The Mulberry Bush (6 page)

She had gone up Pike's Peak, and on the way had missed most of the view because she had to count the number of seats in the cog-wheel cars and the buses. She had been driven up a dizzy ascent to a quiet brow where a tower and a carillon and bronze tablets kept alive the memory of Will Rogers, and she had had little chance to explore, because she had had to argue endlessly with the proprietor of a lunch place about box lunches for next summer. She had sat in the offices of hotel managers and listened, though Teresa had cautioned her against that.

“Don't let them get started on their sales talk. They'll recite whole pages from their folders, and then, when you're completely numb and past resisting, they'll end up by sticking another dollar on the rate.”

On the whole she had done very well, as well as Teresa had done the previous year. She had been weary at night, glad to lie in a hot tub, fragrant with pine salts, glad to wrap herself in a silk negligée and stretch out on the bed with a book, after the interminable reports to Washington had been dropped down the mail chute. And twice at night she had been too tired to write a letter to Mike.

There had been no letters from him, of course. She had left in such haste that she had had no chance to arrange for the forwarding of her personal mail. She mailed Mike's letters in care of Bill Foster and realized that they might not reach Mike for days, perhaps not for weeks. They might even follow him about and never catch up with him at all. Mike had told her how he might go—pack-train, burro, on foot.

“How will he look when I see him again?”

Would there be a self-conscious stiffness, a strangeness? Would they meet awkwardly, struggling to recapture old ground again, rapture past, dreams shared, that gossamer fabric of love they had woven together? Or would the same radiance clothe them again—the same ecstasy sing in their hearts, the same eager gladness spring into their eyes?

“We had so little time,” she thought anxiously. “So little time for love to grow!”

Like planting a fragile and lovely flower and then rushing away, trusting to time and the weather to water the delicate roots.

“It mustn't die,” she told her pillow in a brief surge of midnight panic. “It mustn't die!”

Daylight brought calm and a quiet feeling of amusement for her fears. How could love die—for people who loved as she loved Mike? How Mike would laugh if ever she confessed to him the silly fears she had conjured out of thin air.

“Ginny, you nutty—Ginny, you silly angel!”

And then, though she fought it down furiously, would come again that wincing uncertainty, returning as a bitter taste returns to the tongue, as pain returns in the morning. That black-haired girl—had she, too, thought that love lived forever?

“Stop it, you idiot!” she raged at her mirror. And deliberately and with frigid calm, dressed herself up smartly to go out and beard the lions that Teresa had ordered bearded and signed on the various dotted lines.

She was glad when Sunday came, and Bruce Gamble drove up to the door of the hotel in a rented car.

“I hope you're not a nervous passenger,” he said, as he helped her in. “This road we're driving today is a trifle steep and crooked.”

“I went up Pike's Peak and didn't grab a thing. If the brakes hold, I promise not to squeal a squeal.”

“I looked into that. They've widened the road, too, since the stagecoaches used to come galloping down with the lady passengers uttering delicate shrieks and fainting at the foot of the mountain.”

“I couldn't faint if I tried, and I'm not sure I could shriek—I never have, that I remember.”

A late, silvery, October glow was in the air, the sun, wine-clear and golden, laid over the peaks, some of them already beginning to show pale caps of snow, a thin bluish-chromium haze.

“This,” she said, as they began the sharp ascent from the flat floor of the valley, “must have been the way it looked when it was first made, all clean and new.”

“The way the pioneers saw it when they rode in here, dusty and weary, on footsore horses. They followed the gulches and the streams on the hunt for gold and they were a tough and salty lot. But I've often wondered how their women felt when they saw these remote and savage peaks against the sky. To them, they must have looked pretty grim.”

“Because,” said Virginia, “women are always looking around for some quiet place where a little house could be tucked away. When they came out here in covered wagons, they brought along their flower seeds, and peony roots, and rose cuttings. And they looked all around this rocky wilderness and wondered how anything could be persuaded to grow here.”

“But after their men had taken a few millions in gold out of these hills, they stopped mourning about their posy beds,” Gamble said. “They built a college and the finest opera-house east of Philadelphia, with a hundred gaslights in the chandelier to shine down on the ladies in their jewels, and their chignons and bustles. And they gave splendid balls in the hotel, which was a magnificent place for those days.”

The road was narrow and the curves sharp, the view downward a little terrifying, but Virginia kept her eyes on the distant peaks and would not let herself think of those giddy slopes below. Cars passed, tearing along recklessly, the drivers undisturbed by the hairpin turns.

“They live here,” Gamble said. “They're annoyed at us for a couple of nervous tourists. Now, we're up—and how do you like that world down there?”

“There's too much of it,” she said, in a small, hushed voice. So many canons and ragged peaks, so much rugged land going on and on. And beyond was the flatness of the plains, the deltas of the rivers, the marshes and shores, and then the endless miles of ocean! Between herself and Mike. “It seems—too big and almost cruel, doesn't it?” she said. “Such tremendous, indifferent, unfeeling distances between people.”

“Left some one behind, did you?” He smiled at her.

“Oh, yes—numbers of people. I suppose you did too?”

“Only my little girl, Meredith. She's eight now. We lost her mother when she was three years old.” He handled the wheel with his left hand deftly, took a leather folder from an inside pocket. “There she is—not a pretty kid, but smart as they make 'em.”

Virginia looked at the Kodak picture of an earnest, blonde child in white shorts and jersey, who clutched a bewildered puppy in stout, short arms.

“She's sweet. Do you see her often?”

“Once a month, or so. My sister takes care of her. In Baltimore. She's learning to ride now. Here's her last letter.” He brought out a penciled envelope from his coat pocket. “Pretty fair writing for a third-grader, I think.”

“You mean—I'm to read it?”

“Sure—go ahead and read it.”

Virginia read:

Dear daddy, Thank you for the Dopey. Now I have all the darfs. I washed Grumpy and his paint came off. Why I washed him was Skippy chewed him and berried him. I fell down on my skats and skinned my knee. I rode some more Satterday. The horse was name Flash and he was kind of bony. Don't fall off a mountain.

Your little girl,

Merry.

She liked Bruce Gamble even better, when she had read that naive letter. She liked the tender way he folded it and put it away.

“I save 'em all,” he said.

Virginia ached to tell him about Mike. Why had they made this absurd compact of secrecy? It had seemed wise at the time, but now that Teresa knew, what did it matter? If she could talk to someone, her loneliness would be eased a little. But so long as she held Mike to the arrangement, she felt duty-bound to keep silent herself, though now the whole thing seemed a little silly, especially since that nasty little item in the gossip column. She wondered if Mike would see that. Not
likely, unless Bill Foster clipped it and mailed it to him.

She had had an idea of sending it to him herself, with something light and bantering written on it. “Two timer!” or “Villainy Exposed”—something to show him how lightly she was taking it, how inconsequential it all was.

If Bill sent it to Mike, would he read it and wonder if she had seen it? Would he mention it in his letters—explain if there were anything to explain? She could never, she knew, speak of it herself except in a gay mood of simulated amusement. She would not be a jealous wife. She wondered if Mike would be a jealous husband. Would he be hurt and sulky if he knew that she was here today, walking the steep streets of this old town—streets full of the ghosts of men in boots and big hats, with pistols on their hips and grim lines around their mouths, ghosts of women who looked from the windows of the sagging wooden buildings, bold, painted women—timid, gentle women? Would Mike be stung with the same uneasy doubts that made her heart flinch whenever she let her thoughts wander?

She looked at Bruce Gamble's graying temples and considered the absurdity of that. And then he pulled out her chair in the dining room of the old hotel and leaned across a small table, with a look of eager intimacy in his eyes, and she had a twinge of uncertainty, slaying it quickly by telling herself that Bruce Gamble was only being gallant. He would do the same for any lonely woman.

He went off on business of his own, while she interviewed the men she had come to see and closed her contracts, putting them down to be signed on a table that had once held the silk hat and cane of a president. Then, when Gamble returned, they explored together the once splendid theater, the bar where in the rich, roisterous seventies, gold dust had been weighed on delicate scales in exchange for potent drafts from thick old bottles. At that bar, fur-collared coats and tall hats had jostled buckskins and flannel shirts, men had fought there, men had died, caught up in the violent frenzy of the fever for gold. Then the short October day began to wane, and they drove down the steep, twisting road again, a little silent, a bit oppressed by the past.

It was as if those lost adventurers went with them, down the trail. Men crouched on the top of stagecoaches with rifles across their knees, women in white hose and strapped shoes, gold earrings in their ears. Men with brown beards and quick angry eyes, men who blustered, and men who spoke slowly and with deadly intent. Hussies, proud, brave women, frightened women—Mike could have put it all into words. But to Virginia it was only an odd, nostalgic pain, and a small cold breath of fear. Life was such a passing thing, life was so soon over!

And then they were down and speeding along the wide highway, with the autumn day dying in a purple-and-russet haze upon the hills, and traffic roaring by going home. Suddenly Bruce Gamble slowed the car, laid his hand over hers.

“This has been a happy day for me,” he said. “I knew—when I first saw you that you were a person I could talk to—about the things I like—that old town up there, and Merry—things like that.”

Now was the time to speak, to end this stupid no sense. Now was the time to say casually, “My husband is in South America. He's a writer—I wish he could have seen all this.” But she did not say it.

She said, instead, a trifle awkwardly, drawing he hand away, “You were generous to take pity on working woman. I'd have gone up there in a taxi, probably, and been scared to death.”

“What I want,” he went on, ignoring her words, “is to see you again. You're going back to Washington, aren't you? Baltimore isn't far. I have to shove off tomorrow—make the Western Slope and Utah, perhaps Nevada. I may not get back to the East again for a month—but when I do—”

Virginia managed a light laugh. “I'm at the Harrison Travel Bureau. Call me up when you're in town, and I'll sell you a nice trip through the Panama Canal, or to the Virgin Islands, with Trinidad thrown in. Or would you prefer Alaska?”

“Postman's holiday? When I come home I don't want more places to go. I want my old corduroy pants and the garden hose to squirt around. I want to put my feet up, and let the pup nuzzle my hand, and have plenty of tobacco for my pipe. I want a fire and hot coffee and no ice water brought in, no telegrams shoved under the door, no telephones jangling. Does that sound pretty deadly?”

The lawnmower—and the mortgage! A soundproof room for Elvira.

“It sounds awfully restful. To me, home is a couple of rooms up two flights, with a gas-plate to cook on and a bed that turns into a couch in the daytime. And that does sound deadly.”

“Home never sounds deadly. Not when you're tired of being always far away.” The words had a faintly wistful sound.

A lonely man, a red-headed girl—just the old formula! But something intuitive, something that struck deep, told her that this was no casual meeting to him, that Bruce Gamble would not take some other girl to see the sights of Utah or Nevada.

She told him goodbye next morning, and three days after, her job finished, went back to Washington by train. She saw Teresa first and found her fuming under her fracture bar, outraged because the doctor would not let her smoke.

“I didn't think you had it in you,” Teresa was grudgingly commendatory when she looked over the contracts. “I'll make a businesswoman of you yet, if that itchfoot you married will let me alone. Why on earth you wanted to throw a good mind away—like some sappy girl out of finishing school—”

It was dark when Virginia alighted from the Georgetown bus—dark and cold, with a briny mist of rain) falling.

She ran up the two flights of stairs, leaving her impeding bags on the first landing, groping for her key feverishly.

Letters—they lay in a heap where they had fallen through the slot in the door. She snatched them up eagerly, thumbed through them swiftly, her fingers turning slowly colder, her heart sinking with incredulous despair.

Bills and circulars, her stepmother's spidery handwriting on a blue envelope—but no letter from Mike!

The sons of the sun had builded well.

While the Crusades had stirred Europe to holy, fanatic zeal, tall, bronzed men in tunics of vicuna wool and gaudy robes of feathers had set up an empire in the Andean highlands, tamed rivers to water their fields, and with shrewdness, superstition, and clever cruelty bound together a dozen tribes into the proud realm of the Inca.

Mike Paull, walking through the ancient stony streets of Cuzco, found himself walking on tiptoe and moving his fingers over the polished stones of the walls ages old, as reverently as he might have touched the face of one dead.

For a thousand years those stones had lain one upon another, fitted without mortise or mortar, and no parchment, no chiseled tablet kept a record of the men who had squatted in the sun, year after year, chipping, grinding, rasping away bit by bit the deathless Cordilleran rock, achieving a perfect piece of construction that neither time, nor frost, nor earthquakes, nor enemies had been able to lay low.

The spell of the place was on Mike Paull. Over his head, built on the Inca walls, loomed the monastery that the priests of Pizarro had erected to their newer saints. But this structure wore the apologetic air of the interloper. Beneath it the ancient wall—monument to men who, without steel, with crude weapons of copper and stone, had enslaved the people of these highlands—reared itself in aloof silence, in contempt of the gimcrack superstructure.

Looking up at that looming curve of stone, it was Rocca, the Boy-God, that Mike Paull saw, rather than the Moorish arches, the broken lattices, the weather-worn carvings of Spain.

A dozen llamas passed, herded by an Indian in a flat felt hat with wool ear-laps. On the backs of the small, proud beasts, joggled baskets of potatoes no bigger than golf balls; clay pots swung on leather thongs; little bundles of firewood. Just this way, in the year 1225, a Quichua might have driven his beasts past these stone barriers, carrying his tribute to Yupanqui.

The past had Mike Paull. He was a little drunk on it. He forgot that not far away, in the old city of Lima, men sat at mahogany desks, with telephones and tickers bringing in the news of the world. He forgot that there were newspapers and smart cars, and radios blaring out modern dance tunes; he forgot Bill Foster and his room at the Gran Hotel Bolivar, where his razor and his mother's picture on the dresser indicated that Mike Paull had moved in.

He forgot that he had come to this land in a clipper ship that had spanned in a night the oceans where Pizarro's ships had tossed for weeks. But he did not forget Virginia.

She had come with him all the way, wrapped around his heart as the Crusaders of old had wrapped their lily banners. She walked with him now, along this narrow little street which led into a square where the Church of the Company of Jesus lifted twin towers not greatly changed, though students lugged notebooks, through carved doors where formerly pale nuns had gone, soft-footed, to pray.

He caught himself saying, “Look, Ginny!” He caught himself measuring with his eye, the rough steps up to ancient Manchu Picchu, up to the temple where a sundial counted the unrelenting years. Ginny, his whimsy told him, would be plenty tired when she got to the top of that, where once Hiram Bingham had wrested history from wilderness, and where goatherds now dozed in the sun.

He had shown Ginny the coral rainbows lying in the green shallows where the shadow of the plane slipped, small as a homing gull. And at night, while Aymara pipes and the thud of a big skin drum made strange music in the square of old Cuzco, he reached to wake her, and then knew the hurting jerk of separation because Ginny was so far away.

And he knew, too, the guilty feeling of omission because he had not written yet.

But the days were a rush of time over his head. Dead men's time, old, forgotten time. Feathered canopies moving in ghostly splendor. Naked men running barefooted with the knotted string records—the
quipus
—in their hands, or on their shoulders clay-lined baskets in which live fish were carried to the table of the Inca.

Spanish mail glittered and fire signals burned on the lonely peaks, and Huayna's frustrated heart was carried to rest in Quito. Atahualpa, grave and majestic, went to the garrote, and the heel of Spain came down, till glory was no more.

At night Mike's typewriter leaped, red-hot with the burning words into which his brain translated what he had seen, but chiefly with what he had dreamed and conjured out of the past. And when it was finished and the words counted, he was tired with a weariness that went deeper than aching leg muscles and eyes stung from long hours in the high, thin air—that went as deep as his soul.

Then he was too spent to write a coherent letter though he made up loverly passages in his mind as he drifted into exhausted sleep. And then in the morning the rush began again, a car waiting, a guide squatting on his heels in a doorway, the past catching at him again, and again he did not write.

The mail came with Virginia's brief letter—odd, Mike thought that she was somewhere on this ragged backbone of the continents, too. Mike read the single page a dozen times, shot a sheet of paper into Elvira's maw, then remembered that he hadn't any address, that he hadn't an idea where Ginny was going from Denver, that he would have to wait for another mail that might be a week away.

He carried her letter up mountain roads and into old towns where women haggled in ancient, odorous markets, bartering a haunch of goat meat for shoes made in Massachusetts.

“Sunday, I'll write—a long letter. If only Ginny could see this—”

The letter got creased very flat from lying in his pocket. And very worn from being read over and over. Sometime he would bring her, see these dead stones come alive through her eyes, see the gold-clad priests hold up offerings to the sun, where now the herders lay slumbering.

But on Sunday, very early, he woke on fire with the impulse to write a book. He would write about this Inca civilization. Other people had done it, but his book would be different. He saw things the academic fellows missed—that was his heritage from his mother again, the fey thing she had brought with her from the bog country, where men still knew the Little People, still heard wild bugles blowing.

He wrote till late afternoon, forgetting his lunch, and the New York boys who were in Lima selling road machinery to the Peruvians came beating at the door. There was a game on downstairs. It was one o'clock in the morning when Mike returned to his room, having drunk too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes. He fell across his bed wearily and went to sleep. Not much use writing anyway, he told himself, till he knew where she was.

Mike had been in Lima a week when a sea mist came in, wet and cold, to water that coastal land where rain so rarely fell. Mike had been up in the hills with a Quichua guide, and even the goatskin poncho the guide had loaned him had failed to keep the dampness out of his bones.

“No wonder,” he grumbled, as he stripped and got under a hot shower, “that those old boys worshiped the sun!”

There was no heat on, for mid-October was the beginning of summer in that equatorial country, but the water was hot and the towels supplied by the Gran Bolivar were soft and luxurious. He wrapped himself in one of them and sat down at his typewriter. Before a line went off to Bill Foster, he was writing a long letter to Ginny.

He was a little aghast when he looked back and counted the days since he had kissed her goodbye in the dark drizzle of the Newark Airport. But he told himself comfortably that Ginny would understand. Very firmly, to silence the faint stirrings of unease under his bland confidence, he told himself that Ginny was swell. She'd know that he had had to work.

He shot a sheet of paper around Elvira's platen, and looking at the Lima paper to be sure of the date, began “Darling Ginny:”

Off to a start, at least. Ginny would have loved the things he had seen last night. That Andean village—its market women and angry, spitting llamas, children wearing sandals made of old automobile tires, hats of felt beaten into shape with paddles, children who carried loads of brush and weeds for firewood on their backs.

He told her about it, the keys flying, the light table teetering. Of the Indian concert in the moonlit square, on instruments that went back a thousand years. Panpipes, clay trumpets, drums. Of the knots of people who had gathered and were presently dancing, treading an antique measure, whirling skirts and ponchos, colorful, strange, a dance old before Columbus, old before Spain sailed her dark ships to conquer the western world.

He was deep in the spell of it, starting his fourth age when there came a banging on the door.

Mike yelled, “Come in!” but did not look around till a slow voice behind him said, “Well, you darned old son of a gun!”

“Dave Martin!”

Mike jumped up, almost upsetting the table.

“Dave—where the devil did you come from?”

Dave Martin strode in, tall and red-headed and arrogant, Dave of the trenchant and deadly pen, who had flown with him over the turbulent Polish Corridor, who had eaten goat meat with him in a straw-roofed hut on the salty marshes of Darbenut, who had stolen a jug of dark beer from under the bed of a Lithuanian cobbler—beer that had saved their lives the day an oil line broke and the plane had been grounded for a day and a night in a desolate stretch along the Baltic.

“Just blew in.” Dave threw his hat across the room. “Been running down some kind of wild story about mysterious air bases in the Argentine. Very interesting yarn—now when I get it, the State Department says hands off. Got anything around to drink?”

“I'll get something up right away. Gosh, old man, I've been wondering where you were. See your stuff sometimes. What do you know?”

“Not much. Nobody talks. Canny lot of politician down here. That the native costume you're sporting?'

“Been up in the hills. Cold up there. I was just writing—” almost he had said, “to my wife.” Then he remembered that Ginny had wanted nothing said “Not till we can live like people,” she had said. “Just writing some stuff I got up there,” he went on. “Ah here's the liquor. Say when.”

They talked long and late, beating each other on the back as men do, who have been through danger together and can laugh about it. They had dinner sent up and they ate, Mike in his pajamas and bathrobe the coffee pot wrapped in a towel to keep it warm, dousing steaks with hot, unfamiliar sauces, recalling meals they had eaten in strange places.

“Remember that pot of soup we finagled off the old goat farmer that time in the Pyrenees, Mike? And after we'd eaten it, we found out the meat in it, was an old nanny goat that had died?”

“Yeah, I remember. You got sick. But I was so hungry I didn't care what had died—till he told us his idiot boy was dying of some kind of growth in his head—then we left.”

Dave Martin stretched his legs and lighted a thin, brown Paraguayan cigarette.

“By the way, Mike, what became of that girl you used to send cables to every day? The one whose picture you pasted in the top of your hat?”

Involuntarily Mike glanced toward his hat. It was a new hat—he had thrown the other one away, after making a futile attempt to scrape a photograph from the inner felt with a razor blade—a day or two after he had met Virginia.

“Oh, you mean Harriet? I guess she's still on the paper. I see some stuff now and then that reads like hers. Haven't seen her for a long time.” Not since August. But he was dismissing the fine details of the truth. In August he had been sent to Washington, had met Ginny. After that, for him, all other women had become merely ghostly phases of an adolescent past. Like silly old songs and hoarded pennants, like paper hats from forgotten parties and the other sappy affections men recover from and remember afterward with slightly nostalgic indulgence.

“Get your ring back—that one the customs officer tried to take away from me in Memel?” asked Dave. “I mailed it for you in Paris, I remember. You had three months' pay in it.”

“No—I didn't want it back,” Mike edged awkwardly around this. “It was—just a present. It didn't mean a thing.”

“Funny—I was under the impression that it meant a lot, once. I was distinctly under that impression when you bought it from that old Jew in Orküt. He knew that it had been stolen from the nobility, and so did the police. You might have gotten stuck over there in one of their lousy prison camps, waiting for red tape to unwind and get you out, on account of that ring. But you had to have it.”

“It didn't mean a thing,” Mike repeated, flatly “Anyway—it was a lot too big. I doubt if she even wore it. Likely she sold it to some antique place. It wasn't a lucky ring—she had nervous feelings about it, a fortune-teller told her there was blood on it.”

He wanted an end of hearing about Harriet Hillery. And that ring. Harriet knew that all that was ended—if, indeed, Mike told himself in his bland arrogance there had been anything to be ended. People changed, drifted apart. Now even reminders of his past irritated him. He hated to have recalled to him any part of his life that hadn't included Ginny. If only he could tell Dave about Ginny—but he'd promised, not quite sure why—he shouldn't have given in, he should have stood on his pride as a husband—a man made a mistake to start by giving in.

At midnight, Mike remembered suddenly that he had to get off some copy to Bill Foster. So he cut out the beginning of the letter to Ginny, crossed out part of it with x's and z's, sent it down, with a new lead written on it, stamped and sealed and addressed to Bill.

Tomorrow he would write a long letter. Pages and pages, with crosses at the bottom of every page.

“Positively, I'll write. Positively!”