Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“What do you mean?”

“I am beginning to feel as though I can be consoled.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It can prove to be mortal,” Pritchard whispered, taking her clumsily and bulkily in his arms, “for those of us who are inconsolable.”

When they woke in the morning, they were solemn at first, and disconnectedly discussed the weather, which was revealed through the not quite closed curtains to be gray and uncertain. But then Pritchard asked, “How do you feel?” and Constance, taking her time and wrinkling her eyebrows in a deep attempt to be accurate, said, “I feel enormously grown up.” Pritchard couldn’t help roaring with laughter, and all solemnity was gone. They lay there comfortably discussing themselves, going over their future like misers, and Constance was worried, although not too seriously, about scandalizing the hotel people, and Pritchard said that there was nothing to worry about—nothing that foreigners could do could scandalize the Swiss—and Constance felt more comfortable than ever at being in such a civilized country.

They made plans about the wedding, and Pritchard said they’d go to the French part of Switzerland to get married, because he didn’t want to get married in German, and Constance said she was sorry she hadn’t thought of it herself.

Then they decided to get dressed, because you could not spend the rest of your life in bed, and Constance had a sorrowful, stinging moment when she saw how thin he was, and thought, conspiratorially, Eggs, milk, butter, rest. They went out of the room together, bravely determined to brazen it out, but there was no one in the corridor or on the stairway to see them, so they had the double pleasure of being candid and being unobserved at the same time, which Constance regarded as an omen of good luck. They discovered that it was almost time for lunch, so they had some kirsch first, and then orange juice and bacon and eggs and wonderful, dark coffee in the scrubbed, wood-panelled dining room, and in the middle of it tears came into Constance’s eyes and Pritchard asked why she was crying and she said, “I’m thinking of all the breakfasts we’re going to eat together.” Pritchard’s eyes got a little wet then, too, as he stared across the table at her, and she said, “You must cry often, please.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because it’s so un-English,” she said, and they both laughed.

After breakfast, Pritchard said he was going up the hill to make a few runs and asked if she wanted to go with him, but she said she felt too melodious that day to ski, and he grinned at the “melodious.”

She said she was going to write some letters, and he grew thoughtful. “If I were a gentleman, I’d write your father immediately and explain everything,” he said.

“Don’t you dare,” she said, meaning it, because she knew her father would be over on the next plane if he got a letter like that.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not that much of a gentleman.”

She watched him stride off between the snowbanks with his red sweater and his skis, looking boyish and jaunty, and then went to her room and wrote a letter to Mark, saying that she had thought it over and that she was sorry but she had decided it was a mistake. She wrote the letter calmly, without feeling anything, cozy in her warm room. She didn’t mention Pritchard, because that was none of Mark’s business.

Then she wrote a letter to her father and told him that she had broken off with Mark. She didn’t mention Pritchard in the letter to her father, either, because she didn’t want him over on the next plane, and she didn’t say anything about coming home. All that could wait.

She sealed the letters, then lay down dreamily to nap, and slept without dreaming for more than an hour. She dressed for the snow and went to the post office to mail the letters and walked down to the skating rink to watch the children on the ice, and on her way back to the hotel she stopped at the ski shop and bought Pritchard a lightweight yellow sweater, because soon the sun would be very hot all day and the clothes of winter would all be too warm.

She was in the bar, waiting unhurriedly for Pritchard, when she heard that he was dead.

Nobody had come to tell her, because there was no particular reason for anybody to come to tell her.

There was an instructor with whom Pritchard had sometimes skied talking in the bar to some Americans, and he was saying, “He was out of control and he miscalculated and he went into a tree and he was dead in five minutes. He was a jolly fine fellow”—the ski teacher had learned his English from his British pupils before the war—“but he went too fast. He did not have the technique to handle the speed.”

The ski teacher did not sound as though it were routine to die on skis, but he did not sound surprised. He himself had had many of his bones broken, as had all his friends, crashing into trees and stone walls and from falls in the summertime, when he was a guide for climbers, and he sounded as though it were inevitable, and even just, that from time to time people paid up to the mountain for faults of technique.

Constance stayed for the funeral, walking behind the black-draped sled to the churchyard and the hole in the snow and the unexpected dark color of the earth after the complete white of the winter. No one came from England, because there was no one to come, although the ex-wife telegraphed flowers. A good many of the villagers came, but merely as friends, and some of the other skiers, who had known Pritchard casually, and as far as anyone could tell, Constance was just one of them.

At the grave, the ski teacher, with the professional habit of repetition common to teachers, said, “He did not have the technique for that much speed.”

Constance didn’t know what to do with the yellow sweater, and she finally gave it to the chambermaid for her husband.

Eight days later, Constance was in New York. Her father was waiting for her on the pier and she waved to him and he waved back, and she could tell, even at that distance, how glad he was to see her again. They kissed when she walked off the gangplank, and he hugged her, very hard, then held her off at arm’s length and stared at her delightedly, and said, “God, you look absolutely wonderful! See,” he said, and she wished he hadn’t said it, but she realized he couldn’t help himself. “See—wasn’t I right? Didn’t I know what I was talking about?”

“Yes, Father,” she said, thinking, How could I ever have been angry with him? He’s not stupid or mean or selfish or uncomprehending—he is merely alone.

Holding her hand the way he used to do while they took walks together when she was a little girl, he led her into the customs shed, to wait for her trunk to come off the ship.

L loyd Barber was lying on his bed reading France-Soir when the phone rang. It was only two o’clock in the afternoon, but it was raining for the fifth consecutive day and he had no place to go anyway. He was reading about the relative standing of the teams in the Rugby leagues. He never went to Rugby games and he had no interest in the relative standings of Lille and Pau and Bordeaux, but he had finished everything else in the paper. It was cold in the small, dark room, because there was no heat provided between ten in the morning and six in the evening, and he lay on the lumpy double bed, his shoes off, covered with his overcoat.

He picked up the phone, and the man at the desk downstairs said, “There is a lady waiting for you here, M. Barber.”