and glowing hair, with soft bodies and sweet, attentive voices… They had been brought here for him to choose from and they had smiled at him, full of kindness and invitation. And now, for all of him, they might as well have been six tailor's dummies in a closed store, six numbers on a page, six door-knobs. It could only happen to him, he thought. It was the pattern of his life, grotesque, savagely humorous, essentially tragic.
No, he thought, I will put this away from me. If it shatters me, if I collapse from it, if I never touch a woman as long as I live. But he could not bear to be in the same room with her. He went over to the cupboard in which his clothes hung side by side with Roger's, and got his hat. He would go out and walk around until the party had broken up, the merrymakers dispersed, the piano silent, the girl safe with her aunt beyond the bridge in Brooklyn. His hat was next to Roger's on the shelf and he looked with guilt and tenderness at the rakishly creased old brown felt. Luckily, most of the guests were grouped around the piano and he got to the door unobserved; he would make up some excuse for Roger later. But the girl saw him. She was sitting talking to one of the other girls, facing the door, and an expression of quiet inquiry came into her face as she looked at Noah, standing at the door, taking one last, despairing look at her. She stood up and walked over to him. The rustle of her dress was like artillery in his ears.
'Where are you going?' she asked.
'We… we…' he stuttered, hating himself for the ineptness of his tongue. 'We need some more soda, and I'm going out to get it.'
'I'll go with you,' she said.
'No!' he wanted to shout. 'Stay where you are! Don't move!' But he remained silent and watched her get her coat and a plain, rather unbecoming hat, that made tidal waves of pity and tenderness for her youth and her poverty sweep him convulsively. She went to Roger, sitting at the piano, and leaned over, holding his shoulder, to whisper into his ear. Now, Noah thought, blackly, now it will all be known, now it is over, and he nearly plunged out into the night. But Roger turned and smiled at him, waving with one hand, while still playing the bass with the other. The girl came across the room with her unpretentious walk.
'I told Roger,' she said.
Told Roger? Told him what? Told him to beware of strangers? Told him to pity no one, told him to be generous never, to cut down love in his heart like weed in a garden?
'You'd better take your coat,' the girl said. 'It was raining when we came.'
Stiffly, silently, Noah went over and got his coat. The girl waited at the door and they closed it behind them in the dark hall. The singing and the laughter within sounded far away and forbidden to them as they walked slowly, close together, down the steps to the wet street outside.
'Which way is it?' she asked, as they stood irresolutely with the front door of the house closed behind them.
'Which way is what?' Noah asked, dazedly.
'The soda. The place where you can buy the soda?'
'Oh…' Noah looked distractedly up and down the gleaming pavements. 'Oh. That. I don't know. Anyway,' he said, 'we don't need soda.'
'I thought you said…'
'It was an excuse. I was getting tired of the party. Very tired. Parties bore me.' Even as he spoke, he listened to his voice and was elated at the real timbre of sophistication and weariness with frivolous social affairs that he heard there. That was the way to handle this matter, he decided. With urbanity. Be cool, polite, slightly amused with this little girl…
'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
