“Who, me? I’m objective, is all. Yearning, I can smell yearning a mile off.”
“I shall have to shower.”
“Not at all, not at all. It stinks only when untempered by reason. In your case I smell reason a mile off, too. Eminently suitable, eminently,” he pronounced. “I wouldn’t bet against it,” he added seriously, and I felt so good about this last that I had to change the subject. I questioned him about Duluth, which till then I hadn’t even thought of. Now, almost superstitiously, I refused to think about Jane. Every time he gave me an opening I closed it, choosing, as one does who has so much at stake and success seems within his grasp, to steer clear of the single thing that is of any interest to him. We spoke trivially the whole time, and my excitement and happiness were incandescent.
“How many miles do you get to the gallon in this Bentley of yours, Plympton?” I asked, and even before he could answer I turned to look out the window and exclaim, “Look, look at the grass, so green it is. That’s your English climate for you. If rain’s the price a nation must pay to achieve a grass that green, then one must just as well pay up and be still about it. Who’s your tailor? I’m thinking of having some things made.”
When we left the M-4 and came to the turnoff that would bring us at last to Duluth I put my hand on Plympton’s sleeve. “Freddy, listen, I know I must sound like a fool, but could you just introduce us and give me some time alone with her? We’ve so many friends in common — and perhaps other things as well — that I know there won’t be any awkwardness. My God, I’ve been pursuing her for months. Who knows when I’ll have such an opportunity again? I know my hope’s showing, and I hope — look, there I go again — you won’t despise me for it, but I have to talk to her. I have to.”
“Then you shall,” he said, and we turned onto the road that took us across the perimeter of the estate and drove for five miles and came to a gate where a gatekeeper greeted Lord Plympton and a chauffeur who seemed to materialize out of the woods got in and took the wheel while Freddy and I moved to the back seat, and we drove together through the lovely grounds for another fifteen or twenty minutes and passed through another gate, though I did not see it until we were almost on it — the queer, camouflaged electric fence — and through the windows I could hear the coughing of apes and the roar of lions and the bleating of lambs and the wheezes and grunts and trebles and basses of a hundred beasts — though I saw none — and at last, passing through a final gate, came to the long, curving, beautiful driveway of the beautiful house and servants came to take our bags and others to open doors and an older woman in a long gown — Plympton kissed her and introduced her as his wife, the Lady Plympton I’d never met (“She came with guanacos on her crest, dear fellow, with the funny panda and the gravid slug. I married her — ha ha — to fill out the set”), and he bolted upstairs beckoning me to follow. “Come on, come on,” he said, “can’t wait to get here, then hangs back like a boy at his first ball,” and I bounded up the stairs behind him, and overtook him. “Wherever are you going? You don’t know the way. Go on, go on, left, left,” he called. “When you come to the end of the hall turn right into the Richard Five wing. It’s the first apartment past the Ballroom of Time. You’ll see the clocks,” and I left him behind, only to come to the door, her door, and stop outside it.
Plympton came up behind me. “I knew you wouldn’t,” he said, and knocked on the door gently, “Jane,” he called softly. “Jane? Are you decent, darling?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was beautiful.
“Shall I push open the door?”
“Yes,” she said, “would you just?”
He shoved me gently inside, but did not cross the threshold himself. “Here’s Brewster Ashenden for you,” he said, and turned and left.
I could not see her clearly. No lights were on and the curtains were still drawn. I stood in the center of the room and waited for a command. I was physically excited, a fact which I trusted the darkness to shield from Jane. Neither of us said anything.
Then I spoke boldly. “He’s right. I trust he’s right. I pray he is.”
“He?”
“Plympton. ‘Here’s Brewster Ashenden for you,’ he said.”
“Did he? That was presumptuous of him, then.”
“I am Brewster Ashenden of the earth, air, fire and water Ashendens and this moment is very important to me. I’m first among eligible men, Miss Löes Lipton. Though that sounds a boast, it is not. I have heard of your beauty and your character. Perhaps you have heard something of mine.”
“I never listen to gossip. And anyway hearsay is inadmissible in court…ship.”
I knew she was going to say that. It was exactly what I would have replied had she made the speech I had just made! Do you know what it means to have so profound a confirmation — to have, that is, all one’s notions, beliefs, hunches and hypotheses suddenly and entirely endorsed? My God, I was like Columbus standing in the New round World, like the Wrights right and aloft over Kitty Hawk! For someone like myself it was like having my name cleared! I’m talking about redemption. To be right! That’s everything in life, you know. To be right, absolutely right, one hundred percent correct in all the essentials, that’s all we want. And whoever is? Brewster Ashenden — once. I had so much to tell her.
I began to talk, a mile a minute, filling her in, breathlessly bringing her up to date, a Greek stranger’s after-dinner talk in a king’s gold palace on an inaccessible island in a red and distant sea. A necessary entertainment. Until then I had not known my life had been a story.
Then, though I could not see it in the dark room, she held up her hand for me to stop. It was exactly where I would have held up my hand had Jane been speaking.
“Yes,” she said of my life, “it was the same with me.”
Neither of us could speak for a time. Then, gaily, “Oh, Brewster, think of all the—”
“—coastlines?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “yes. All the coastlines, bays, sounds, capes and peninsulas, the world’s beaches scribbled round all the countries and continents and islands. All the Cannes and Hamptons yet to be. Shores in Norway like a golden lovely dust. Spain’s wild hairline, Portugal’s long face like an impression on coins. The nubbed antlers of Scandinavia and the great South American porterhouse. The French teapot and Italian boot and Australia like a Scottie in profile.”
“Asia running like a watercolor, dripping Japan and all the rest,” we said together.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “God, I love the world.”
“There’s no place like it.”
“Let me wash up on seashores and eat the local specialties, one fish giving way to another every two or three hundred miles along the great continuous coasts like an exquisite, delicious evolution. Thank God for money and jet airplanes. Let me out at the outpost. Do you feel that way?”
“What, are you kidding? An earth, fire, air and water guy like me? I do, I do.”
“Family’s important,” she said.
“You bet it is.”
She giggled. “My grandfather, a New Yorker, was told to go west for his health. Grandfather hated newspapers, he didn’t trust them and said all news — even of wars, heavy weather and the closing markets — was just cheap gossip. He thought all they were good for, since he held that calendars were vulgar, was the date printed at the top of the page. In Arizona he had the New York Times sent to him daily, though of course it always arrived a day or two late. So for him the eleventh was the ninth or the tenth, and he went through the last four years of his life a day or two behind actual time. Grandfather’s Christmas and New Year’s were celebrated after everyone else’s. He went to church on Easter Tuesday.”