The Young Lions

Noah came back into the room. Roger was in the kitchenette getting some ice and the girl was standing in front of the picture on the wall, with her back to Noah. Roger was singing softly over the ice behind the screen, his nasal voice bumbling along on a song he sang over and over again, whose words went: You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy, But, honey, are you makin' any money?

That's all I want to know.

The girl had on a plum-coloured dress with a full skirt that caught the lamplight. She was standing, very serious and at home, with her back to the room, in front of the fireplace. She had pretty, rather heavy legs, and a narrow, graceful waist. Her hair was pulled to the back in a severe, feminine knot, like a pretty schoolteacher in the movies. The sight of her, the sound of ice, his friend's silly, good-humoured song from behind the screen, made the room, the evening, the world, seem wonderfully domestic and dear and melancholy to Noah. Then the girl turned round. Noah had been too busy and excited really to look at her when she first came in and he didn't even remember what her name was. Seeing her now was like looking through a glass that is suddenly brought to focus.

She had a dark, pointed face and grave eyes. Somehow, as he looked at her, Noah felt that he had been hit, physically, by something solid and numbing. He had never felt anything like this before. He felt guilty and feverish and absurd.

Her name, Noah discovered later, was Hope Plowman, and she had come down from a small town in Vermont two years before. She lived in Brooklyn now with an aunt. She had a direct, serious way of talking, and she didn't use perfume and she worked as a secretary to a man who made printing machines in a small factory near Canal Street. Noah felt a little irritated and foolish through the night, as he found out all these things, because it was somehow simple-minded and unworldly to be so riotously overcome by a father ordinary small-town Yankee girl who worked prosaically as a stenographer in a dull office, and who lived in Brooklyn. Like other shy, bookish young men, with their hearts formed in the library, and romance blooming only out of the volumes of poetry stuck in their overcoat pockets, it was impossible to conceive of Isolde taking the Brighton Express, Beatrice at the Automat. No, he thought, as he greeted the new guests and helped with the drinks, no, I am not going to let this happen. Most of all, she was Roger's girl, and even if any girl would desert that handsome, superior man for an awkward, craggy boy like himself, it was inconceivable that he, Noah, could repay the generous acts of friendship even by the hidden duplicity of unspoken desire.

"Miss Plowman," he said, "would you like a drink?"

"No, thank you," she said. "I don't drink."

And he went off into a corner to ponder this and discover whether this was good or bad, hopeful or not.

"Miss Plowman," he said later, "have you known Roger long?"

"Oh, yes. Nearly a year."

Nearly a year! No hope, no hope.

"He's told me a lot about you." The direct, dark gaze, the soft, definite voice.

"What did he say?" How lame, how hungry, how hopeless.

"He likes you very much…"

Treachery, treachery… Friend who snatched the lost waif among the library shelves, who fed and sheltered and loved… Friend now, all thoughtless and laughing, at the centre of the bright group, fingering the piano lightly, singing in the pleasant, intelligent voice, "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho…"

"He said," once more the troubling, dangerous voice… "He said, when you finally woke up you would be a wonderful man…"

Ah, worse and worse, the thief armed with his friend's guarantee, the adulterer given the key to the wife's apartment by the trusting husband.

Noah stared blankly and wearily at the girl. Unreasonably, he hated her. At eight that evening he had been a happy man, secure and hopeful, with friend and home and job, with the past clean behind him, the future shining ahead. At nine he was a bleeding fugitive in an endless swamp, with the dogs baying at him, and a roster of crimes dark against his name on the books of the county. And she was the cause of it, sitting there, demure, falsely candid, pretending she had done nothing, knew nothing, sensed nothing. A little, unpretentious, rock-farm hill girl, who probably sat on her boss's knee in the office of the printing machinery factory near Canal Street, to take dictation.

"… and the walls came tumbling down…" Roger's voice and the strong chords of the old piano against the wall filled the room.

Noah stared wildly away from the girl. There were six other girls in the room, young, with fair complexions 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."