The Wars of Love Read online

  Two or three curious spectators had gathered around us. He glanced at them, then let go of my coat and let his fist drop. It had all taken less than half a minute. We stared at each other. I laughed again. I had an impulse to forgive him for everything.

  The stragglers drifted away, and suddenly Freddie turned and started back in the direction from which we had come. Then I wanted to call to him. “Freddie, come back! For God’s sake, let’s be men!” I wanted to call. But I did not, and I watched his implacable back as it disappeared among others.

  Then an unpleasant experience came over me. There, among all the slam-bang of traffic, among all the street noises, the horns, the shouting, the laughter, under the sudden horrible clatter of a train overhead, among the hundreds of human beings who were surging up and down the sidewalks—in the throbbing heart of the city, I was suddenly alone; there seemed, quite simply, quite horribly, to be no one else in the world.

  5

  The rest comes in glimpses. It occurred in the months that followed on the Pact, the months of the invasion of Poland and the beginnings of the phoney war, and it comes now in glimpses, small-shuttered, sometimes spectacular, glimpses of madness and of a mad unwinding. To the small events, the large times were appropriate; we seemed, indeed, to be playing some odd miniature shadow game with history. And in the phantasmagoria of history, with all that chaos of clumsy alliances and shattering events, my private phantasmic isolation grew. It played its small part in the disaster of these others.

  When we are very close to things in time, there is little likelihood of our handling them like artists. We summon up no recollections in tranquillity; what we summon up is what we are still living, what has not yet passed through the sieve of time that true recollection demands, has not arranged itself in the mysterious mind into that core of the essential which in itself is the selective process that enables the artist, finally, to think he chooses to tell what he will tell. Now, in this present and of that near past, I tell everything. And in a sense, that everything, which is very brief, is an essence, or at least an ultimate of all that has gone before. I omit only what pertains to me alone as apart from these others—my work, of course, and its slow deterioration, but also my attempt to find in various women a life, an attachment. Only one of those attempts, the most real, the only desperate one, pertains at all, and of that one I will have to tell although it, too, can be briefly told.

  But first—I find, as I approach the end, that I am reluctant to come to it. If we remember too much, we risk madness; if we remember too little, we are probably fools. Remembering with measure, we are artists, supposing that there is also measure to remember. And measure is what—my reiterated effort to tell this story as I wish to tell it is proving, I begin to feel, in vain again—measure is what that situation was without. Excess, excess! And finally catastrophic misery. And my own buckling under the design that I have meant you to have, the design itself buckling somewhere. Where? Let me finish the story and perhaps we shall see.

  That autumn was intolerable, melancholy like many another autumn, but worse, much worse, as I found myself constantly on the verge of sinking into that nightmare in which I seemed to be abstracted from the universe, an experience that was almost visual in that the objects that made up the world around me, people, buildings, the walls of a room, seemed just to recede a little, to pull away from me into a kind of static isolation, leaving me there in the center, totally out of touch somehow, without relation! In this mood, I thought naturally and often of those three. They must be back, I said to myself in September, in October, and occasionally I would wander past their apartment building, staring up to their turret of glass to see if there were lights, but it was too high and set back besides and I could never tell; so sometimes I would stand on Fifty-seventh Street opposite The Ford Gallery, waiting for one or another of them to come or go, but they did not. This was perhaps all on my own account, a desire to get back to a point before Freddie’s street-corner challenge, before Milly’s last plea to me and her consequent final sacrifice of herself, and to try again to have them as friends. Or I would remind myself that, after all, Freddie was not Dan, or even Milly, and then, quite apart from my own needs, the thought of Dan preyed upon me, a young man still who might be a brilliant success in the world but who was being victimized by an insane love and held out of the world. And now I did not think of Freddie and Milly as at all vicious. If vice consists of a recognition of base motives, they were never vicious. I thought of them as mistaken, sadly mistaken, and pitied them, for, suffering themselves from a certain blindness to the truly inescapable conditions of modern life, they were always able to say to themselves with complacency, “We’re his friends. We know what he needs. We love him!” and pursue his destruction with the most exalted notions of tenderness and virtue. And Dan himself could so easily assist in the collaboration. Bred as he was in that atmosphere of Bohemian-aristocratic detachment, and having both by that breeding and his own temperamental bias the old-fashioned aesthete’s aloofness from the hard run of ordinary things, he made his own protected isolation easy. Freddie’s aestheticism was of another kind. Freddie was tough in will, and his was a chosen role, active and deliberate, the mask of a narrow soul. These reflections encouraged me finally, in November, to risk Freddie’s not very formidable wrath and try once more for Dan’s sake.

  I telephoned Dan at the gallery and asked him whether I could pick him up for lunch. He seemed surprised and pleased and then said, “But Freddie’s not here, he’s out with a client.”

  “Well, you and I alone, then,” I said. “All the better.”

  His hesitation suggested that this was a strange idea, but presently he said, “All right. Fine. Come on over when you can.”

  I went early in the hope that Freddie would not have returned, and yet I felt a little trepidation as I entered that chic foyer, with its black and white parquetry, on either side an elegant Regency bust of marble on a garlanded column, and as I went up the stairs into the first room. There were two men there, in overcoats, standing in conversation before some Matisse flowers.

  “In French painting,” one of them was saying, “the background is part of the picture. In American”—and he swung round a little to point at a Milton Avery that hung opposite—“it is nothing, background only.”

  “Good teachers,” the other murmured. “Monet.…”

  “You see how he knows that the background should be broken up, like that, then brought into the front—? That other? Flowers in a teapot.”

  I went up three or four more steps to a further room. There a young woman was busy at a small desk. “Mr. Norman?” she asked. “Mr. Ford’s expecting you.” She opened two large doors into the private showroom, and there was Dan, slumped on a sofa.

  Even before he stood up to greet me, I saw that he was worse. He looked older, but not in experience, only in an invalided way, shrunken, really, his eyes dim, the skin on his face loose, his mouth drawn, much grayer. And when he was on his feet, I saw that he had become a little stooped, so that he looked smaller. “We thought that you’d given us up again,” he said with a quaver.

  “No, no,” I muttered, unable to bring myself to ask him how he was.

  And I did not need to, for without any preamble, he said, “I’ve not been well, Grant. Not at all well.”

  “I’m sorry, Dan.”

  He moved to a cabinet and found some glasses and whisky, and over the fizz of the soda, he said to the muffled wall, “I don’t know what to do.”

  We sat down together on the sofa. “I want to help. There must be something that can be done, something that I can do.”

  “Everything upsets me.…”

  “Such as what?”

  “Anything at all.” His voice was petulant. “Anything.”

  “Well, Dan, the world now is enough to give us all bad nerves.” I was thinking of the air stiff with the threat of bombs about to plummet down on great cities, of the doors to the West closing one after another, of Eur
ope in flames, and America …?

  He looked at me blankly. “I don’t mean that. Little things—a rude waiter last night.… Stupid things!”

  “Oh.” Momentarily, I wondered why I was troubling with him. “Your summer’s rest didn’t help?”

  “No. And I was no help to them, to Milly and Freddie. They had to do all the work.” Suddenly he put his drink down on the floor and clenched his hands together and bent over them in a spasm. “God, it’s awful,” he said. “At night now, I wake up, I see them, I hear them screaming.”

  “Them?”

  “It gets worse, it gets worse. As if I had only that one thing in my life.”

  “What thing?”

  “That one memory, of my mother, my father,” he said bleakly.

  “Ah, yes, yes,” I said quickly. “Terrible! Only wait—even such horrors fade finally.”

  “But no!” he cried, leapt up, walked a step or two, came back, and sat down again. “No. It doesn’t. That’s what unnerves me. It grows instead. It’s always there. And now, I tell you, at night—and at night it’s the worst, the clearest! It grows and grows, and it’s all I have.…”

  “But it’s not all you have. You have this gallery. You have your whole life ahead of you. You have your marriage. Milly’s so thoughtful, so competent—surely she’s helped.” I paused. “But what does keep it alive then, over so long a time?”

  He stood up and hitched nervously across the room. He stood with his back to me for a moment, a small figure in that tall room entirely hung with dark gray draperies except for one end of the room, where room-tall hinged screens for pictures stood, as in a museum storeroom, a kind of giant metal file at the edges of which Dan now seemed to be staring. When he turned around he said, “Of course, Milly’s been wonderful, and Freddie, too, for all the rest of it, all that she couldn’t manage. What would I be without Milly? I wouldn’t be here at all, I imagine. My only luck in a long time, I guess, was that I didn’t marry that other girl, who couldn’t possibly have been as patient, as—”

  “Other girl, Dan?”

  He looked at me in surprise that I did not know about her. It was characteristic of his present self-engrossment that he should have assumed that I did. “I told you, Jo Drew, the nurse at Windhaven. I told you how fine she was, and how I nearly called her last winter.” He paused and his eyes darkened, and then he smiled ruefully, rather attractively in the old way, and he finished, “I owe her a great deal, but most, I guess, for throwing me over. And that’s why I couldn’t bring myself to ask for her when I called.”

  That was Milly’s luck, not his, I thought, but I could only say, “You told me about her, but not that you wanted to marry her.”

  “Well, I did, for a while,” he said, but the faint regret of his smile was gone, and he was smiling again with the tense, humorless egotism that was more usual with him.

  “Do you see a doctor?” I asked.

  “Doctors can’t help me,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with me that they can help. It’s only that picture that comes all the time. It’s here.” He put his hand on his forehead.

  “There are such doctors.”

  “They can’t help that.”

  “They did once, didn’t they, at Windhaven?”

  “I can’t go back there now.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve got to live through this myself.”

  “That’s silly, Dan.”

  He changed the subject. “We had wonderful luck in Europe,” he said with a kind of animation. “It’s a grab bag now, you know. I’d like to show you some of the things we brought back. Especially three pieces that a German was trying to get off his hands. But we have to keep them under cover for a while. There’s always the danger of their being loot. Although Freddie, who dug these up, is very good at such business, and especially if there’s a little intrigue involved, very good, very circumspect. Intrigue fascinates him, makes him sharper than ever. He made friends with these people, and after that—”

  As I watched him across the expanse of room and only half-listened to his prating, my mind was running on its own course. I began to understand now how Milly’s vanity (or Milly’s fear?) had worked, extraordinary compulsion that it was. Josephine Drew, even though in the end she had been unwilling to marry Dan, must yet have made it clear to Milly that she would lose Dan to someone unless she married him herself. And I thought that now I understood why their marriage had been so quick, so quiet. And Freddie?

  That was different. I had now only one desire for myself, and that was to find a woman to whom my commitment could be complete, to find a relationship knit with those details of responsibility in the very minor, daily things as in the major, moral ties—in short, a marriage; and out of the very intensity of that desire I began now to understand Freddie more clearly than I had before. He was that kind of perennial bachelor who, although often attractive to women and needing to be intimately in their company, is yet pathologically incapable of marriage. Some deeply childish irresponsibility unfits them for just those minute and multitudinous strands of responsibility which this most demanding and most rewarding of human relationships exacts and which a marrying man wants. Often the unmarrying man attaches himself, then, as “best friend” to some household in order to come as close as possible to the thing which he is incapable of seizing in itself. In a queer and intense way, Freddie was one of those, and of his marrying, or even, except for his single attempt, of straying from her, Milly never had to worry, least of all now, when she had given him more than he had ever intended to ask for, and had taken finally all that there was of him.

  And then, as with Dan, there was that childhood thing again. In human affairs, the background is the picture. Freddie had been the outsider, the village boy who found us attractive when most of his townsmen resented the summer colony, to whom—perhaps for the very reason that he came into our life on sufferance, and that by allying himself with us he cut himself off from his true allegiances—the group came to mean more than it ever did to me or, I think, to Dan.

  Dan’s tragedy lay in his passivity, in his terrible capacity to accept. It was as if he were material devised to be worked upon by the aggressive will of others, their frenetic loyalties. For Milly and Freddie were alike in that they were not jealous of individuals, as Freddie’s long placidity in the face of Milly’s marriage showed, but jealous, rather, for the narrow integrity of the group which together they comprised. Did they recognize that if the group relationship were to be kept intact, Dan must be deliberately sacrificed to it and their own persons exhausted by it at last? “We’re his friends. We know what he needs. We love him!” they told themselves, and believed, I think, what they said. That they were unaware of their true motives does not exculpate them, of course, but it explains why, in the end, it was Dan alone of the three who saw the hideous truth for what it was.

  He had stopped talking and was staring at me in a vacant way across the room. I finished my drink, put down my glass, and asked, “Shall we go?”

  He awoke from his dazed abstraction and looked at his watch. “Milly ought to be along in a minute,” he said.

  “Oh, Milly’s coming?”

  “She’s eager to see you. So I called her after you called. She’ll be right along.”

  And in a moment she came. She entered briskly, in full and splendid sail, her heels tapping smartly across the uncarpeted floor. “Grant!” She put just the tips of her trimly gloved fingers into my hand. “You’re so abrupt, my dear. You might have given me a little warning, just a little,” she said with arch satire. Then she stepped past me and kissed Dan lightly on the cheek, as if he were a habit.

  I stared at her. She looked as though she had just been taken out of the window of a shop, perfectly groomed, very beautiful in an exaggerated way, and utterly without feeling in her face.

  “You like it?” she cried. “You approve?”

  “What?”


  “My coat, silly! It’s new.” She turned slowly to let me see it—sleek, gorgeous mink. “It’s my birthday present from Dan and Freddie.”

  “Oh, yes. Very handsome.”

  “I’ve found,” she said with an appalling sweetness, “that you do much better if you can persuade men to give you things together.” Her laughter was brittle and unembarrassed, and I felt blood rise to my face in a rush.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Dan said as he started for a door.

  “Hurry, then,” Milly called. “Freddie’s holding a table for us.”

  “Oh, you found him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Freddie, too,” I said as Dan closed the door behind him.

  She looked at me with faint scorn. “We don’t do things separately, Grant. You know that.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “Is this important, this lunch?”

  She hesitated. “I hope that Freddie and I aren’t spoiling your plans.”

  I caught myself about to say “I’m delighted,” or some other such casual lie, and for a moment I said nothing at all. Then, “I haven’t any plans.”

  She smiled severely. “That’s good. I thought perhaps you had. One never knows.”

  There are grim moments in all our lives when the progress of our fate appalls us, knocks us over, moments when we are suddenly made to see ourselves exactly where and as we are in what can be the grotesque stream of human relationship. This was such a moment, and as it seized hold of me, I felt my being groan, and I seized her hands. “Oh, my God, Milly, don’t go on, please, don’t let us go on.”

  “Go on?” she said faintly, as if my seizure had seized her, and did not take her hands away.

  “How could this have happened?” I begged her. “Good God—consider what, all our lives, we were.”