"I thought that was a very nice party," the girl said seriously.
"Was it?" Noah asked offhandedly. "I hadn't noticed." That was it, he told himself, gloomily pleased, that was the attack. Remote, slightly vague, like an English baron after an evening's drinking, frigidly polite. It would serve a double purpose. It would keep him from betraying his friend, even by so much as a word. And also, and he felt a delicious thrill of guilty promise at the thought, it would impress this simple little Brooklyn secretary with his rare and superior qualities.
"Sorry," he said, "if I got you down here in the rain under false pretences."
The girl looked around her. "It's not raining," she said, practically.
"Ah." Noah regarded the weather for the first time. "Ah, so it is." There was something baffling about the grammar here, but the tone still was right, he felt.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
He shrugged. It was the first time he had ever shrugged in his whole life. "Don't know," he said. "Take a stroll." Even his vocabulary suddenly took on a Galsworthian cast. "Often do. In the middle of the night. Very peaceful, walking along through the deserted streets."
"It's only eleven o'clock now," the girl said.
"So it is," he said. He would have to be careful not to say that again. "If you want to go back to the party…"
The girl hesitated. A horn blew out on the misty river and the sound, low and trembling, went to the core of Noah's bones.
"No," she said, "I'll take a walk with you."
They walked side by side, without touching, down to the tree-bordered avenues that ran high above the river. The Hudson, smelling of spring and its burden of salt that had swept up from the sea on the afternoon's tide, slipped darkly past the misty shores. Far north was the string of soaring lights that was the bridge to Jersey, and across the river the Palisades loomed like a castle. There were no other strollers. Occasionally a car rushed by, its tyres whining on the roadway, making the night and the river and themselves, moving slowly along the budding branches of the glistening trees, extraordinary and mysterious. They walked in silence alongside the flowing river, their footsteps lonely and brave. Three minutes, Noah thought, looking at his shoes, four minutes, five minutes, without talking. He began to grow desperate. There was a sinful intimacy about their silence, an almost tangible longing and tenderness about the echoing sound of their footsteps and the quiet intake of their breath, and the elaborate precautions not to touch each other with shoulder or elbow or hand as they went downhill along the uneven pavement. Silence became the enemy, the betrayer. Another moment of it, he felt, and the quiet girl walking slyly and knowingly beside him would understand everything, as though he had mounted the balustrade that divided street from river and there made an hour-long speech on the subject of love.
"New York City," he said hoarsely, "must be quite frightening to a girl from the country."
"No," she said, "it isn't."
"The truth is," he went on, desperately, "that it is highly overrated. It puts on a big act of being sophisticated and cosmopolitan, but at heart it's unalterably provincial." He smiled, delighted with the "unalterably".
"I don't think so," the girl said.
"What?"
"I don't think it's provincial. Anyway, not after Vermont."
"Oh…" He laughed patronizingly. "Vermont."
"Where have you been?" she asked.
"Chicago," he said. "Los Angeles, San Francisco… All over." He waved vaguely, with a debonair intimation that these were merely the first names that came to mind and that if he had gone through the whole list, Paris, Budapest and Vienna would certainly have been on it.
"I must say, though," he went on, "that New York has beautiful women. A little flashy, but very attractive." Here, he thought with satisfaction, looking at her anxiously, here we have struck the right note. "American women, of course," he said, "are best when they're young. After that…" Once more he tried a shrug and once more he achieved it. "For myself," he said, "I prefer the slightly older Continental type. They are at their best when American women are bridge-playing harpies with spread behinds." He glanced at her a little nervously. But the girl's expression hadn't changed. She had broken off a twig from a bush and was absently running it along the stone fence, as though she were pondering what he had just said. "And by that time, too, a Continental woman has learned how to handle men…" He thought back hurriedly about the foreign women he had known. There was that drunk in the bar the night his father died. It was quite possible that she was Polish. Poland was not a terribly romantic place, but it was on the Continent all right.
"How does a Continental woman learn how to handle men?" the girl asked.
"She learns how to submit," he said. "The women I know say I have a feudal attitude…" Oh, friend, friend at the piano, forgive me for this theft tonight, I will make it up some other time…
After that it flowed freely. "Art," he said. "Art? I can't stand the modern notion that art is mysterious and the artist an irresponsible child."
"Marriage?" he said. "Marriage? Marriage is a desperate admission on the part of the human race that men and women do not know how to live in the same world with each other."
"The theatre," he said, "the American theatre? It has a certain lively, childish quality, but as for taking it seriously as an art form in the twentieth century…" He laughed loftily. "Give me Disney."
After a while they discovered they had walked thirty-four blocks along the dark, sliding river and that it had begun to rain again and that it was late. Standing close to the girl, cupping a match to keep out the wind so that they could see what time it was on his wrist watch, with the small fragrance of the girl's hair mingling with the smell of the river in his nostrils. Noah suddenly decided to be silent. This was too painful, this wild flood of nonsensical talk, this performance of the jaundiced young blood, dilettante and connoisseur.
"It's late," he said abruptly, "we'd better go back to the party."
But he couldn't resist the gesture of hailing a taxi that was cruising slowly past them. It was the first time he had taken a taxi in New York and he stumbled over the little let-down seats, but he felt elegant and master of himself and social life as he sat far away from the girl on the back seat. She sat quietly in the corner. Noah sensed that he had made a strong impression on her and he gave the driver a quarter tip although the entire fare had only been sixty cents.
Once more they stood at the closed door of the house in which he lived. They looked up. The lights were out and no sound of conversation, music or laughter came from behind the closed windows.
"It's over," he said, his heart sinking with the realization that Roger would now be certain he had stolen his girl. "Nobody's there."
"It looks that way, doesn't it?" the girl said placidly.
"What'll we do?" Noah felt trapped.
"I guess you'll have to take me home," the girl said.
Brooklyn, Noah thought, heavily. Hours there and hours back, and Roger waiting accusingly in the dawn light in the disordered room where the party had been so merry, waiting with the curt, betrayed, final dismissal on his lips. The night had started out so wonderfully, so hopefully. He remembered the moment when he had been alone in the apartment waiting for the guests, before Roger had arrived. He remembered the warm expectancy with which he had inspected the shabby, shelf-lined room that had seemed at that moment so friendly and promising.
"Can't you go home alone?" he asked bleakly. He hated her standing there, pretty, a little drab, with the rain wilting on her hair and her clothes.
"Don't you dare talk like that," she said. Her voice was sharp and commanding. "I'm not going home alone. Come on."