Chapter XI: Part 11

“That’s what she wants to know. How you are. She gave me hell because I hadn’t been over to check up. Tell me a few details so I can square myself tomorrow when I talk to her.” Maxwell’s skinny leg hung loosely on his knee. The strong arch of his nose kept its slender tip from faltering, but his cheeks fell away in unashamed gulleys. A pompadour of graying hair offset his cadaverousness, and the humor lines around his mouth looked as if they might have been put there by off-color stories. Washington editor for _Everett’s_ since 1915, Maxwell had hired Janice as a novice, taken her past the brass knockers into the big houses, and introduced her to Congress, Senator by Senator, over a series of whiskeys and sodas. For about a year she was “Fred’s girl.” Then they stopped seeing each other until Arthur moved down. Maxwell liked Bemrose the minute he met him and had hung around ever since.

“Fred is a bachelor, the lucky stiff,” Arthur told Larry. “They tell me he’s hell with women, but he’s always been too smart----”

“Too smart is right. I thought I was better off single. But lately I’ve found out there is a catch in this business of having your freedom. I didn’t figure out some of the other ways a man can be tied down. Guess how many nights a week I have off.” He held up a finger. “One.”

“Fred lives with his sister, and she hasn’t been well,” Arthur said.

“Cancer. It hit her a year ago,” Maxwell explained. “The doctor gives her another eight months. I go out the one night, and they phone me when she has pain and can’t stand it alone.”

Larry nodded his sympathy, and Arthur said, “I suppose there was a time when you thought about getting married----”

“About ten years ago was the last time, when Janice and I went around together. But I decided that I didn’t want to be tied down. I didn’t marry any of the others for the same reason. With Janice, I knew it was probably the last time I’d consider it. Getting too old.”

Larry found it difficult to tune in sharply on what Fred Maxwell was saying. He kept thinking of Janice. Almost everything in the room reminded him of her--the licks of shadow on the ceiling, the ink spot on the leather top of her desk, a mess of papers under her Chinese bronze weight, her uncovered typewriter, and the wall of ragged bindings piled crazily to fill the bookshelves. He found himself believing that she was out on a late assignment. She’d come in dead beat any minute and ask for a cup of coffee or for some of the brandy.

“It’s fellows like me who get hooked,” Maxwell said. “The kind who know all the answers. We feel good about ducking responsibility. Then, when we’re too old, we wake up and find that everything else has passed us by, too. That place of mine is a hospital, a morgue. Do you know the fellows I envy? The plodding Joes who took responsibilities when I was busy making fun of them and have some swell kids to show for it today. I’m the big freedom guy. Only freedom’s caught up with me. It was an illusion anyway, and it didn’t last. If I had it to do over again, I would have married a dumb little girl when I was twenty-five, the kind who believed me when I told her that I had to work a couple of nights a week.”

“Wouldn’t Janice have let you out?” Bemrose asked.

“She was never that dumb.” Maxwell tapped the table with the bowl of his meerschaum pipe. “After fifty-three years I know my limit with a woman,” he said. “It’s six months. I’d have done fine with the right kind of wife. I’d have had a home today, not a hospital, and on the side I’d have had enough variety.”

“To six months with a woman!” Bemrose lifted his glass.

“To Janice.” Maxwell altered the toast. “Why don’t you stop kidding around, Bemrose? Why don’t you get a divorce and marry her? By the way, how are you feeling? If I know Janice, she’ll have me on the phone first thing in the morning. Your symptoms are going to cost _Everett’s_ plenty.”

“He hasn’t any symptoms,” Larry said. “Have you?”

“You can tell her I have a cold feeling of anger when I fall over the bedroom slippers she forgot to put in her closet.”

“You should hear Bess,” Larry said. “She’s furious that Janice left you in the house alone. She thinks it’s an outrage----”

“Who’s Bess?” Maxwell asked.

“My wife.”

“Well, you tell Bess that the readers of _Everett’s_ would be outraged if this fellow made a housekeeper of her.”

“How long before the invasion?” Bemrose asked suddenly.

“Six months to a year,” Maxwell said.

“But I thought----”

“Sure, I know. So does everyone else. That’s why all those correspondents are sitting over there. There are enough of them in England to sink the damned island. They could come over here and get back again half a dozen times before anything happens.”

“Then she could come home and get back?” Larry said.

“Why don’t you hang around the office tomorrow morning and talk to her when she phones?” Fred asked Arthur, his ghostly face coming to life. “Tell her that you’ve thought about it and you don’t want her to go in on the first wave. You don’t think it’s safe.”

“I’m not sure I want her to go in at all,” said Bemrose, his jaw set obstinately.

“That’s no way to get her to say ‘yes,’” Maxwell advised. “How about it? Do you want to come down tomorrow and talk to her on the phone?”

Silently Bemrose quizzed Larry.

“Maybe he’d rather cable her,” Larry suggested. “The connection might not be good, and she might not be able to hear him over the phone.”

“Larry’s right. I think I’d rather cable,” Arthur said gratefully.

He found a lined yellow pad on Janice’s desk, and rolled a sheet of paper into her typewriter. Deliberately his fingers tackled the keys. “Take it down for me, will you?” He folded the message and handed it to Larry. “When you get there, you can read it.”

At the corner of the dark, cool street, Larry disregarded the blackout and struck a match. He held its flame close to the message.

MAXWELL SAYS YOU HAVE TIME COME HOME
MARRY ME WILL YOU TAKE RISK LOVE
ARTHUR BEMROSE

Although Larry knew it was one of the last errands he was going to do for Bemrose, he didn’t feel any special regret. He wasn’t even sorry about giving up an old habit. He saw the trolley coming, and stepped briskly into the street to signal it.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Italization and accent marks were standardized.

The name of the painter Brueghel was standardized.

Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following changes:

Page 73: “er great-grandfather had” “Her great-grandfather had”
Page 94: “want and pro-Vichy talk” “want any pro-Vichy talk”