“I’m glad too. I really didn’t take you very seriously when you first promised you’d come. And then after I found out who you were… you must have thought me terribly stupid for not realizing…”
“Oh no. Why should it matter?”
“But it really was inexcusable. I felt so embarrassed when someone told me I’d been talking to Carey Arundel, the movie star…”
Movie star… That was evidently all he knew—even now. “But you were very nice and friendly. I enjoyed our conversation.”
“So long as you’ve forgiven me, Miss Arundel. Because before you leave I’m going to take another liberty if I may.”
“Oh, please. ANYTHING.”
“I’d like you to sign an autograph book for a friend of mine… a little girl—she’s ten—the daughter of the woman who comes in once a day to clean for me. You’ve no idea what it’ll mean to her—and when I tell her Carey Arundel’s actually BEEN here… I hope it isn’t too much to ask?”
She observed him in the faint glow that reflected back from the flashlight and wondered how far he was from reading what was in her mind.
“Of course I’ll do it… and now please stop talking about Carey Arundel. I’m a little bit tired of her and if she doesn’t mend her ways I’ve a good mind to shove her off a cliff… Is there a cliff by the way? I’m sure there must be.”
“Not just here, but you passed some steep ones on the way up. Of course you wouldn’t see them at night. Some people find the road rather frightening.”
“Not me. I love heights… Tell me what you do here.”
“Technically? I don’t think it would interest you very much, though if you really want me to I’ll—”
“No, no, I mean the way you live—are you alone all the time? Do you feel happy? Is there peace of mind on a mountain-top?”
They had reached a cabin the door of which he opened. Suddenly she felt: THIS IS HOME. There was actually a small log-fire burning and it was in the firelight that she saw the room first of all. “It gets chilly at nights even in summer,” he explained; and the warmth was indeed a pleasant thing. A couch, chairs, desk, and radio-gramophone were the main furnishings. No pictures, only a strip of matting on the floor, a few books, a map of the area pinned on the log walls, an old-fashioned telephone. “There’s also a bedroom, bathroom, and a small kitchen,” he said, noticing her interest, but not knowing—how could he know?—that whenever she entered any room (except decorators’ show pieces) her mind made an inventory as if she were looking for something lost from her own life. “Simple, Miss Arundel —primitive, I dare say it seems to you—but good enough for a bachelor… Won’t you sit down? I’ll tell my assistant to have things ready.” He made the call while she watched him. There was a green-shaded lamp he switched on over the desk—it was almost the ugliest lamp she had ever seen, but doubtless in the right position for his work and that was all he cared about.
“So you’re not alone?” she said, when he had hung up.
“He’s a student. He likes to help me on good nights… And you were asking if I’m happy… of course I am. I wouldn’t be up here if I weren’t. I could probably earn more money down below.”
“Sure. That’s where we can all earn more money.”
“You say ‘sure’ like the Irish, not like the Americans.”
“I was born in Ireland.”
“I THOUGHT there was an accent… no, not quite an accent—more a rhythm, a lilt. You can’t lose it, can you? You shouldn’t want to, anyhow. I’m from Wyoming.”
“Cowboys,” she said absently.
“Now that’s odd—because I almost was a cowboy, and it’s still what I’d rather be than anything else—except this. You like horses?”
“Love them. Near where I was born there was the Curragh—that’s the great place for horses.”
“And music? You like music too?”
“Yes. Music and horses and dogs and…”
“Classical music?”
“Yes.”
“Bach?”
Without waiting for a reply he went to the radio-gramophone, saying as he opened it: “We have a few minutes before he gets everything adjusted.” He found a record close to hand. There was something in the way he let down the needle on to the outermost groove that seemed to her one of the most exquisite movements she had ever seen, and the thought came then that Paul would have seen it like that too, would have wanted to shoot it slowly and tenderly, and that Randolph later would have cut the whole scene. “But nothing happens, Saffron! A guy starts a record on a turntable and you let him use up all that footage!”
Nothing happens… They would say that too, doubtless, of the Bach Chorale. The music just goes round and round…
She listened and felt peaceful. The little room, the firelight, Bach… the mountain outside, above the world.
Presently the record ended and he switched off the machine. He made no comment, did not even ask if she had liked it. Perhaps he feared she hadn’t, perhaps he simply didn’t care. He picked up the flashlight, toying with it, as if in hint that they should leave. She looked at him without moving. If only she could stay a while. If only he could grasp how comfortable she was where she was. If only he could guess the kind of reassurance she was seeking.
“Tell me,” she said suddenly. “What’s going to happen?”
“To happen? Where? How… how do you mean?”
“To all of us… That’s a terrible thing to ask, isn’t it? But I thought you might have some professional ideas. Will the world blow itself up one of these days?”
He smiled. “Some popular science writers have said so. I don’t know enough to contradict them.”
“But you do know something about atomic energy—Einstein— all that?”
“Not much, and even if I did it wouldn’t make me a prophet of world affairs. I’m just an astronomer.”
“I wish I knew what you really thought. If people like you don’t give us the benefit of an honest opinion, no wonder we’re all misled by people who aren’t honest.”
“But is there much value in an unqualified person’s opinion? Of course, if you ask, if I think there’ll be a third world war—THAT sort of question—I dare say my guess is no worse than anybody else’s.”
“DO you think there will be?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“And if there is, do you think the world will destroy itself?”
“You mean everything go bang all at once? I doubt that. Possibly there’ll be a breakdown of what we now call civilization.”
“You don’t think the invention of all kinds of horrible weapons will prevent the world from daring to go to war?”
“It never has done before, though that’s no proof that it couldn’t happen.”
“But on the whole you’d stick to your first guess that civilization’s on its way to suicide?”
“I don’t know that I’d put it quite like that—”
“Suicide’s an ugly word, isn’t it? It’s something hardly any of us would do individually—and yet collectively, if we take the road we’ve been warned is fatal, what else can you call it?”
“I get your point, and it’s not the ugliness of the word I’m chary of, it’s the melodrama. If nature abhors a vacuum, I should say that science also abhors a catastrophe. In a sense it’s too EASY to contemplate.”
“I think I know what you mean. Too Jules-Vernal, my husband once said. My first husband,” she corrected herself, and then wondered why it had mattered enough to do so.
He smiled. “Jules-Vernal? Of course, people still believed in progress in those days, so Jules Verne was just a romantic, but today, when every amateur talks calamity at every cocktail party… I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to sound superior.”
“But you probably are superior—that’s why I’m asking you these things. Isn’t there anything we can do—any of us—you— or even me?”
“That again I don’t know. The problem seems to be worrying the best minds in
the world—”
“If they ARE the best. And you’re just an astronomer. So you’ll go on with your work—up here—till the whistle blows?”
“Well, won’t movie people go on making pictures—”
“—and bankers go on making money and lawyers go on filing suits and everyone else go on with whatever they do for a living?”
“Why, yes, I expect they will.”
She said, after a rather tense pause: “You know, professor, it all reminds me of a play I was once in—a dreadful thing which we all realized was dreadful, yet we kept on rehearsing in a sort of hypnotic trance as if we were stuck in a groove of disaster and had to go through with it to the end.”
“What happened?”
“It flopped—just as we’d all known it would.”
“And what do you think could have been done to prevent that?”
“Somebody—maybe me, because I was the star—somebody after the first rehearsal should have said: ‘Are we all crazy?’”
“But if you all were, how would that have helped?”
During the argument his voice had grown colder and more distant, until this last remark was more like an answer in ice, a final verdict, than a question. Then he got up, as if to change both the temperature and the perspective. She still looked at him without moving. If only she could stay a little longer…
She said: “I’m not crazy any more like that. I think I would know now, and warn the others in time… IN TIME, of course, is the whole point. IS there time in the world today? Oh, but there must be. If we need a miracle we must have one. Suppose you were lost in a cave in pitch darkness, would you lie down and die or fumble around to try to find a way out?”
“I’d try to find a way out, because I’d know there was one, since there’d been a way in.”
“But maybe the way out today ISN’T the way in. Perhaps that’s the mistake we’ve been making.” She broke off with a bemused smile. “I don’t know why I suddenly feel so optimistic. Could it be the altitude? How high is it here?”
He smiled also. “Five thousand seven hundred feet. And that reminds me of something somebody once said—Chesterton, I think—about the difference between the mathematician and the poet. The mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head, the poet tries to get his head into the heavens… But here, you see, even without being a poet…”
“I have a stepson who’s neither and yet he tries to do both,” she interrupted. The word ‘stepson’, which she could not recall using before about Norris, threw her like a fluffed line in a play, so that she went on, less securely: “He had an idea to study medicine and go out to some tropical island and doctor the natives. No particular reason except that he thought he’d rather do it than anything else.”
“Then he should. That’s one of the best reasons for doing anything.”
“I’m so glad to hear you say that.”
He was looking at his watch. “I think everything will be ready by now… Oh, but before we go—I mustn’t forget.” He pulled open the drawer and found the little girl’s autograph book. He was the naďve one now, warmer and closer. “Her first name’s Milly—she left it for me to write in, but when she finds your name too…” He offered his pen.
“Why, of course.” She took the book and wrote in it: “For Milly from Carey Arundel with love. ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.’” And the date.
“It’s really most kind of you to take the trouble, Miss Arundel.”
“Oh no. No trouble at all. I wish it were always as easy to give a little pleasure.”
Then he saw what she had written. She could see it startled him. “That’s… that’s very nice. But I’ll have to explain it to her, won’t I?”
“You can show her the label on the record and say you played it here tonight and I wanted to do something, somehow, so that it shouldn’t ever be forgotten.”
“_I_ wouldn’t have forgotten… Shall we walk over now?”
* * * * *
He guided her again by flashlight along the pathway that led across the rounded hump of the mountain-top to the Observatory. The huge aluminium structure glistened dimly as they approached it. He began to talk about what she would presently see, and after she had met his assistant (a good-looking youth named Christianson) his manner became progressively more impersonal. It was doubtless the same little lecture he had given to countless other visitors—terse, elementary, decked out with a few simple-minded witticisms. He even perpetrated the most obvious of all—“A star come to look at the stars,” he told Christianson. It was all Miss Arundel this and Miss Arundel that, but she knew that in a truer sense his politeness and admiration stopped short of real concern; she was just a charming inhabitant of a lower world who earned as much in a week as he did in a year; AND HE DID NOT CARE. Out of sheer kindness he would have done as much for her, perhaps more, had she been Mrs. Anybody from Anywhere.
When they left, after an hour or so, he asked if she would like some coffee, but she felt he hoped she would decline; she had heard Christianson locking up as they walked away, and it occurred to her that probably they would both go to bed as soon as she had gone.
Christianson caught up with them as they reached the parking lot. It was about a quarter to four. He said: “It’s almost dawn. You’ll see the sunrise before you’re home. Wouldn’t you rather have the top up? It’ll be chilly.”
“No, I like it open. I’ll wear this extra coat.”
Lingard helped her on with it. “What a beautiful car! You should hear my old jalopy wheezing and sputtering when I bring it up here… Mind how you take the curves.”
She put out her hand. “It’s been so nice, professor. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed it.”
“The firmament or the argument?”
“Both. And Bach too. Now THERE’S a man who had his head in the heavens.”
“Yes, and didn’t do too badly on earth either. I think he had twenty children.” He laughed and turned to Christianson. “I played my favourite record for Miss Arundel while we were waiting. The Chorale.”
She laughed back as she answered: “Why, of course, THAT’S why I feel optimistic. Bach abhors a catastrophe too… Twenty, did he? How wonderful!… And please, professor, do give me a ring when you come down to earth—either of you, or both of you—I’m probably going away fairly soon, so don’t leave it too long… Oh dear, I’m not in the book —I’d better give you my number.”
She began fishing in her purse, but he said: “Just tell it to me. I can always remember numbers.”
“You’re sure you can? It’s Excelsior 16641.”
“That’s easy. Happens to be the square of 129… Good night, Miss Arundel. And thanks again for the autographing.”
“Good night… Good morning, rather. Goodbye, Mr. Christianson.”
* * * * *
She started the car and drove away. What she intended to do was not even then quite clear in her mind; final decision, like Paul’s, might come by chance or caprice, some lightning alchemy of time or place. The music, like the road, like something in her own head, went round and round—and who would have thought that 16641 was the square of 129? That revelation, with all its hint of things hidden before one’s own eyes, made some mental link with the look of emptiness as she turned the downhill corners; it was almost dawn, but the sky seemed blacker, far more abysmal than on the way up. No doubt cars had met with accidents or near-accidents on this road before; the headlights showed up the scuffs on the guard-rails. No guard-rails on the road over the Sally Gap, where she had driven once with her mother and Fitzpomp in an old-fashioned horse-drawn wagonette—skies cloudy-clear, mountains blue-green in the sun-shadow, no talk of trouble in those days, so it must have been before the Easter Rebellion; that would make her eleven years old or less. Poor little Fitzpomp with his asthma pills and Gaelic verbs and the muscle-building machine. Those walks with him, her little-girl’s hand in his, sometimes through the fields beside the Dodder, or along the Blessington road where the
steam tram tooted a greeting as it passed… and then the final scene, obliterating all others when she let herself think of it… the house in Terenure that Sunday morning, poor little Fitzpomp, leaving her that letter… unwilling for her to think (even if she could) that it was all a mishap—unwilling to quit the play without the fullest value of an exit. And the quote from Seneca—the stoic quote—“One cannot complain of life, for it keeps no one against his will “. Perhaps, though, if one had acted professionally in life, one could more easily resist that last temptation—as a good actor will sometimes, for the sheer selflessness of it, take his leave as unmemorably as he can. Or perhaps if one had (to use Paul’s phrase) a ready-made audience for the next thing one did, no matter what it was, one could choose that next thing, no matter what it was, with some deep regard for others… Poor Fitzpomp, with no ready-made audience at all… She saw in passing that at one point the guard-rail was broken; maybe some car had actually gone through. She thought of the crash, the curving fall, the few seconds of being almost airborne… she remembered a scene like that in a movie, a car upturned at the foot of a cliff, its occupants dead, but a radio freakishly undamaged, and music—dance music—going round and round… She switched on her own car radio. Sure enough, dance music. Then, after a moment, an early morning news bulletin… Berlin… President Truman… the Iron Curtain… a sentence that made her laugh aloud. “Mother Nature went on a rampage yesterday in our nation’s capital.” How Paul would enjoy that. Mother Nature went on a rampage. She had always had far more time for radio listening than he, and had gathered these flowers whenever she chanced on them and offered them to him like nosegays. She must remember that one, if… if, that is, she ever saw him again. Then suddenly she heard his name.
* * * * *
As soon as she realized he was at that moment quite probably in jail, she felt cool, rather indignant, and also very slightly amused. Apparently no one had been hurt, just a few fenders dented, it was not a serious case. But she was indignant because she knew he could not have been drunk; he never did drink too much, he had got over all his excesses in youth, he always said contemptuously, but that of course did not include his central excess of being exactly what he was. She could imagine that this might be what had caused the trouble with the police. It had been the same, once, in New York —and then there had been that more serious trouble in London, when only the judge had finally believed him. He would certainly not have been at his best on his way home from that Critics’ Dinner.