The Trip

Friday afternoon about four o'clock, the week's work done, time to kill: The editor disliked this characterless hour when everyone except his secretary had left the building. Into his briefcase he had slipped some notes for a short talk he was going to give in a cheap London hall, worn by two generations of protest against this injustice or that, before he left by the night plane for Copenhagen. There his real lecture tour would begin and turn into a short holiday. Like a bored card player, he sat shuffling his papers and resented that there was no one except his rude, hard-working secretary to give him a game.

The only company he had in his room--and, in a way, it was a rather moody friend--was his portrait hanging behind him on the wall. He liked cunningly to draw people to say something reassuring about the picture: It was "terribly good," as the saying is; he wanted to hear them say he lived up to it. There was for him a strange air of rivalry in it. It rather overdid him. There he was, a handsome mixture of sunburned, satyrlike pagan and shady, jealous Christian saint under the happy storm of white hair. His hair had been gray at 30; at 47, by a stroke of luck, it was silken white. His face was an actor's, the nose carved for dramatic occasions, the lips for the public platform. It was a face both elated and ravaged by the highest beliefs and doubts. He was energized by meeting it in the morning and, enviously, he said goodbye to it at night. Its nights would be less tormented than his own. Now he was leaving it to run the paper in his absence.

"Here are your tickets." His secretary breezed into the room. "Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich--the lot," she said. She was mannerless to the point of being a curiosity.

She stepped away and wobbled her tongue in her cheek. She understood his restless state. She adored him, he drove her mad and she longed for him to go.

"Would you like to know what I've got outside?" she said. She had a malicious streak. "A lady. A lady from Guatemala. Miss Mendoza. She has got a present for you. She worships you. I said you were busy. Shall I tell her to buzz off?"

The editor was proud of his tolerance in employing a girl so sportive and so familiar; her fair hair was thin and looked harassed, her spotty face set off the knowledge of his own handsomeness in face and behavior. He liked the state of war between them.

"Guatemala! Of course, I must see her!" he exclaimed. "What are you thinking about? We ran three articles on Guatemala. Show her in."

"It's your funeral," said the girl and gave a vulgar click with her tongue. The editor was, in her words, "a sucker for foreigners"; she was reminding him that the world was packed with native girls like herself as well.

All kinds of men and women came to see Macaulay Drood. Politicians, who spoke to him as if he were a meeting, quarreling writers, people with causes, cranks and accusers, even criminals and the mad: They were opinions to him and he did not often notice what they were like. He knew they studied him and that they would go away boasting, "I saw Macaulay Drood today and he said...." Still, he had never seen anyone quite like the one who now walked in. At first, because of her tweed hat, he thought she was a man and would have said she had a mustache. She was a stump, as square as a box, with tarry choppedoff hair, heavy eyebrows and yellow eyes set in her sallow skin like cut glass. She looked like cut glass. She looked like some unsexed and obdurate statement about the future--or was it the beginning?--of the human race, long in the body, short in the legs and made of wood. She was wearing on this hot day a thick, bottle-green velvet dress. Indian blood, obviously; he had seen such women in Mexico. She put out a wide hand to him; it could have held a shovel; in fact, she was carrying a crumpled brown-paper bag.

"Please sit down," he said. A pair of heavy feet moved her with a surprisingly light skip to a chair. She sat down stiffly then and stared without expression, like geography.

"I know you are a very busy man," she said. "Thank you for sparing a minute for an unknown person." She looked formidably unknown.

The words were nothing; but the voice! He had expected Spanish or broken English of some grating kind, but instead, he heard the small, whispering birdlike monotone of a shy English child.

"Yes, I am very busy," he said. "I've got to give a talk in an hour and then I'm off to lecture in Copenhagen.... What can I do for you?"

"Copenhagen!" she said, noting it.

"Yes, yes, yes," said the editor. "I'm lecturing on apartheid."

There are people who listen; there are people upon whom anything said seems not to be heard but, rather, to be stamped or printed. She was receiving the impress of the walls, the books, the desk, the carpet, the windows of the room, memorizing every object. At last, like a breathless child, she said: "In Guatemala, I have dreamed of this for years. I've been saying to myself, 'Even if I could just see the building where it all happens!' I didn't dare think I would be able to speak to Macaulay Drood. It is like a dream to me. 'If I see him, I will tell him,' I said, 'what this building and what his articles have done for my country.' "

"It's a bad building. Too small," he said. "We're thinking of selling it."

"Oh, no," she said. "I have flown across the ocean to see it. And to thank you."

The word thank came out like a kiss.

"From Guatemala, to thank me?" The editor smiled.

"To thank you from the bottom of our hearts for those articles." The little voice seemed to sing.

"So people read The Instigator in Guatemala," said the editor, congratulating that country and moving a few papers onto another pile on his desk.

"Only a few," she said. "The important few. You have kept us alive in all these dark years. You have held the torch of freedom burning. You have been a beacon of civilization in our darkness."

The editor sat taller in his chair. Certainly he was vain, but he was a good man: Virtue is not often rewarded. A nationalist? Or not? he wondered. He looked at the ceiling, where, as usual--for he knew everything--he found the main items of the Guatemalan situation. He ran over them like a tune on the piano. "Financial colonialism," he said, "foreign monopoly, uprooted peasants, rise of nationalism, the dilemma of the mountain people, the problem of the coast. Bananas."

"It is years since I've eaten one," he said.

The woman's yellow eyes were not looking at him directly yet: She was still memorizing the room and her gaze now moved to his portrait. He was dabbling with the figures of the single-crop problem when she interrupted him.

"The women of Guatemala," she said, addressing his portrait, "will never be able to repay their debt to you."

"The women?"

He could not remember; was there anything about women in those articles?

"It gave us hope. 'Now,' I said, 'the world will listen,' " she said. "We are slaves. Man-made laws, the priests, bad traditions hold us down. We are the victims of apartheid, too."

And now, she looked directly at him.

"Ah," said the editor, for interruptions bored him. "Tell me about that."

"I know from experience," said the woman. "My father was Mexican, my mother was an English governess. I know what she suffered."

"And what do you do?" said the editor. "I gather you are not married?"

At this sentence, the editor saw that something like a coat of varnish glistened on the woman's wooden face.

"Not after what I saw of my mother's life. There were ten of us. When my father had to go away on business, he locked her and all of us in the house. She used to shout for help from the window, but no one did anything. People just came down the street and stood outside and stared and then walked away. She brought us up. She was worn out. When I was fifteen, he came home drunk and beat her terribly. She was used to that, but this time she died."

"What a terrible story. Why didn't she go to the consul? Why--"

"He beat her because she had dyed her hair. She had fair hair and she thought if she dyed her hair black like the other women he went with, he would love her again," said the childish voice.

"Because she dyed her hair?" said the editor.

The editor never really listened to astonishing stories of private life. They seemed frivolous to him. What happened publicly in the modern world was far more extravagant. So he only half listened to this tale. Quickly, whatever he heard turned into paragraphs about something else and moved on to general questions. He was wondering if Miss Mendoza had the vote and which party she voted for. Was there an Indian bloc? He looked at his watch. He knew how to appear to listen, to charm, ask a jolly question and then lead his visitors to the door before they knew the interview was over.

"It was a murder," said the woman complacently.

The editor suddenly woke up to what she was saying.

"But you are telling me she was murdered!" he exclaimed.

She nodded. The fact seemed of no further interest to her. She was pleased (continued on page 164) The Trip(continued from page 96) she had made an impression. She picked up her paper bag and out of it she pulled a tin of biscuits and put it on his desk.

"I have brought you a present," she said, "with the gratitude of the women of Guatemala. It is Scottish shortbread. From Guatemala." She smiled proudly at the oddity of this fact. "Open it."

"Shall I open it? Yes. I will. Let me offer you one," he humored her.

"No," she said. "They are for you."

Murder. Biscuits, he thought. She is mad.

The editor opened the tin and took out a biscuit and began to nibble. She watched his teeth as he bit; once more, she was memorizing what she saw. She was keeping watch. Just as he was going to get up and make a last speech to her, she put out a short arm and pointed to his portrait.

"That is not you," she pronounced. Having made him eat, she was now in command of him.

"But it is," he said. "I think it is very good. Don't you?"

"It is wrong," she said.

"Oh." He was offended, and that brought out his saintly look.

"There is something missing," she said. "Now I have seen you, I know what it is."

She got up.

"Don't go," said the editor. "Tell me what you miss. It was in the Academy, you know."

He was beginning to think now she was a fortuneteller.

"I am a poet," she said. "I see vision in you. I see a leader. That picture is the picture of two people, not one. But you are one man. You are a god to us. You understand that apartheid exists for women, too."

She held out her prophetic hand. The editor switched to his wise, pagan look and his sunny hand held hers.

"May I come to your lecture this evening?" she said. "I asked your secretary about it."

"Of course, of course, of course. Yes, yes, yes," he said and walked with her to the outer door of the office. There they said goodbye. He watched her march away slowly, on her thick legs, like troops.

The editor went into the secretary's room. The girl was putting the cover on her typewriter.

"Do you know," he said, "that woman's father killed her mother because she dyed her hair?"

"She told me. You copped something there, didn't you? What d'you bet me she doesn't turn up in Copenhagen tomorrow two rows from the front?" the rude girl said.

• • •

She was wrong. Miss Mendoza was in the fifth row at Copenhagen. He had not noticed her at the London talk and he certainly had not seen her on the plane; but there she was, looking squat, simple and tarry among the tall fair Danes. The editor had been puzzled to know who she was--for he had a poor visual memory; for him, people's faces merged into the general plain lineaments of the convinced. But he did become aware of her when he got down from the platform and when she stood, well planted, on the edge of the small circle where his white head was bobbing to people who were asking him questions. She listened, turning her head possessively and critically to each questioner, and then to him, expectantly. She nodded with reproof at the questioner, when he replied. She owned him. Closer and closer she came, into the inner circle. He was aware of a smell like nutmeg. She was beside him. She had a long envelope in her hand. The chairman was saying to him:

"I think we should take you to the party now." Then people went off in three cars. There she was at the party.

"We have arranged for your friend...." said the host. "We have arranged for you to sit next to your friend."

"Which friend?" the editor began. Then he saw her, sitting beside him. The Dane lit a candle before them. Her skin took on, in the editor's surprised eye, the gleam of an idol. He was bored: He liked new women to be beautiful when he was abroad.

"Haven't we met somewhere?" he said. "Oh, yes, I remember. You came to see me. Are you on holiday here?"

"No," she said. "I drink at the fount." He imagined she was taking the waters.

"Fount?" said the editor, turning to others at the table. "Are there many spas here?" He was no good at metaphors.

He forgot her and was talking to the company. She said no more during the evening, until she left with the other guests, but he could hear her deep breath beside him.

"I have a present for you," she said before she went, giving him the envelope.

"More biscuits?" he said waggishly.

"It is the opening canto of my poem," she said.

"I'm afraid," said the editor, "we rarely publish poetry."

"It is not for publication. It is dedicated to you."

And she went off.

"Extraordinary," said the editor, watching her go; and, appealing to his hosts, "That woman gave me a poem."

He was put out by their polite, knowing laughter. It often puzzled him when people laughed.

The poem went into his pocket and he forgot it until he got to Stockholm. She was standing at the door of the lecture hall there as he left. He said: "We seem to be following each other around."

And to a minister who was wearing a white tie: "Do you know Miss Mendoza from Guatemala? She is a poet," and escaped while they were bowing.

Two days later, she was at his lecture in Oslo. She had moved to the front row. He saw her after he had been speaking for a quarter of an hour. He was so irritated that he stumbled over his words. A rogue phrase had jumped into his mind--"murdered his wife"--and his voice, always high, went up one more semitone and he very nearly told the story. Some ladies in the audience were propping a cheek on their forefinger as they leaned their heads to regard his profile. She had her hands in her lap. He made a scornful gesture at his audience: He had remembered what was wrong. It had nothing to do with murder: He had simply forgotten to read her poem.

Poets, the editor knew, were remorseless. The one sure way of getting rid of them was to read their poems at once. They stared at you with pity and contempt as you read and argued with offense when you told them which lines you admired. He decided to face her. After the lecture, he went up to her.

"How lucky," he said. "I thought you said you were going to Hamburg. Where are you staying? Your poem is on my conscience."

"Yes?" the small girl's voice said. "When will you come and see me?"

"I'll ring you up," he said, drawing back.

"I'm going to hear you in Berlin," she said with meaning.

The editor considered her: There was a look of magnetized, inhuman committal in her eyes. They were not so much looking at him as reading him. She knew his future.

Back in the hotel, he read the poem. The message was plain. It began:

I have seen the liberatorThe foe of servitudeThe godhead.

He read on, skipping two pages, and put out his hand for the telephone. First he heard a childish intake of breath, then the small determined voice. He smiled at the instrument; he told her in a forgiving voice how good the poem was. The breathing became heavy, like the sound of the ocean. She was steaming or flying to him across the Caribbean, across the Atlantic.

"You have understood my theme," she said. "Women are history. I am the history of my country."

She went on and boredom settled on him. His cultivated face turned to stone.

"Yes, yes. I see. Isn't there an old Indian belief that a white god will come (continued on page 211)The Trip(continued from page 164) from the East to liberate the people? Extraordinary, quite extraordinary. When you get back to Guatemala, you must go on with it."

"I am doing it now. In my room," she said. "You are my inspiration. I've been working every night since I saw you."

"Shall I post this copy to your hotel in Berlin?" he said.

"No, give it to me when we meet there."

"Berlin!" the editor exclaimed. Without thinking, without realizing what he was saying, the editor said: "But I'm not going to Berlin. I'm going back to London at once."

"When?" said the woman's voice. "Could I come and talk to you now?"

"I'm afraid not. I'm leaving in half an hour," said the editor. Only when he put the telephone receiver back did the editor realize that he was sweating and that he had told a lie. He had lost his head. Worse, in Berlin, if she were there, he would have to invent another lie.

It was worse than that. When he got to Berlin, she was not there. It was perverse of him--but he was alarmed. He was ashamed: The shadiness of the saint replaced the pagan on his handsome face; indeed, on the race question, after his lecture, a man in the audience said he was evasive.

But in Hamburg, at the end of the week, her voice spoke up from the back of the hall: "I would like to ask the great man, who has filled all our hearts this evening, whether he does not think that the worst racists are the oppressors and deceivers of women."

She delivered her blow and sat down, disappearing behind the shoulders of bulky German men.

The editor's clever smiles went; he jerked back his heroic head as if he had been shot; he balanced himself by touching the table with the tips of his fingers. He lowered his head and drank a glass of water, splashing it on his tie. He looked for help.

"My friends," he wanted to say, "that woman is following me. She has followed me all over Scandinavia and Germany. I had to tell a lie to escape from her in Berlin. She is pursuing me. She is writing a poem. She is trying to force me to read it. She murdered her father--I mean, her father murdered her mother. She is mad. Someone must get me out of this."

But he pulled himself together and sank to that point of desperation to which the mere amateurs and hams of public speaking sink.

"A good question," he said. Two irreverent laughs came from the audience, probably from the American or English colony. He had made a fool of himself again. Floundering, he at last fell back on one of those drifting historical generalizations that so often rescued him. He heard his voice sailing into the 18th Century, throwing in Rousseau, gliding on to Tom Paine and The Rights of Man.

"Is there a way out of the back of this hall?" he said to the chairman afterward. "Could someone keep an eye on that woman? She is following me."

They got him out by a back door.

At his hotel, a poem was slipped under his door.

Suckled on RousseauStrong in the divine message ofNatureClasp Guatemala in your arms.

"Room 363" was written at the end. She was staying at the same hotel! He rang down to the desk, said he would receive no calls and demanded to be put on the lowest floor, close to the main stairs and near the exit. Safe in his new room, he changed the time of his flight to Munich.

There was a note for him at the desk. "Miss Mendoza left this for you," said the clerk, "when she left for Munich this morning."

Attached to the note was a poem. It began:

Ravenous in the long night of thecenturiesI waited for my liberatorHe shall not escape me.

His hand was shaking as he tore up the note and the poem and made for the door. The page boy came running after him with the receipt for his bill, which he had left on the desk.

The editor was a well-known man. Reporters visited him. He was often recognized in hotels. People spoke his name aloud when they saw it on passenger lists. Cartoonists were apt to lengthen his neck when they drew him, for they had caught his habit of stretching it at parties or meetings, hoping to see and be seen.

But not on the flight to Munich. He kept his hat on and lowered his chin. He longed for anonymity. He had a sensation he had not had for years, not, indeed, since the pre-thaw years in Russia: that he was being followed, not simply by one person but by dozens. Who were all those passengers on the plane? Had those two men in raincoats been at his hotel?

He made for the first cab he saw at the airport. At the hotel, he went to the desk.

"Mr. and Mrs. Macaulay Drood," the clerk said. "Yes. Four-fifteen. Your wife has arrived."

"My wife!" In any small group, the actor in him woke up. He turned from the clerk to a stranger standing at the desk beside him and gave a yelp of hilarity. "But I am not married." The stranger drew away. The editor turned to a couple also standing there. "I'm saying I am not married," he said. He turned about to see if he could gather more listeners.

"This is ludicrous," he said. No one was interested and loudly to the clerk he said: "Let me see the register. There is no Mrs. Drood."

The clerk put on an embarrassed but worldly look, to soothe any concern about the respectability of the hotel in the people who were waiting. But there, on the card, in her writing, were the words: Mr. and Mrs. M. Drood--London.

The editor turned dramatically to the group.

"A forgery!" he cried. He laughed, inviting all to join the comedy. "A woman traveling under my name."

The clerk and the strangers turned away. In travel, one can rely on there being one mad Englishman everywhere.

The editor's face darkened when he saw he had exhausted human interest.

"Four-fifteen. Baggage," called the clerk. A young porter came up quick as a lizard and picked up the editor's bags.

"Wait. Wait," said the editor. Before a young man so smoothly uniformed, he had the sudden sensation of standing there with most of his clothes off. When you arrived at the Day of Judgment, there would be some worldly youth, humming a tune you didn't know the name of, carrying not only your sins but your virtues indifferently in a couple of bags and gleaming with concealed knowledge.

"I have to telephone," the editor said.

"Over there," said the young man as he put the bags down. The editor did not walk to the telephone but to the main door of the hotel. He considered the freedom of the street. The sensible thing to do was to leave the hotel at once, but he knew that the woman would be at his lecture that night. He would have to settle the matter once and for all now. So he turned back to the telephone cabin. It stood there empty, like a trap. He walked past it. He hated the glazed, whorish, hypocritically impersonal look of telephone cabins. They were always unpleasantly warmed by random emotions left behind in them. He turned back; the thing was still empty. "Surely," he wanted to address the people coming and going in the foyer, "someone wants to telephone?" It was wounding that not one person there was interested in his case. It was as if he had written an article that no one had read. Even the porter had gone. His two bags rested against the desk. He and they had ceased to be news.

He began to walk up and down quickly, but this stirred no one. He stopped in every observable position, not quite ignored now, because his handsome hair always made people turn.

The editor silently addressed them. "You've entirely missed the point of my position. Everyone knows, who has read what I have written, that I am opposed on principle to the whole idea of marriage. That is what makes this woman's behavior so ridiculous. To think of getting married in a world that is in one of the most ghastly phases of its history is puerile."

He gave a short sarcastic laugh. The audience was indifferent.

The editor went into the telephone cabin and, leaving the door open for all to hear, he rang her room.

"Macaulay Drood," he said brusquely.

"It is important that I should see you at once, privately, in your room."

He heard her breathing. The way the human race thought it was enough if they breathed. Ask an important question and what happens? Breath. Then he heard the small voice: It made a splashing, confusing sound.

"Oh," it said. And more breath. "Yes."

The two words were the top of a wave that is about to topple and come thumping over onto the sand and then draws back with a long, insidious hiss.

"Please," she added. And the word was the long, thirsty hiss.

The editor was surprised that his brusque manner was so wistfully treated. "Good heavens," he thought, "she is in that room." And because she was invisible, and because of the distance of the wire between them, he felt she was pouring down it, headfirst, mouth open, swamping him. When he put the telephone down, he scratched his ear; a piece of her seemed to be coiled there. The editor's ear had heard passion. And passion at its dramatic climax.

He had often heard of passion. He had often been told of it. He had often read about it. He had seen it in opera. He had friends--who usually came to him for advice--who were entangled in it. He had never felt it and he did not feel it now; but when he walked from the telephone cabin to the lift, he saw his role had changed. The woman was not a mere nuisance--she was something like Tosca. The pagan became doggish, the saint furtive as he entered the lift.

"Ah," the editor burst out aloud to the liftman, "les femmes." The German did not understand French.

The editor got out of the lift and, passing one watchful white door after another, came to 415. He knocked twice: When there was no answer, he opened the door.

He seemed to blunder into an invisible wall of spice and scent and stepped back, thinking he had made a mistake. A long-legged rag doll with big blue eyes looked at him from the bed, a half-unpacked suitcase was on the floor with curious clothes hanging out of it. A woman's shoes were tipped out on the sofa.

And then, standing by a small desk, where she had been writing, stood Miss Mendoza. Or. rather, the bottle-green dress, the boxlike figure were Miss Mendoza's; the head was not. Her hair was no longer black; it was golden. The idol's head had been chopped off and was replaced by a woman's. There was no expression on the face until the shock on the editor's face sent shock to hers, then a searching look of horror seized her, and then of being caught in an outrage. She lowered her head, suddenly cowed and frightened. She quickly grabbed a stocking she had left on the bed and held it behind her back.

"You are angry with me," she said, holding her head down like an obstinate child.

"You are in my room. You have no right to be here. I am very angry with you. What do you mean by registering in my name--apart from anything else, it is illegal. You known that, don't you? I must ask you to go or I shall have to take steps...."

Her head was still lowered. Perhaps he ought not to have said the last sentence. The blonde hair made her look pathetic.

"Why did you do this?"

"Because you would not see me," she said. "You have been cruel to me."

"But don't you realize, Miss Mendoza, what you are doing? I hardly know you. You have followed me all over Europe; you have badgered me. You take my room. You pretend to be my wife...."

"Do you hate me?" she muttered.

Damn, thought the editor, I ought to have changed my hotel at once.

"I know nothing about you," he said.

"Don't you want to know about me? What I am like? I know everything about you," she said, raising her head.

The editor was confused by the rebuke. His fit of acting passed. He looked at his watch.

"A reporter is coming to see me in half an hour," he said.

"I shall not be in the way," she said. "I will go out."

"You will go out!" said the editor. Then he understood where he was going wrong. He had--perhaps being abroad, addressing meetings, speaking to audiences with only one mass face had done this--forgotten how he dealt with difficult people.

He pushed the shoes to one end of the sofa to find himself a place. One shoe fell to the floor, but after all, it was his room, he had a right to sit in it.

"Miss Mendoza, you are ill," he said.

She looked down quickly at the carpet.

"I am not," she said.

"You are ill and, I think, very unhappy." He put on his wise voice.

"No," she said in a low voice. "Happy. You are talking to me."

"You are a very intelligent woman," he said. "And you will understand what I am going to say. Gifted people like yourself are very vulnerable. You live in the imagination and that exposes one. I know that."

"Yes," she said. "You see all the injustices of the world. You bleed from them."

"I? Yes," said the editor with his saint's smile. But he recovered from the flattery. "I am saying something else. Your imagination is part of your gift as a poet, but in real life, it has deluded you."

"It hasn't done that. I see you as you are."

"Please sit down," said the editor. He could not bear her standing over him. "Close the window, there is too much noise."

She obeyed. The editor was alarmed to see the zipper of her dress was half undone and he could see the top of some garment with ominous lace on it. He could not bear untidy women. He saw his case was urgent. He made a greater effort to be kind.

"It was very nice of you to come to my lectures. I hope you found them interesting. I think they went down all right--good questions. One never knows, of course. One arrives in a strange place and one sees a hall full of people one doesn't know--and you won't believe me, perhaps, because I've done it scores of times--but one likes to see a face that one recognizes. One feels lost, at first...."

She looked hopefully.

This was untrue. The editor never felt lost. Once on his feet, he had the sensation that he was talking to the human race. He suffered with it. It was the general human suffering that had ravaged his face.

"But, you know," he said sternly, "our feelings deceive us. Especially at certain times of life. I was worried about you. I saw that something was wrong. These things happen very suddenly, God knows why. You see someone whom you admire, perhaps--it seems to happen to women more than men--and you project some forgotten love on him. You think you love him, but it is really some forgotten image. In your case, I would say, probably some image of your father, whom you have hated all these years for what he did when you were a child. And so, as people say, one becomes obsessed or infatuated. I don't like the word. What we mean is that one is not in love with a real man or woman but a vision sent out by oneself. One can think of many examples...."

The editor was sweating. He wished he hadn't asked her to close the window. He knew his mind was drifting toward historic instances. He wondered if he would tell her the story of Jane Carlyle, the wife of the historian, who had gone to hear the famous Father Matthew speak at a temperance meeting and how, hysterical and exalted, she had rushed to the platform to kiss his boots. Or there were other instances. For the moment, he couldn't remember them. He decided on Mrs. Carlyle. It was a mistake.

"Who is Mrs. Carlyle?" said Miss Mendoza suspiciously. "I would never kiss any man's feet."

"Boots," said the editor. "It was on a public platform."

"Or boots," Miss Mendoza burst out. "Why are you torturing me? You are saying I am mad."

The editor was surprised by the turn of the conversation. It had seemed to be going well.

"Of course you're not mad," he said. "A madwoman could not have written that great poem. I am just saying that I value your feelings, but you must understand I, unfortunately, do not love you. But you are ill. You have exhausted yourself."

Miss Mendoza's yellow eyes became brilliant as she listened to him.

"So," she said grandly, "I am a mere nuisance."

She got up from her chair and he saw she was trembling.

"If that is so, why don't you leave this room at once?" she said.

"But," said the editor with a laugh, "if I may mention it, it is mine."

"I signed the register," said Miss Mendoza.

"Well," said the editor, smiling, "that is not the point, is it?"

The boredom, the sense of the sheer waste of time (when one thought of the massacres, the bombings, the imprisonments in the world) in personal questions, overcame him. It amazed him how many times, at some awful crisis--the Cuban, for example--how many people left their husbands, wives or lovers, in a general post: the extraordinary, irresponsible persistence of outbreaks of love. A kind of guerrilla war in another context. Here he was in the midst of it. What could he do? He looked around the room for help. The noise of traffic outside in the street, the dim sight of people moving in office windows opposite, an advertisement for beer were no help. Humanity had deserted him. The nearest thing to the human--now it took his eye--was the doll on the bed, an absurd marionette from the cabaret, the raffle or the nursery. It had a mop of red hair, silly red cheeks and popping blue eyes with long cotton lashes. It wore a short skirt and had long inane legs in checked stockings. How childish women were. Of course (it now occurred to him), Miss Mendoza was as childish as her voice. The editor said playfully: "I see you have a little friend. Very pretty. Does she come from Guatemala?" And frivolously, because he disliked the thing, he took a step or two toward it. Miss Mendoza pushed past him at once and grabbed it.

"Don't touch it," she said with tiny fierceness.

She picked up the doll and, hugging it with fear, she looked for somewhere to put it out of his reach. She went to the door, then changed her mind and rushed to the window with it. She opened the window and, as the curtains blew in, she looked as if a desperate idea had occurred to her--to throw herself and it out of the window. She turned to fight him off. He was too bewildered to move and when she saw that he stood still, her frightened face changed. Suddenly, she threw the doll on the floor and, half falling onto a chair near it, her shoulders rounded, she covered her face with her hands and sobbed, shaking her head from side to side. Tears crawled through her fingers down the backs of her hands. Then she took her hands away and, soft and shapeless, she rushed to the editor and clawed at his jacket.

"Go away. Go away," she cried. "Forgive me. Forgive. I'm sorry." She began to laugh and cry at once. "As you said--ill. Oh, please forgive. I don't understand why I did this. For a week, I haven't eaten anything. I must have been out of my mind to do this to you. Why? I can't think. You've been so kind. You could have been cruel. You were right. You had the courage to tell me the truth. I feel so ashamed, so ashamed. What can I do?"

She was holding onto his jacket. Her tears were on his hands. She was pleading. She looked up.

"I've been such a fool."

"Come and sit here," said the editor, trying to move her to the sofa. "You are not a fool. You have done nothing. There is nothing to be ashamed of."

"I can't bear it."

"Come and sit here," he said, putting his arm on her shoulder. "I was very proud when I read your poem. Look," he said, "you are a very gifted and attractive woman."

He was surprised that such a heavy woman was not like iron to the touch but light and soft. He could feel her skin, hot through her dress. Her breath was hot. Agony was hot. Grief was hot. Above all, her clothes were hot: It was perhaps because of the heat of her clothes that for the first time in years, he had the sensation of holding a human being. He had never felt this when, on a few occasions, he had held a woman naked in her bed. He did something then that was incredible to himself: He gently kissed the top of her head, on the blonde hair he did not like. It was like kissing a heated mat and it smelled of burning.

At his kiss, she clawed no longer and her tears stopped. She moved away from him in awe.

"Thank you," she said gravely and he found himself being studied, even memorized, as she had done when she had first come to his office. The look of the idol was set on her again. Then she uttered a revelation: "You do not love anyone but yourself." And, worse, she smiled. He had thought, with dread, that she was waiting to be kissed again, but now he couldn't bear what she said. It was a loss.

"We must meet," he said recklessly. "We shall meet at the lecture tonight."

The shadow of her future passed over her face.

"Oh, no," she said. She was free. She was warning him not to hope to exploit her pain.

"This afternoon?" he said, trying to catch her hand, but she drew it away. And then, to his bewilderment, she was dodging round him. She was packing. She began stuffing her few clothes into her suitcase. She went to the bathroom and while she was there, the porter came in with his two bags.

"Wait," said the editor.

She came out of the bathroom looking very pale and put the remaining things into her suitcase.

"I asked him to wait," the editor said.

The kiss, the golden hair, the heat of her head seemed to be flying round in the editor's head.

"I don't want you to leave like this," the editor said.

"I heard what you said to the man," she said, hurriedly shutting the suitcase. "Goodbye. And thank you. You have saved me from something dreadful."

The editor could not move when he saw her go. He could not believe she had gone. He could feel the stir of her scent in the air and he sat down exhausted but arguing with his conscience. Why had she said that about loving only himself? What else could he have done? He wished there were people there to whom he could explain, whom he could ask. He was feeling loneliness for one of the few times in his life. He went to the window to look down at the people. Then, looking back to the bed, he was astounded by a thought: "I have never had an adventure in my life." And, with that, he left the room and went down to the desk. Was she still in the hotel?

"No," said the desk clerk. "Mrs. Drood went off in a taxi."

"I'm asking for Miss Mendoza."

"No one of that name."

"Extraordinary," lied the editor. "She was to meet me here."

"Perhaps she is at the Hofgarten, it's the same management."

For the next hour, he was on the telephone, trying all the hotels. He got a cab to the station; he tried the airlines and then, in the afternoon, went out to the airport. He knew it was hopeless. "I must be mad," he thought. He looked at every fair-haired woman he could see: The city was full of them, it seemed to him. As the noisy city afternoon moved by, he gave up. He liked to talk about himself, but here was a day he could never describe to anyone. He could not return to his room but sat in the lounge, trying to read a paper, wrangling with himself and looking up at every woman who passed. He could not eat nor even drink and when he went out to his lecture, he walked all the way to the hall on the chance of seeing her. He had the fancy once or twice, which he laughed at bitterly, that she had just passed and had left two or three of her footprints on the pavement. The maddening thing was that she was exactly the kind of woman he could not bear--squat, ugly; how awful she must look without clothes on. He tried to exorcise her by obscene images. They vanished and some transformed, indefinable vision of her came back. He began to see her tall and dark or young and fair; her eyes changing color, her body voluptuously rounded, athletically slim. As he sat on the lecture platform, listening to the introduction, he made faces that astonished people with a mechanical display of eagerness followed by scorn, as his gaze went systematically from row to row, looking for her. He got up to speak. He knew it would be the best lecture he had ever given. It was. Urging, appealing, agonizing, eloquent: It was an appeal to her to come back.

And then, after a lot of discussion, which he hardly heard, he returned to the hotel. He had now to face the mockery of the room. He let himself in and it did mock. The maid had turned the bed back and on it lay the doll, its legs tidied, its big ridiculous eyes staring at him. They seemed to him to blink. She had forgotten it. She had left her childhood behind.