I will speak thy speech, love; think thy thought

RICHARD SHERMAN

They were talking about war, the next war, the war that was already smoldering somewhere and that sometime—next year, the year after, three years from now; but certainly not much farther away than that—would burst into flame. They sat on sofas, on the arms of chairs, on the floor, and one or two kept pacing the room, and spoke of poison gas and long-range guns and death, citing known facts sometimes, but for the most part, because they were young, probing into the future, the dark, unfathomed future. Outside, in the muggy air of the early autumn evening, the million sounds of the millioned city purred lazily, yet no one paused to listen. Once someone went to the tall, wide-swung windows and pointed dramatically at the lights in the distant towers. "They'll topple," he said. "Bombs will break them off and crash them down and the streets will run with blood. And that's only a small part of it. . . ."

In the corner there was a long table littered with whisky bottles and siphons and, in the center, a huge glass bowl filled with ice cubes floating in their own water. Now and then people got up to refill glasses. They continued to talk as they poured out their drinks; talking of death and destruction and the world in ruins. "You can't stop it," they said. "You can't stop it."

If they couldn't stop it, she thought, then why must they dwell on it so lovingly? What good did speeches do?

She sat on the floor in front of the radio, leaning her head against the fretted sound box. Earlier in the evening someone had turned the radio on, tuning it to its lowest pitch, and it still fought against the static, though everyone had long since ceased to listen to it. A voice which only she could hear, because she was nearest, whined into the back of her neck: "Ah-speak ah-to ah-me of ah-love. . . ." But no one spoke of love at all; they only spoke of war.

On the far side of the room she saw Cleve, straddling a chair and pounding ominously on its back. "I tell you we're caught," he said. "Just as young people were caught in 1914. The only differences are that they didn't know what was coming and we do— and that they thought war was glorious and we don't."

She watched him, loving the way his thick eyebrows lowered when he stressed a point; feeling with fingers that were twenty feet away the straight line of his nose and the curve of his chin as it rounded into the beginning of a throat. Once he looked directly at her, but his eyes went through hers, into the belly of the radio, and through the wall behind. She smiled at him, shyly, and then quickly straightened her face, embarrassed to give when nothing was offered in return.

She wished they could go home. She hadn't wanted to come anyway, not only because they were his friends rather than hers, and she felt awkward among them, but because these days all everyone talked about was internationalism and economics and politics—and war, especially war. Parties used to be different: people danced or played games or gathered together at a piano to sing harmony. But now everything was changed. It was difficult to be gay when everyone around you said that you were just one out of millions, all of whom were to be killed within two years, three years, but certainly not much farther away than that. . . .

What was the use of being twenty-one and pretty and in love with your husband if you felt that you were living on a precipice? Of what value is a bud if it will never have a chance to blossom?

Suddenly she put her hand behind her back and twisted the dial until the drone became a roar, drowning out the babble of voices: "AH-SPEAK AH-TO AH-ME. . . ." Fifteen pairs of eyes turned on her swiftly, reprovingly. "Sylvia—turn it down, can't you? Please?"

He looked at her now and saw her as a human being. "Listen, darling," he said. "We're talking."

Meekly she reversed the knob until the radio was completely silent. "I'm sorry," she said. "I really didn't mean. . . ."

They didn't even wait to hear her apology in full. Already they had turned again to each other's shining eyes, gesturing hands, moving lips. Facts flew, and statistics, and foreign names. Germany rose up, Japan flared out of the east; a throne fell, a republic crumbled, its fragments littering the space around their feet. They had forgotten her again. Once more she was alone on an island.

After a moment she rose and edged around the wall toward where he was. She stood behind him and placed her hands lightly on his shoulders. Automatically his hands came up to join them; but he kept on talking. "A million dollars' worth of poison gas," he said; "why shouldn't science want war, if only to experiment? But it'll be the last experiment, because. . . ." She slipped her hand from his, and then drew her finger gently down behind his left ear, tracing the groove where the ear joined the head. She did it twice, very slowly. When her finger was halfway down the third time, he said, without moving, hardly without stopping the conversation that he was keeping up steadily, strongly, earnestly, "Don't." Just the one word: "Don't."

She stood there, a flush mounting to her cheeks, afraid that everyone was staring at her. He had never been abrupt before; that was one reason—one out of ten thousand— why she loved him so, because he was tender with her, treating her as the fragile child that everyone said she was. When she had married, her father had warned him: "Now, young man," he had said, "you must take care of our little girl. She's pretty young, you know." And Cleve had answered gravely, with his arm around her, "Oh, I will, sir. You needn't worry about that."

Now she saw herself as the object of pity and derision, an interfering child who had been slapped in front of company. Her hands were no longer touching him; they were hanging at her sides, taut and with the fingers spread rigidly. Then, when she realized that no one was watching her, she relaxed. A cold fury swept over her as she looked down at the top of his head, at the tightly curled hair that she had once said was like a pickaninny's. "Like a nigger's," she thought now. "Like a dirty nigger's. I hate you. I hate you!" Yet even as she mentally formed the words, she knew that she did not hate him, that she could never hate him, no matter what he did or said. But she wanted to hate him, and she tried to convince herself that she might be able to learn how.

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At the table-bar, she mixed herself a drink, a strong one. She would get tight, that's what she'd do. Get tight and embarrass him; and make a scene. Standing with the glass cold against her fingers, she imagined herself suddenly laughing insanely and throwing her hands wildly into the air, shrieking, "I think you're stupid, all of you, even if you are Cleve's friends. You don't do anything but talk about ghastly things that will probably never happen at all. You try to frighten yourselves and other people. You're young; for God's sake why don't you act young? Why are you all such croakers? Oh—you make me sick!"

She sipped her drink, then put it down on the table. They weren't even worth getting drunk for; they weren't worth making herself ridiculous in front of him. The only thing to do was to let them alone, and let him alone too.

Finally people began to leave. Cleve came over to her, his face innocent and curious, and said, "Well, mouse, why so quiet?"

She waited a moment before answering, and when she did answer her voice was distant, her glance cold. "I didn't have much of an opportunity to talk," she said. "No one does, when your intellectual friends get wound up."

He placed his hand on her arm. "What did I do, honey?" he said.

She wished she had some protection against his tone when it sounded like that, when it was low and wheedling and meant for her alone. Why should she be so helpless, so weak? . . . But she wouldn't be weak. She wouldn't let him heal her wounds merely with the rising inflection of a word.

"What did you do?" She laughed, looking not at him but at the safe, blank surface of her palm. "I suppose you think you can tell me to keep still, in front of your friends, and I won't even say anything about it."

"Why, Sylvia—" he began; but she moved away swiftly. She couldn't let him get at her that way, with a begging look in his eyes. She didn't dare trust herself to face him. "We'd better be going, hadn't we?" she said.

They said good-night to the hostess ("Ugly, big-nosed thing," Sylvia thought; "would he rather talk to her than look at me?") and rode down in the elevator in silence. After they got in the cab, he tried to put his arm around her, to draw her into the curling posture that was always hers when they were in a cab together, but she shook him away and edged to the farthest corner of the seat. Please, God, she thought; please give me the strength to be as hard as he is.

"I'm sorry, Sylvia," he said. "I guess we tvere pretty long-winded. But—but it's so important, don't you see?"

"What's important?" She tried to make her voice politely skeptical. "You used to tell me that / was important, too. You told me that only this evening, before we started out. You stood in the foyer, with your hat on the back of your head, and said, T love you. Did you know that? Did you know that you're my world?' "

His knee was against hers. At first she was about to move, and then she decided not to: after all, people must touch each other sometimes, and he had already said he was sorry. But she didn't intend to let him off so easily always. He would have to learn that being her husband was a full-time job. She couldn't feed on generalities.

"Don't you ever think about people instead of just a person?" he asked, as if he read her mind. "Don't you ever look ahead and see what might happen —what will happen—if there's a war?"

She was silent. No, she said to herself, I do not think of people. I do not think of China's starving millions, of injustices done to the Jews, the Armenians. I think only of you.

"How would you like to have me be a soldier, and get killed?"

In the darkness of the cab she caught her breath quickly. He shouldn't say things like that. Even now she pictured him lying with his face pressed into mud and with a bullet in his back, a dark stain spreading slowly over his tunic. . . . But, but that was silly; that was visualizing a non-existent horror, just as he and his friends always were doing. It was as if she were staring at the sun, feeling its heat, and someone behind her whispered, "What if that sun went out? What if the world were dark and cold, and no thing lived?"

Even if war should come—and it wouldn't, it couldn't—there was no reason to fear it. Her own father had been in the last one, though he had never got to France. He had been a captain at a training camp, and Mother used to go down and see him weekends. There had been dances, with a handful of women divided among all those officers. Mother had said it was the gayest time she had ever had. The war had not spoiled her youth.

The cab was passing through Times Square, where a loudspeaker in the middle of the street was blaring out music. A swinging, warming rhythm: "The Stars and Stripes Forever," played very fast and very loud. It sent a shiver of excitement through her whole body, and she softly beat time to it with the tips of her shoes. Involuntarily she groped for Cleve's hand.

Listen to that," he said, scornfully. They ought to make a law against such music. Romanticizing death. . . ."

But that wasn't what it did; not to her. To her the music meant strength and a surging sweep of vitality. Suddenly she thought of him in a uniform, an officer's uniform with burnished leather puttees and a smart Sam Browne belt. He would look lovely in it, with his narrow waist and broad shoulders. Marching at the head of a column of troops, with a sword flashing in his hand in the sunlight.

"Don't you see what I mean?" he asked, moving closer to her. "Don't you understand at all?"

Words were so useless. If she argued with him now, they would quarrel; and they must not quarrel, they must never quarrel again.

She pressed his hand, and lifted her face to be kissed.

With her lips on his, with his arms tightening around her, she heard the music grow fainter and finally die away altogether. She wished the driver would make the car go faster. She wanted to get home.