But my mother had for the moment marvelously recovered. She might have been addressing Anneke, so purely sovereign was her sally. "Then your requests must be generally worthless," she superbly brought out.

He seemed not to mind this a bit. "In that case there must be something in the way I ask!"

But she was no less sly. "Is it your tone?"

"Don't compare my tone with yours!" he rallied. "Mine's perfectly charming. You don't see me intimidating anybody, do you? The nicest thing about me is-you know what?-I'm amenable."

"Yes," my mother said. "I'm aware of your amenability."

He permitted himself a practised hesitation. "Oh, when it comes to that, I can recall yours. It doesn't take much digging up, if you're interested in the archaeology of it. You remember that night after the parade-"

"There were lots of parades," Enoch said suddenly; his voice came between them with the brusqueness of a guardian or keeper. I had nearly forgotten the third person in the room, and all at once I thought it odd that the private visitor, Enoch's visitor who had come on Enoch's business, should direct everything all deftly at my mother: and odder yet that Enoch should pace and pace (his footfalls continued to shudder and tramp and weave a ring) and let them sniff up their cage unhindered. "Dozens of parades," he said, "nothing but parades"-still, it was impossible to tell from this whether he spoke in defense of my mother, inside the bars; it might as easily have been an accusation.

"She knows which one I mean."

"No," my mother protested. "I don't."

"It was January."

"I don't remember any January."

There was a brief disparaging silence.

Then: "She doesn't remember any January," Enoch said.

"There!" confirmed my mother.

"I see it does you good," the visitor said softly, "to think of me as a fossil."

"I never think of you at all."

"A real moral good. It's what makes you Mrs. Vand." He stopped and loosed a self-amused sound, not really laughter any more. "You don't mind my saying Mrs. Vand? I'm rusty on Allegra, and I think I ought to say Mrs. Vand, under the circ.u.mstances, I mean-"

"Under the circ.u.mstances that's who I am."

"What?"

"I am Mrs. Vand." my mother responded stoutly.

"I don't argue it. It couldn't be plainer. I admit to it," said the visitor, "gladly, gleefully. I even applaud it. Look, I admit to it with all my heart-"

"I told you to keep your heart out of it."

"-only I'm somebody too. Look at it that way, Mrs. Vand."

"You're Nick."

"All right-"

"And Nick doesn't exist. That proves it."

"Proves what?"

"That I never think of you."

"Never?"

"You're the man in the moon." She was all confidence again. "You're not there, that's all. You don't exist," she repeated.

"Not for you, then maybe for someone else."

But she was practical and patient. "You don't exist for anyone."

"No one?"

"Isn't that what I'm saying? No one. Not a soul."

He seemed to suck on the moment that mildly intervened. "You prefer it that way?" he pretended to wonder after a while. "You really prefer it?"

"I more than prefer it. I intend it."

"You intend it. See!" he said. "Didn't I tell you we were on the same side? We peep through the same pair of eyes, Mrs. Vand!"

"You might just as well keep your eyes out of it too," she came briskly back.

"Eyes too? Eyes and heart-you don't leave me much to negotiate with. There's nothing left but arms and legs! You didn't think I came for a wrestling match?"

"You're rough enough, even for that."

"Rough? Oh, like a diamond in fact! But I know what you mean. I haven't any facets. I come all in one lump-not a solitary shiny part. Still," he reasoned, "it doesn't change what I'm worth."

"I can tell him what he's worth, can't I?" But it must have been the window and the walls as much as Enoch my mother sneeringly addressed; and there was no reply from any of them. Meanwhile the visitor appeared to be mopping away a long meandering trickle of fresh amus.e.m.e.nt: from all that foam his intimate skeptical tones came up h.o.r.n.y and hard, like the dogged dependable back of a turtle. "I'd like to hear it, Mrs. Vand," he pursued-"it's just for that I'm here. Perhaps"-and surely the hearty din of his "perhaps," with its far convivial reverberations, was struck for Enoch too-"perhaps we can all agree on a price," he gave out, and let the notion stand.

It stood. "Price," said Enoch solidly. "There you are, Allegra."

"It isn't as though I didn't expect it," she complained. "It's exactly what I expected, didn't I say so?"

But Enoch once more only answered "Price," and went on dropping m.u.f.fled steps around the room.

"If you expected it," resumed the visitor, "that's better yet We accommodate one another-that's even more than I expected! Although I'm not surprised at your point of view. Mine is just the same. That's the crux of it all-we hold a single intention, Mrs. Vand: you and I! It's remarkable, isn't it?-when you think of it?"

"I have better things to think of," countered my mother.

"Of course. You're thinking of a price."

A syllable of outrage fell from her.

"Ah, but when I bring you exactly what you want," he comfortably reproved. "I'm perfectly willing not to exist, you see, for someone else"-somehow she obliterated the flare of her little cry-"as long as I can manage to exist for you. That's the thing, after all. One wants one's due."

Her spite was light and fine. "Oh, if you were to get that!-"

"Well, put it that one wants a little acknowledgment," he conceded.

Enoch darkly emerged: "It depends of what."

"Of who one is; of what one is. Oh, I don't say as a regular thing-only now and then: I want to be fair. I don't ask for anything contrary to temperament."

"Your temperament, you mean," said my mother.

"My temperament-of course. I like to think of the long run."

"You've never noticed the long run," Enoch said with the precision of recitation, quite as though he had come to the end of one of his lists, "in all your life." But my mother overwhelmed the bareness of his declaration with a dozen sudden hoa.r.s.e condemnations, which pa.s.sed without purpose through the bright panes and into the oddly coa.r.s.ened air-the rain had begun to multiply, and changed its pitch to avoid the eave, and came against my nape and cheeks in little blows. I did not mind the rain; it was endurable; for meanwhile I was preoccupied with the arrangement of my limbs. My left leg, which had been twisted under me for a sort of bolster, was stiff with cramp. It was partly numb and partly thick with black pain; I had to drag it after me across those eroded concrete inches, turning halfway on the ledge and rea.s.sembling myself as best I could. My mother's wails had quickly grown familiar. They left me no curiosity; I was bored by all that vivacity without intelligibility, and thought to retrace my cold brief trail. So I crept on with the solemnity of disappointment, and looking down saw the garden, through interstices, grey and drenched, and the blue bicycle sunk almost out of view behind a grating of bobbing twigs. The concierge's husband's silly bush bounced: and under an a.s.sault of big drops the little stubborn flag beat like a fierce rag-bird to escape the tether of its stick-it tore away and would have flown off, but each time the wind struck it back and furled its striped plume. The private visitor, returning, would find his things in ruin. Already his bundle had slipped off the fender and was dangling like an out-of-rhythm pendulum, square-edged, from a wet string. I watched it queerly hang and rock, and wondered whether he would be angry and would blame my mother for keeping him long, while all the while his flag and books (I thought I knew what sort of books) were getting spoiled. She did keep him; she kept him and talked, and sent out her unaccountable faint whine, and would not buy. For I did not doubt that he had come to sell. What else could he have come for? I supposed he was a salesman, one of those curious entrepreneurs and pursuers who made secret appointments and uncommon offerings, d.o.g.g.i.ng my mother: sometimes it was gems they sold her, and frequently cars, and often paintings, owned previously by d.u.c.h.esses; and if the man chattered of gems, cars, or paintings, my mother would not buy, but if he spoke of something else (of the d.u.c.h.ess, say) she would. Usually, therefore, the man would wisely speak of something else, for though he may have looked a fool (uniformly they looked to be fools, breathless, hairless, flat-thumbed), he had come a long way and grown clever on the journey-he might throw down his traveling-box, certainly he would hurl aside his window-frame portfolio stuffed with touched-up photographs, as though these were impediments to the style he knew my mother's brilliance required, and smiling and fawning and whirling his elbows he seemed obliged to sell, before anything else, himself And regularly afterward my mother would glitter in a new place (a long-unused finger would suddenly sp.a.w.n a fantastic ring; or a shining stone looped from temple to temple by the dark deft hands of a Pa.r.s.ee salesman would sit astride her brow) or she would be driven off gaily in a snail of white enamel, or she would confront with comfortable purrings a preposterous picture full of rosy gnats, and carry it under her arm all day. But she never minded when I attended, as once or twice the occasion had it, one of these odd private entertainments, rich with flattery and implausible pleasurable gossip; she never pretended the man had come on Enoch's business. And I no longer believed that he had come on Enoch's business, this Nick who avoided speaking of nothing, and who was careless of my mother's feelings, and seemed unaware of the expectations of her brilliance. It could not have been Enoch's business he had come on, whatever my mother might say: and he had arrived with no merchandise but his bicycle, his bundle of books, his bit of spangled rag. Did he mean to bribe their favor by waving the flag of compatriotism? And having won it, did he mean to sell his old bike? (How I would have fancied just such a vehicle for my own, miraculously blue, clanging and ringing!) Or did he mean merely to hawk his books?-But Enoch's visitors came discreetly, presenting their accounts and inventories with the deep attention of the very bored; they drove dusty little French cars; they complained of their territory; they complained that their merchandise was slow to move: that it was too fresh, being redolent still of factory-handling; that it was too stale, being old as violated Eden. They complained that the market was reluctant; that there were no reputable outlets; that facilities for distribution were a tangle of contradictions; that the supply of the product exceeded by ten thousand percent the demand for it; that it was consequently impossible to dump even whatever portion was already released from the wholesalers and the chains. This was their language, although I knew it was corpses they meant, and ma.s.s graves, and exhumations, and freight cars lurching westward, and names lost forever, and the blind tongues of the dead, and cinders and smoke. It was their language, practical, purposive, and without whimsy: it was the jargon of trade. The gem-men and the auto-men and the picture-men had the same difficulties with turnover: in trade it is all the same, whatever the merchandise. But this Nick was something new. If he had not come to haggle over late acquisitions with Enoch, if he had not come to fatten my mother's velvet jewel-sack, why did I hear his calculated tradesman's laughter just now beading the wind?

He was a secret from me. And in his letter he had written "child."

So I supposed he had come for me-for a surprise; I really supposed he was a salesman of children's books, and that my mother (who could be indulgent when it suited her) believed my behavior on the homeward ship would be tolerable only if I were soundly beguiled. And the private visitor, a confident salesman, laughed, because despite his a.s.sertion the bargain was all on his side-what, in that part of the world, at that instant of history, could be rarer than a child's book in English? But they had known him before; that much, from the quality of their unfathomable talk, was plain. Perhaps they had even turned him away once or twice-I hadn't needed books when Anneke had let me have my sh.e.l.ls-and now his price, out of malice, was even higher. His price, it seemed, was too high.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n you," my mother flung out suddenly.

His price was sinister. And I did not care for books just then; I coveted his bicycle, and thought, if only they would let the books go and bargain fearlessly for the bicycle, how I would mount it and ride it home to America, round and round the ship's deck, spinning more clamorously than the gulls, and bluer than the sea. But while I was musing into the far-down garden, the little offending muscle once more twinged; and to relieve it I stopped short and arched back to stretch away the cramp, with the rain's slant salting my eyelashes: and, sloth-like, upside down, the big wide curtain-winged square of my mother's window, and inside it her room reversed-the ceiling was the floor, and the ceiling-lights a pool flashing in the middle of the floor, and the armchair all gone. But the black frame of the bureau-mirror seemed suspended all by itself, without a top or a bottom, like the oval mouth of one of those magic mirrors which can speak out who is the fairest of us all. The answer, just then, appeared in the form of a face, which marvelously emerged, just as you would expect of a magic mirror, out of a packet of clouds showing exactly the configuration of the clouds over the garden. The fact that the mouth in this face was situated a nice distance above the nose hardly made the sight less wonderful. I rose to my haunches to persuade it to come right, and recognized in the rea.s.sortment of these features the reflected portrait of my stepfather. It was a serious and deeply realistic study, not in the least astonishing: the mirror with justice had conjured the fairest of them all. It was not that his long sallow chin, already growing jowly, the blade-high nose-bridge, that triangular forehead veering back in a style my mother called Canaanitic, and all the other particularities of margins and pockets which, in spite of so many angles, suggested (for the future) bulk, even portliness-not that these marked him out for such a compliment. This wasn't the sort of fairness the mirror, taking the wizard's privilege of ambiguity, meant. If it had been merely Enoch's face that had swum up out of chaos, it would hardly have mattered, to the mirror or the moment. But it was not simply Enoch's face: it was Enoch's look. It was the dispa.s.sionate and judicious look of a man intimate with pa.s.sion and injudiciousness, and all the more prepared against them. He was fair. Nothing could be clearer in his look than his unshakable. unbreakable fairness. It almost made me pity whoever might have been the object of it. "Allegra," I watched him say-for an instant his head ducked away, then reappeared; he had taken a short turn and come back to the spot where the mirror unerringly transmitted him, down to the shoulders, like a library-bust-"Never mind that, Allegra," he commanded her fury. But the words were derived from the air, and although I saw his mouth flicker, I might have been watching a crude early piece of sound-film, not quite synchronized. in which the actor has not yet discarded the rule of the broad and trustworthy gesture. Whoever it was he stared at-he wax staring-could not have escaped the full fanatical sense of that determined unfanaticism. Oh, he would be fair!-even I could read that, in spite of the light-splinters that now and then spoiled the portrait in the mirror. "Didn't I say what he was after? Didn't I know it?" my mother went on, sending out her quick beratements: but Enoch's eye did not waver.

"Allegra," he said again, and stopped, as though that were enough.

But for the private visitor it was not enough. The private visitor plainly valued expansion and reiteration. "I'm not 'after' anything, Mrs. Vand-except what you're after yourself. You can't call that villainous!"

"The soul of the n.o.ble motive," my mother murmured.

"Well, why not? Only nowadays," the private visitor amiably developed, "you can't get somebody to vanish by mere intention. I mean you can't simply yell abracadabra and have it happen. Try it and see." The face in the looking-gla.s.s only very slightly frowned at this-the frown of an efficient administrator who discovers his underlings in the act of folding paper airplanes. But it was without effect. "Listen," began the private visitor experimentally-"Abracadabra. I've said it. You see? Nothing. I'm still here. It isn't as easy as- all that, Mrs. Vand! It isn't in accord with modern business practise. In today's market you have to secure your intention."

"Oh, get on with it," Enoch said. "Let's finish it up."

"Yes, let's finish it up," my mother joined in. "There's no point in dragging on this way, when the fact is I have all the security I need."

"I know, Mrs. Vand, I know! But it's not a finish I have in mind, it's really only a beginning, don't you see? Because I understand you exactly, Mrs. Vand-oh, trust me to understand you! You take care of your interests, isn't that right? You watch out for them."

"If I didn't they wouldn't have stayed so unsoiled."

"Are they"-he gave a doubtful little crooning chuckle at the word-"unsoiled?"

"Perfectly. It's how I intend to keep them."

"I was confident you would. It's the reason I came. -Only you make them sound terribly psychological!"

"I make them sound what they are. My interests," affirmed my mother, "are identical with my wishes." But this gaudy bloom of a notion, left over from her argument, with my stepfather, of hours before, fell from her stale and shrivelled; it would not yield twice in a day, and had all the juicelessness of a quip forced to make do as a credo, decked out above its station and beyond its powers. The stare the mirror gravely emanated must have met and deflected her bravado: as quickly as possible she amended it. "Oh, more than that even!" she put out-"you'll find my wishes identical with my intention," she explained, as though this would set the matter straight, "and as far as that's concerned-well! My intention is-absolutely-my security."

"But the matter, encouraged by her pushing hopeful tone, had turned crookeder than ever. It was too ludicrous-Enoch's view, almost fiercely detached, showed just how ludicrous it was. His left eyelid drooped-it was an old weakness, the consequence of the barest touch of strabismus-and in contrast to it the other eye seemed more than humanly open, a whole wide observing sky only briefly and accidentally limited by an aperture. It gave him-it was not inoffensive-the disinterest of an ideal judge taking in horrendous testimony. Meanwhile the other's laughter rammed like a shock wave-"Put 'security' in the plural and you have it!" The private visitor opportunely whooped. "Maybe I'd care about psychological interest if it accrued-which is where stocks and bonds have all the advantage!" He submitted to being wrung out by his joke and even allowed it to suck his breath away; he did not appear to mind that Enoch's half-shut scanning marked it all out, down to the last whimsical tremor, as evidence.

"Have we come to it then?" said Enoch.

"Come to what?"

"The point of your being here. I can't wait all day."

"Oh, you mean my proposal," the private visitor swallowed it up, in a voice faintly cracked from rubbing his joke in his throat.

"Do you have a proposal? I thought you didn't bother with 'em," my mother offered.

"All right, call it a proposition then-if you're thinking of poor Annie! But don't let's hurry, I have all the time in the world. If I didn't have the time I wouldn't be here. Blame yourself for it-it's only because you sent her packing that I've got the time. A liaison, after all-that's your word y'know, not mine-but anyway they're terribly occupying, did you ever happen to notice that?"

"No," my mother said shortly.

"And with your good memory!"

Her cry fell softly, softly against him. It had something of his laughter in it, not so much an echo as the laughter itself turned inside out and showing its hasty ugly seams. She was all at once subdued. "G.o.d d.a.m.n," she gave out, but it was too vague to intend efficacy; it was the merest wisp of a sigh, an exhalation voiced for want of something less striking than silence. She was, anyway, no good at conventional imprecation-it might well have been the legacy of William's stiff proprieties. Still, looking into herself for a glimmer of savagery, she tried hard: "d.a.m.n you, Nick, G.o.d d.a.m.n you" sprang from her once more, and whether the malediction required the usual three chantings to set it going, or whether she had at last, by an utterance of perfect hatred, unwittingly charged and unleashed its magic, her quiet deep curse nevertheless brought forth a marvel. I started at her achievement-she had blotted out the mirror. It hung empty, filling up slowly with the impalpable images of clouds-the gla.s.s turned grey, breathed-over. Enoch was gone. It was as though, by an unspeakable error of the spoken, she had misdirected her d.a.m.nation and eradicated her husband, when it was the other man who had challenged her to make him disappear.

But the other man was still there.

He said: "I'm interested in that, the idea of d.a.m.nation"-it was easy to suppose that here he smiled-"my d.a.m.nation, not no-one-in-particular's," and out of the smooth dim murmur of his pleasure I just then lucidly took the truth. It was brilliantly clear to me, all at once, whom he had come for. Why did not matter, for some reason: I could not divine what he wanted; I did not comprehend it until years afterward, when William told it to me one strange evening on Wall Street; but I knew whom he had come for, for whose sake he spread his legs invisible to me on the bed in my mother's room, booming out his subtle commands, weaving mockeries, inventing new notes for laughter, supplanting Enoch with a big untamed authority. He was not, at any rate, the peddler my ingenuity had churned up out of the garden-not a peddler of books or bicycles or anything. My mother's first "G.o.d d.a.m.n" had done away with whatever might be made of the observed facts; her second had obliterated even theories. I was wrong, wrong-gently and with a dismayed fist I beat my concrete floor. He had not come for me. He had not come for Enoch. He had not come for my mother. He had not come for corpses. He had not even come for Anneke, although now and then it almost seemed he was there to fetch her back to nurse him through perhaps another night's perplexing illness. -Oh, he had not come for any of us. The advantage, whatever it was, was all his. He had simply come for himself.

He said: "In case I am d.a.m.ned 111 let you know what the road to h.e.l.l is really paved with-it won't be with intentions, believe me!-I seem to see a long highway surfaced with checks"-now it was merely a snicker, quick and short, that waited on his vision-"miles and miles of pink checks-"

"Then we've come to it," said Enoch. Now only the clouds were the fairest of them all-dirty bags of wetwash wringing out their corners: the mirror had given up its witness, and since seeing was no help I embraced my head between my knees in a circle of self-wondering and listened. It was quite as though the trial were over, and the moment for sentencing had come. Enoch could be as vindictive as he felt like being now, as long as he kept to the law; and the law, from his changed voice, harsh, partisan, strict, was a bitter one. "If that's what you've been thinking of why didn't you come before?"

"Before? When before? You mean before Annie?"

"Years before."

"It's a pity I didn't. Blame it on the war."

"Yes, blame it on the war," my mother mocked him.

"But actually it wasn't the war," he said, almost apologetic. "I really have no complaints about the war. In my position it doesn't matter, war or peace-"

And Enoch: "In your position? What is your position?"

"Well, I don't see the point in taking sides, you know. I don't care about countries," he told them, and thinking of the colored shred that badged his wheel I marveled at his lie-who but the profoundest patriot would travel always with a flag?

But my mother insisted, "What is your position?"

"I am a piano-player, Mrs. Vand," he said in a dark voice. "I mean by that I'm more of an international person. It's in the nature of playing the piano not to care about countries."

"Chopin didn't mind being a Pole," my mother retorted.

"You remember about that, hah? But I don't play him any more. Nowadays it's only the American things that go over. I always have to do 'Rhapsody in Blue'-they don't hire you if you can't do 'Rhapsody in Blue,' they won't even audition you. But I told you you had a good memory, Mrs. Vand!-You remember that hall off Trafalgar Square, somebody'd let in the goons, and I got to the black keys-they'd ripped out half the white ones-just when the constabulary popped in, and instead of a riot they found the Chopin Freed Poland Society? They couldn't take in a single man, not with the Polonaise going-it had all the signs of Polish respectability-what a noise! My G.o.d, you couldn't do a thing like that with 'Rhapsody in Blue'; it just isn't possible!" He spoke like a man hinting at a delightful reminiscence common to all the company: he does not need to give the whole story, even a small grimace is enough, for they have all been there together, and together have lived the anecdote through in all its hilarious rococo (the past is always rococo) rich little quaint little details, b.u.mps, and crevices; and together they are now all expected to roar at each suggestively funny word. But no happily remembering sound came from my mother, although it was. certainly, just the sort of adventure she liked best, with its incitements, eludings, dupings of the police (of whatever country), and its t.i.tillating threats of arrest; so I could easily believe she had been a part of such an imbroglio, and waited to hear her remark on it.

Instead she kept an avid silence, and surprisingly not she but Enoch remonstrated, "It wasn't Trafalgar Square"-quarrelsomely. "It wasn't even near Trafalgar Square."

"Well, I said off it-"