IX

The blazing suns of August and September cooled into the golden haze of Indian summer but its beauties brought little happiness to three young people of Atlanta. Hilda had listened with tearful gratitude to Mimi’s recital of her talk with Carl. Hopefully she had waited for some sign of interest, some word, some gesture from Carl, but day followed day and she yet was looking in vain. Languidly she prepared for the opening of school when she would begin her career as teacher, the customary interlude between student days and marriage for the girls to whom custom forbade pursuit of any other calling. Hilda passed through various periods of hope, of despair, of rage against herself, against Mimi, against Carl. At times she consoled herself that all affairs of this sort took time, that she need but wait and then her own excellencies would become so apparent, Carl would see how desirable it would be for him to follow up the opening she had made through Mimi’s intercession.

At other times she reviled herself as a hoyden, a brazen creature, a person without shame. Her talk with Mimi assumed gigantic proportions as a stripping bare of all her inner self, shamelessly flaunting her affection for a boy not worth the sacrifice. She castigated herself with all the cruelty of some zealot, crazed by religious fervour, who subjects himself to all manner of barbarities. Tartarus itself nor the Spanish inquisition contained such instruments of torture as those with which unrequited love can flagellate its victims, Hilda learned, and her unhappiness was not lessened by her lack of one in whom she could confide. She dared not risk further pain even from her mother, who might not understand, she thought, and whose lightest word would be as salt to a raw, quivering wound if she should speak lightly or with uncomplete understanding. Hilda’s conviction that her procedure had been wrong and very unwise, certain to drive Carl further from her than achieve any other end, only added to her unwillingness to confide even in her mother.

She thought several times of talking again with Mimi but each time, upon reflection, she rejected this procedure. As time passed with no sign from Carl other than he seemed to avoid her now almost obviously, she began to harbour a new suspicion of Mimi⁠—she wondered if Mimi had said to Carl exactly what she had told Hilda she had said.

She made for herself greater unhappiness by conjecturing phrases or sentences (or implications in phrases or sentences) that Mimi might have used in talking with him. Especially did such thoughts race through her mind after she had turned out the light at night and crept into her bed. Like a child frightened by ghosts and goblins and weird figments of the disordered brain, she shrank in terror from her own thoughts. She saw herself being laughed at by Carl and Mimi, being ridiculed as a brainless, silly little fool.

Daylight always brought relief from these tortures and regret for having entertained such thoughts. She would then rush as soon as she could to Mimi and try by unexplained little tendernesses to atone for her distrust. Mimi was often puzzled by these outbursts and she wondered what caused them. She was too wise, however, to ask directly⁠—she waited for some voluntary word from Hilda, which Hilda, in her shyness and because she was so thoroughly ashamed of her suspicions, never vouchsafed.

Nor was Mimi so free from her own worries that she could expend much thought on the problems of others. After her dismissal, Carl had resolutely avoided her, his pride too great to permit him to risk a second rebuff at her hands. Three times she had seen him approaching her on Auburn Avenue. Twice he had turned into a side street. Once he had entered a grocery store where she was certain he had no reason for going other than to avoid her. With a woman’s perversity of mind, she was annoyed that he should so explicitly obey her command that their friendship be kept on a mere disinterested plane. Mimi had never before been touched by the flaming torch of love nor even of affection despite her volatile and tender nature. The self-imposed abstention from companionship with Carl which had formed, she now discovered, so large a part of her thoughts, was resulting in the steady growth of an interest that before the rupture had been largely an impersonal one. As he continued to avoid her, Mimi determined to tell Carl how foolish she thought him to carry out her quixotic request too literally. Many days passed, though, between the making of the resolution and its execution.

Then one Sunday morning she saw him enter with his mother and sister and father the pew they always occupied near the front of the church. With all the eager impulsiveness of youth in love or youth imagining itself in love, Mimi felt a delightfully pleasant sensation in watching the back of Carl’s head, in being near him. She wanted to put in place the rebellious lock of hair which sprang in disarray from the top of Carl’s head like the feather from an Indian’s headdress. She wanted eagerly to talk with him again as they used to, she wanted to ramble from subject to subject in that comradely way which she missed now that the talks had been ended. The gossip which had partly led to that abrupt severance of their companionship had died down, though Mimi knew from experience that rumour, apparently dead and forgotten, was many lived and any misstep of the future could and would resurrect all previous reports. She knew they could arise again and always did, springing into life with new vigour like that mythical being whose name she could never remember who, thrown to earth, received new strength by contact with it, and entered the struggle again invigorated and more powerful than before.

To regain the friendship she had lost, however, she was willing to risk the wagging of tongues. She stood with bowed head watching Carl with irreverently slitted eyes as the services neared their close. “The Grace of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father⁠ ⁠… now and forevermore, Amen!” droned the minister, his head tilted back, closed eyes raised to the low-hung ceiling.

The human impulse to talk, to move, to be saying or doing something, anything rather than endure introspection however slight, found gushing release as soon as the minister finished. Cloaks and wraps half donned as the benediction was being pronounced were adjusted and feminine hats given the final pat of arrangement, while little eddies of gusts of greeting and conversation flew back and forth. Comments, most of them admiring, were made on the sermon; inquiries, most of them perfunctory, regarding the health of those absent and those present; remarks on the weather, all the petty chitchat which serves as the mucilage that holds together everyday social relations.

Mimi maneuvred her way from the pew into the aisle, timing it so exactly that she reached the end of the seat just as the Hunters were passing up the aisle. She greeted them inclusively but her eyes were on Carl. He sought to avoid her but as his parents passed on he was left standing face to face with Mimi. She smiled easily, he somewhat embarrassedly.

“I haven’t seen you lately⁠—that is, only at a distance,” she said. “I saw you enter Wright’s grocery rather hastily one day, though,” she added maliciously.

Carl flushed and seemed anxious to escape.

“Why should you see me?” he demanded, half angrily. “You practically told me to stay away from you just because of some silly old fools gossiping⁠—”

“You know that isn’t the truth,” she corrected him. “But I didn’t mean for you to avoid me as though I had some sort of contagious disease.”

Carl’s aggressiveness vanished, a tortured, hurt look in his eyes.

“It’s best things go along this way, Mimi,” he pleaded. “If we can’t be the kind of friends we were, it’s wisest I stay away from you altogether.”

His earnestness, for some reason she could not explain; created within her a vague uneasiness. He went on hurriedly before she could speak, his voice lowered to prevent those near overhearing.

“I’ve done a lot of thinking during the last few weeks and I think you were right in breaking off our friendship. No, I don’t mean on account of Hilda⁠—I wish I did care for her, it would make things easier. But I don’t and that’s all there is to it. I was happy with you, Mimi, because you made me content to go along and try to satisfy Dad by working. But now I see I was just fooling myself⁠—I never will be an insurance man⁠—”

“But, Carl, you’ve no right⁠—” Mimi interrupted him.

“Right? What do I care about right? And who’s to say what is right for me and what isn’t? I’m no fool⁠—I know pretty well what I’m doing and I know I’m a pretty rotten sort⁠—you’ll know what I mean by that before long⁠—as soon as the anvil chorus starts on me again.”

“Why don’t you come to see us any more, Carl? You know papa and I’ll always welcome, you.” Neither of them noticed that Mrs. Daquin had not been included.

“No⁠—I’ve caused enough talk about you already,” he answered cryptically as he lost himself in the crowd.⁠ ⁠…

For many days Mimi thought of the talk she had had with Carl. Naturally his mysterious statements of the talk he was certain to create piqued her interest. As discreetly as she could, she sought to find out what he referred to but with no success until Mrs. Hunter called at the Daquin home a week or two later and asked to speak to Mimi, alone. Mrs. Daquin, bursting with curiosity, regretfully complied with the suggestion that she absent herself.

As soon as the door closed, Mrs. Hunter explained her mission. She prefaced her story with a disconcerting question.

“Mimi,” she demanded, her eyes fixed on Mimi’s face, “do you love my Carl?”

“Oh, Mrs. Hunter, why do you ask me such a question?” Mimi, startled, parried the query. She was amazed⁠—she had never asked herself so directly the question Carl’s mother had flung at her.

“Don’t be frightened or worried⁠—I was so in hopes you did care for him. His father and I are terribly worried about him⁠—he has always been a restless, queer sort of a child but as long as you and he were friendly he seemed satisfied. Oh, yes, I know the silly talk that was going around,” she put in as Mimi started to speak, “but nobody who counted ever believed that rot.”

“That wasn’t the reason we did what we did, Mrs. Hunter,” Mimi quickly broke in. “It was on account of Hilda⁠—”

“Hilda? What did she have to do with it?”

Mimi told her the story while Mrs. Hunter showed on her face the amazement she felt.

“Silly little fool!” she pontifically announced when Mimi had finished.

“She isn’t a silly little fool and she’s far too good a girl for Carl or any other boy I’ve seen around here!” Mimi hotly declared, her anger flaming high at the disparagement of her friend. It never occurred to her that she had applied the same term to Hilda or at least terms suspiciously similar in meaning.

“Oh, don’t misunderstand me, dearie,” Mrs. Hunter hastened to cover her hasty statement. “Mind you, I didn’t mean she wasn’t good enough for my Carl but that she didn’t show very good judgment. But that isn’t what I came to talk about. It’s this. Carl, since you and he stopped seeing each other, has taken to staying out nights with all sorts of people and three times this week he’s come home drunk. He’s in such a nasty temper I’ve been afraid to say anything to him and I know there’ll be a terrible scene when his father finds out about his carryings-on.”

“I’m sorry to hear Carl’s acting this way, Mrs. Hunter, but what have I got to do with it?” Mimi, puzzled, asked.

“I was wondering if you’d let him see you occasionally⁠—and⁠—and I thought maybe you cared enough to be willing to do that and see if he would stop. Oh, Mimi, he’s my boy and I want you to help me to save him from himself.”

Mimi did not know what to say. She felt sorry, terribly sorry, for Mrs. Hunter⁠—knowing her, she knew the ordeal through which the older woman was going, imperiously proud as she was, in abasing herself before a younger woman, an outsider, and confessing her weakness, her impotence in saving her own son. On the other hand there was her promise to Hilda. True, Carl had said twice he did not care and would never care for Hilda, but that made her own promise none the less binding. She felt impatience with Carl coming over her. She was not puritanical by nature but Carl’s rapid succumbing to temptation vexed her, he was destroying the ideal she had created in her mind of which he was the embodiment.

Her indecisiveness was due more than to any other cause to her own lack of understanding of the full importance of Mrs. Hunter’s words. This was not because of stupidity, it was because of Mimi’s amazing innocence of life. She had never fully realized why there should have been so much talk regarding the visit she and Carl had paid to the dance hall. The people she saw there she knew were not of her class nor were they of the kind she ever encountered. Margot and Jean had closely guarded Mimi from all influences which they felt might contaminate her mind. They had seen to it that her playmates were from families which observed identically the same customs and beliefs as did the Daquins. At school Mimi had heard phrases which would have shocked her had she understood their import but, knowing nothing of what they meant, she had given them no particular thought.

The same circumstance had existed during the years in Atlanta, where it was considered highly immoral to mention even the most rudimentary facts about oneself. Mimi had asked questions but these had been more or less skillfully evaded. She had asked only once about certain amazingly distressing things she noticed in her body and the answer to that query, implying as it did that she had said something she should not have mentioned, had sealed her lips. But in her own mind she had wondered at and been distressed by these things, by periods of intense depression when the most minor incident made her cry or laugh. Thus Mrs. Hunter’s dark suggestions regarding Carl’s deviations meant little to her and she wondered that his own mother and father could be so lacking in control over him that she had to appeal to her to help save him.

“I asked Carl at church two weeks ago,” she began, Mrs. Hunter meanwhile waiting anxiously for Mimi’s decision, “why he never came to see us anymore and he told me he didn’t want to.”

“Oh, please, Mimi,” the mother pleaded, begging almost piteously for her boy, “ask him again and again until he does come. You can save him⁠—if you will.”

“I’ve asked him once and if he doesn’t want to come to see me then I won’t ask him again,” Mimi said firmly.

Mrs. Hunter rose, her eyes wet with tears. She jabbed them jerkily with a tiny square of linen, ludicrously small for one of her bulk, Mimi thought irrelevantly even as she pitied the older woman’s plight.⁠ ⁠…

Mrs. Daquin sought skillfully to pry from Mimi the reason for Mrs. Hunter’s visit but Mimi evaded her questions and went to her own room. Her resentment against Carl increased. It was so silly of him to act as he was doing. Mrs. Hunter was an old frump, it was true, but she was a decent old sort after all. Mimi wondered just what he had been doing. Getting drunk was pretty bad for a young man who was yet in most respects a boy. Mimi remembered Jean and his demijohn of double port-wine after Margot died and before Mary Robertson came to New Orleans. Her loyalty to Jean and the contact with intoxication having removed some of its terrors made her maintain stoutly that getting drunk wasn’t the worst sin in the world. She wondered what sort of people Mrs. Hunter was referring to when she spoke of Carl’s new associates. There had been a note in Mrs. Hunter’s voice when she said it that brought little chills of apprehension to Mimi. Suppose Carl were killed by these shadowy and horrible creatures. Mimi felt an iciness gripping her that took her breath from her. The very indefiniteness of the danger that threatened Carl made it all the more terrifying and horrific.⁠ ⁠…