristle of Spanish guns, or the Yalu, or the Nogat, or the Xingu. Mike had leaned above them all, flown over them, waded some of them. They were all rivers, water going someplace, carrying the wealth of lands and the waste of humanity doggedly down to the uncaring sea.

And the air was merely air, buoyant enough to lift silver wings and carry a man to strange, far places, where the turmoil and the hate, the passion and the pride of men made good copy. Copy that the sluggish, the bound, the plodders, turned to first as they rode home in subways to lamb chops and peas and shaking down the furnace; as they sat by country stoves or lounged on hotel porches beside lazy beaches. Copy that brought slim, green checks to one Michael Paull.

Not that money meant very much to Mike. He owned nothing save a few clothes, memberships in a club or two, a bagful of rusty, seldom used golf clubs, and his typewriter. He wanted nothing. What money he did not spend—and he spent little, because spending did not interest him—went into the bank, stayed there. His home was a hotel room, any room anywhere. He carried a framed picture of his mother who had died when he was fifteen. Where he set up that picture, laid out his razor and his shabby slippers, was his domicile. A bed, access to a wire or a cable, a chance to take a bath and get a decent meal, a place to buy a shirt and a wastebasket in which to dump the old one when it sawed his neck, these simplicities had contented him. He had no idea how much money he had earned. But he knew to a stick how much stuff he had published. Clippings were stacked head-high in dusty boxes in Bill Foster's office. Bill Foster was his agent.

Someday Mike meant to paste all those clippings in a scrapbook—a terse, brilliant, sardonic history of the follies and tremors of a world of nations. Maybe he'd put them into a book. Get somebody to publish it.

Nobody Told Me
, by Michael Paull. Autographed copies to the great, the defeated, the suave, the dangerous, the mad men whom he had painted in miniatures of sulphuric fire and had sold for money and for the wild love of the game.

He could write and he knew it. He could make friends, bluff officials, dodge bullets, play mediocre poker, lie his way gracefully out of tight places and speak a working minimum of half a dozen languages. He had never laid crude hands upon a woman's body or upon her heart. And he had never cheated a friend or been vindictive toward an enemy. He was, so he told himself, a pretty decent guy. He should be satisfied with life. He was free, twenty-nine years old, healthy and hard as nails. What ailed him? Why had he let a girl with gilt hair knock his complacency askew, send him mooning and meandering here to stare down into the muddy Potomac?

“The trouble with you, Michael, me lad,” he could almost hear Teresa Harrison's flat, blasting voice, “you're in love.”

Was this it? The thing he had thought could never happen to him? At this moment he was straining to go back to her, knowing very well that that was madness, that inevitably Ginny was right. He didn't belong in marriage. Yet when he let himself think of the deep, quiet beauty of her eyes and the grave sweetness of her mouth, he was shaken again and lonely, as he had never been lonely in his life.

Lights on the bridge came on and the owl-eyes of cars swooped down from the bluffs of the Virginia side, blazed over him for a minute, whooshed by. He walked back slowly, caught a streetcar at the corner, went clattering uptown. He sat on the hard seat beside a man in patched dungarees who held a tin lunch box on his knees and stared out the window with the patient dullness, the bloodless face of the night-worker.

“Cigarette, buddy?” Mike held out his limp pack. The man's face lighted briefly.

“Much obliged. Can't smoke here. I'll save it.” The stranger dropped the cigarette into his shirt pocket.

“Where you working?” Mike asked.

“Union Station. Maintenance. Night shift. Sweep out—keep hot water in the tanks—odd jobs.”

“See a lot of things, don't you?” The quickening that was like another sense in Mike stirred, “Queer people—queer stories.”

“Yeah.” The man was young, he was alive behind those tired eyes. “I'm the man nobody sees. The man with the broom. A lot of us in this town. We walk around and we're alive, we can hear and see because the public never sees us. They look through us. We're background like lampposts. They never see us.”

Mike did not get off at Fourteenth Street. He rode on, down darker avenues, to the big, glaring building guarded forever by the marble Columbus. Against the sky, the Capitol dome, flood-lighted, glowed with austere dignity. Mike was talking eagerly, when he was not listening to the pale-faced mechanic with the lunch box.

At the station he hailed a taxi. Speed—before this crackling inspiration died! In his hotel room his little typewriter rattled and hopped on a quaking card table.

The Man Nobody Sees
, by Michael Paull. Hundreds, thousands of them in this teeming town, men colored like dust, blurred, impersonal, with the vagueness of fog. Men people looked through. Living men. He went with them into basements, lifted coal shovels, swung brooms, heaved up garbage cans; they were all alike, drawn with one drab brush, the color of faded overalls, of grayish faces, men who had eaten rather too little, but who lived and thought and loved and suffered behind their patient eyes. In Berlin and Buenos Aires, in London and Shanghai and San Francisco, they were there.

He ripped the sheets out, one after another, counted words mechanically. The stuff was good. He grinned at himself in the mirror, smacked back his unruly hair, went out. The envelope went into a mailbox. Mike did not look at his watch. Time, as time, did not exist for Mike Paull.

But Teresa Harrison looked at the clock reproachfully when he came banging at her door. She held a limp robe around her long legs and, barren of make-up, her face looked old and bleak.

“Mike, you abomination! It's half past four in the morning.”

“Is it?” Mike strolled in, smelled the stale, lingering odor of cigarettes, the sweet, greasy fragrance of Teresa's cold cream. “Why don't you empty your ashtrays? This place is a shambles.”

“Get out of here!” ordered Teresa, “I'm dead. Those dreadful people never left till after two o'clock. And I'm a working woman. I have to be at my office at nine to get forty horrible women from the Middle West off on that Caribbean cruise.”

“I'm a working man, too. Just got through working, Sit down, Teresa. I want to talk. About Ginny Warfield.”

Teresa's face hardened. “Mike, you let Virginia alone. I need her. I've got a lot of money and time invested in her. I won't have her upset.”

“I'm not going to upset her.” He straddled a gilt chair coolly, grinned his engaging grin, “I'm going to marry her. Took me all night to make up my mind.”

“That,” snapped Teresa, “is the wildest thing you've said yet!”

“It's the sanest thing I ever said in all my life. After uttering millions of words, all more or less crazy, I speak a piece of common sense, and you fly off the handle.”

“I won't let Virginia marry you. I'm fond of the girl. I took her up—off a park bench, practically. There she was, struggling to live on a starvation government job, too proud to write home, filing her heels straight with a nail file, eating sandwiches in drugstores, getting a panic over a run in a stocking. And I took her in.”

“Has she got a home?”

“Good heavens. You want to marry her and you know nothing about the girl at all!”

“I know she's the only girl I've ever wanted to marry. The rest is unimportant.”

“And does she want to marry you?”

“She says she doesn't. She'll change her mind.”

“She has a little sense, then.”

“You have a hell of an opinion of me, haven't you? But I'm going to marry Ginny, all the same.”

“I tell you I won't let her marry you, Mike Paull! She's a good girl, loyal and clever and fine all through. I won't let you ruin her life and break her heart. You're no more fit for marriage than I am—and the Lord knows I'd make a man miserable to the end of his days. What do you know about Virginia, except that her hair is pretty and that she has a sort of aloof charm? Do you know that her mother died when she was born? That her father's a hard-working country doctor down in Tennessee, with a second wife and a young, hungry family?”

“Stepmother—is that why Ginny left home?”

“I think not. I think she adores the woman. But you know how country doctors get along. Do ten thousand dollars' worth of work in a year, charge off half of it to charity, collect about three thousand, and half of that in wood, or potatoes, or something. Virginia was independent. She had an uncle in Congress—he got defeated soon after she came here, but he got her a small job and she wanted to stand on her own feet. And now she's on the way to being a good businesswoman. Let her alone, Mike—don't make her unhappy.”

“Teresa, I'm not going to make her unhappy. I'm not going to interfere with her life. I'm free—she'll be free.”

“You,” said Teresa, disgustedly, “are the most completely adolescent person I've ever known. Don't you know anything about the world at all? Don't you know that a woman in love—or a man either, if he's worth shooting at sunrise—can't be free?”

“Ginny said that,” Mike said absently.

“Did she? Then she's a wise woman—and you,” Teresa's eyes grew stony and impatient, “are an irresponsible young fool! You've never considered anyone else in your life. You don't know how. You'd go galloping blithely off to some outlandish place; maybe you'd remember to say goodbye, and more than likely you wouldn't. You'd forget to write—she wouldn't know where you were, half the time. Women can't endure that sort of thing. If you knew how to be considerate, you wouldn't have come crashing in here, dragging me out into the chilly dawn to listen to your maunderings!”

“Teresa, my angel—” Mike got up and searched the cigarette boxes.

“They're all gone, probably. Wait—here's a lone one. Now what were you going to say? Say it, and get out.”

“I was going to say that for a hard-boiled gal who has taken the world by the neck and shaken success out of it, you're still a romantic soul. You read glamour books in secret, I'll bet a hat. You cry over poetry when nobody's looking. And you don't know that a generation has grown up around you who can look life in the teeth, take the best out of it, and dodge the bars and chains.”

“You have read too many books written by brilliant young crackpots like yourself. There isn't any such generation. Men and women haven't changed—not down under. Not fundamentally. Virginia knows that. I knew she had sense or I wouldn't have bothered with her. Now, will you get out of here and let me get some sleep?”

“Just the same,” Mike paused at the door, “I'm going to marry her!”

“Over my dead body.”

“What will you bet?”

“I won't bet. But if she does have you—I'll give her a wedding, with cake and champagne.”

“Remember that. And you'd better order the champagne now.”