VI
I
At last George Farr gave up trying to see her. He had phoned vainly and time after time, at last the telephone became the end in place of the means: he had forgotten why he wanted to reach her. Finally he told himself that he hated her, that he would go away; finally he was going to as much pains to avoid her as he had been to see her. So he slunk about the streets like a criminal, avoiding her, feeling his very heart stop when he did occasionally see her unmistakable body from a distance. And at night he lay sleepless and writhing to think of her, then to rise and don a few garments and walk past her darkened house, gazing in slow misery at the room in which he knew she lay, soft and warm, in intimate slumber, then to return to home and bed, to dream of her brokenly.
When her note came at last, he knew relief, sharp and bitter as the pain had been. When he took the square white paper from the post office, when he saw her nervous spidery script sprawled thinly across it, he felt something like a shocking silent concussion at the base of his brain. I won’t go, he told himself, knowing that he would, and he reread it, wondering if he could bear to see her, if he could speak to her, touch her again.
He was ahead of the appointed time, sitting hidden from view at a turn of the stairs ascending to the balcony. The stairs were enclosed by a solid wood balustrade and from the foot of the steps the long tunnel of the drugstore swept toward light and the entrance, a tunnel filled with the mingled scents of carbolic and sweet syrups: a medicated, a synthetic purity.
He saw her as she entered the door and, rising, he saw her pause on seeing him, then, as in a dream, silhouetted against the door, with light toying with her white dress, giving it a shallow nimbus, she came tap-tapping on her high heels toward him. He sat back trembling and heard her mount the steps. He saw her dress, and feeling his breath catch, he raised his eyes to her face as without pausing she sank into his arms like a settling bird.
“Cecily, oh, Cecily,” he said brokenly, taking her kiss. He withdrew his mouth. “You damn near killed me.”
She drew his face quickly back to hers, murmuring against his cheek. He held her close and they sat so for a long time. At last he whispered: “You’ll ruin your dress sitting here.” But she only shook her head, clinging to him. Finally she sat up.
“Is this my drink?” she asked, picking up one of the glassed, sweetish liquids beside him. She put the other glass in his hand, and he closed his fingers about it, still looking at her.
“Now, we’ll have to get married,” he said, fatuously.
“Yes?” sipping her drink.
“Well, won’t we?” he asked, in surprise.
“You’ve got it backward. Now we don’t have to get married.” She gave him a quick glance, and seeing his face, she laughed. Her occasional coarseness so out of keeping with her innate and utter delicacy always shocked him. But then George Farr, like most men, was by nature a prude. He eyed her with disapproval, silent. She set her glass down and leaned her breast against him. “George?”
He thawed, putting his arm about her, but she refused her mouth. She thrust herself away from him and he, feeling that he had conquered, released her.
“But aren’t you going to marry me?”
“Darling, aren’t we already married, now? Do you doubt me, or is it only a marriage license will keep you true to me?”
“You know it isn’t.” He couldn’t tell her that it was jealousy, that he didn’t trust her. “It’s only that—”
“Only what?”
“Only that if you won’t marry me, you don’t love me.”
She moved from him. Her eyes became dark blue. “Can you say that?” She looked away, and her movement was half shiver, half shrug. “I might have known it, though. Well, I’ve been a fool, I guess. You were just—just passing the time with me, then?”
“Cecily—” trying to take her in his arms again. She evaded him and rose.
“I don’t blame you. I suppose that’s what any man would have done in your place. That’s all men ever want of me, anyway. So it might as well have been you, as anyone. … Only I’m sorry you didn’t tell me before—sooner, George. I thought you were different.” She gave him her narrow back. How little, how—how helpless she is! And I have hurt her, he thought, in sharp pain, rising and putting his arm about her, careless of who might see.
“Don’t, don’t!” she whispered quickly turning. Her eyes were quite green again. “Someone will see! Sit down!”
“Not till you take that back.”
“Sit down, sit down! Please, George! Please, please!”
“Take that back, then.”
Her eyes were dark again, and he read terror in her face, and he released her, sitting down again.
“Promise me not ever, ever, ever to do that again.”
He promised dully and she sat beside him. She slid her hand into his and he looked up.
“Why do you treat me like this?”
“Like what?” he asked.
“Saying I don’t love you. What other proof do you want? What other proof can I give? What do you consider proof? Tell me: I’ll try to do it.” She looked at him in delicate humility.
“I’m sorry: forgive me,” he said abjectly.
“I’ve already forgiven you. It’s forgetting it I can’t promise. I don’t doubt you, George. Or I couldn’t have. …” Her voice died away and she clutched his hand convulsively, releasing it. She rose. “I must go.”
He caught her hand. It was unresponsive. “May I see you this afternoon?”
“Oh, no. I can’t come back this afternoon. I have some sewing to do.”
“Oh, come on, put it off. Don’t treat me again like you did. I nearly went crazy. I swear I did.”
“Sweetheart, I can’t, I simply can’t. Don’t you know I want to see you as badly as you want to see me; that I would come if I could?”
“Let me come down there, then.”
“I believe you are crazy,” she told him, with contemplation. “Don’t you know I’m not supposed to see you at all?”
“Then I’m coming tonight.”
“Hush!” she whispered, quickly, descending the steps.
“But I am,” he repeated stubbornly. She looked hurriedly about the store, and her heart turned to water. Here, sitting at a table in the alcove made by the ascending stairs, was that fat man, with a half-empty glass before him.
She knew dreadful terror, and as she stared at his round, bent head, all her blood drained from her icy heart. She put her hand on the railing, lest she fall. Then this gave way to anger. The man was a nemesis: every time she had seen him since that first day at luncheon with Uncle Joe, he had flouted her, had injured her with diabolic ingenuity. And now, if he had heard—
George had risen, following her, but at her frantic gesture, her terror-stricken face, he retreated again. Then she changed her expression as readily as you would a hat. She descended the steps.
“Good morning, Mr. Jones.”
Jones looked up with his customary phlegmatic calm, then he rose, lazily courteous. She watched him narrowly with the terror-sharpened cunning of an animal, but his face and manner told nothing.
“Good morning, Miss Saunders.”
“You have the morning coca-cola habit, too, I see. Why didn’t you come up and join me?”
“I am still cursing myself for missing that pleasure. You see, I didn’t know you were alone.” His yellow bodyless stare was as impersonal as the jars of yellowish liquid in the windows and her heart sank.
“I didn’t see nor hear you come in, or I would have called to you.”
He was noncommittal. “Thank you. The misfortune is mine, however.”
She said suddenly: “I wonder if you will do me a favor? I have a thousand million things to do this morning. Will you go with me and help me remember them—do you mind?” Her eyes held a desperate coquetry.
Jones’ eyes were fathomless, slowly yellow. “I’ll be delighted.”
“Finish your drink, then.”
George Farr’s good-looking face, wrung and jealous, peered down at them. She made no sign, yet there was such pitiful terror in her whole attitude that even George’s dull and jealous intelligence took her meaning. His face sank again from view. Jones said:
“Let the drink go. I don’t know why I keep on trying the things. Make myself think I have a highball, perhaps.”
She laughed in three notes. “You can’t expect to satisfy tastes like that in this town. In Atlanta now—”
“Yes, you can do lots of things in Atlanta you can’t do here.”
She laughed again, flatteringly, and they moved up the antiseptic tunnel of the drug store, toward the entrance. She would laugh in such a way as to lend the most innocent remark a double entendre: you immediately accepted the fact that you had said something clever, without recalling what it was at all. Jones’ yellow idol’s stare remarked her body’s articulation, her pretty, nervous face, while George Farr, in a sick, dull rage, watched them in silhouette, flatly. Then they reassumed depth and she, fragile as a Tanagra, and he, slouching and shapeless and tweeded, disappeared.
II
“Say,” said young Robert Saunders, “are you a soldier, too?”
Jones, lunching to a slow completion, heavily courteous, deferentially conversational, had already won Mrs. Saunders. Of Mr. Saunders he was not so sure, nor did he care. Finding that the guest knew practically nothing about money or crops or politics, Mr. Saunders soon let him be to gossip trivially with Mrs. Saunders. Cecily was perfect: pleasantly tactful, letting him talk. Young Robert though was bent on a seduction of his own.
“Say,” he repeated, for the third time, watching Jones’ every move with admiration—“was you a soldier, too?”
“Were, Robert,” corrected his mother.
“Yessum. Was you a soldier in the war?”
“Robert. Let Mr. Jones alone, now.”
“Sure, old fellow,” Jones answered. “I fought some.”
“Oh, did you?” asked Mrs. Saunders. “How interesting,” she commented without interest. Then: “I suppose you never happened to run across Donald Mahon in France, did you?”
“No. I had very little time in which to meet people, you see,” replied Jones with gravity, who had never seen the Statue of Liberty—even from behind.
“What did you do?” asked young Robert indefatigable.
“I suppose so.” Mrs. Saunders sighed with repletion and rang a bell. “The war was so big. Shall we go?”
Jones drew her chair and young Robert repeated tirelessly: “What did you do in the war? Did you kill folks?”
The older people passed on to the veranda. Cecily, with a gesture of her head, indicated a door and Jones entered, followed by young Robert, still importunate. The scent of Mr. Saunders’ cigar wafted down the hall and into the room where they sat and young Robert, refraining his litany, caught Jones’ yellow, fathomless eye like a snake’s, and young Robert’s spine knew an abrupt, faint chill. Watching Jones cautiously he moved nearer his sister.
“Run along, Bobby. Don’t you see that real soldiers never like to talk about themselves?”
He was nothing loath. He suddenly desired to be in the warm sun. This room had got cold. Still watching Jones he sidled past him to the door. “Well,” he remarked, “I guess I’ll be going.”
“What did you do to him?” she asked, when he had gone.
“I? Nothing. Why?”
“You scared him, some way. Didn’t you see how he watched you?”
“No, I didn’t notice it.” He filled his pipe, slowly.
“I suppose not. But then you frighten lots of people, don’t you?”
“Not as many as you’d think. Lots of them I’d like to frighten can take care of themselves too well.”
“Yes? But why frighten them?”
“Sometimes that’s the only way to get what you want from people.”
“Oh. … They have a name for that, haven’t they? Blackmail, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
She shrugged with assumed indifference. “Why do you ask me about it?”
His yellow stare became unbearable and she looked away. How quiet it is outside, under the spell of noon. Trees shaded the house, the room was dark and cool. Furniture was slow unemphatic gleams of lesser dark and young Robert Saunders, at the age of sixty-five, was framed and indistinct above the mantel: her grandfather.
She wished for George. He should be here to help her. But what could he do? she reconsidered with that vast tolerance of their men which women must gain by giving their bodies (else how do they continue to live with them?) that the conquering male is after all no better than a clumsy, tactless child. She examined Jones with desperate speculation. If he were not so fat! Like a worm.
She repeated: “Why do you ask me?”
“I don’t know. You have never been frightened by anyone, have you?”
She watched him, not replying.
“Perhaps that’s because you have never done anything to be afraid of?”
She sat on a divan, her hands palm up on either side, watching him. He rose suddenly and she as suddenly shed her careless laxness, becoming defensive, watchful. But he only scratched a match on the iron grate screen. He sucked it into his pipe bowl while she watched the fleshy concavity of his cheeks and the golden pulsations of the flame in his eyes. He pushed the match through the screen and resumed his seat. But she did not relax.
“When are you to be married?” he asked suddenly.
“Married?”
“Yes. Isn’t it all arranged?”
She felt slow, slow blood in her throat and wrists, in her palms: her blood seemed to mark away an interval that would never pass. Jones, watching the light in her fine hair, lazy and yellow as an idol, Jones released her at last. “He expects it, you know.”
Her blood liquefied again and became cold. She could feel the skin all over her body. She said: “What makes you think he does? He is too sick to expect anything, now.”
“He?”
“You said Donald expects it.”
“My dear girl, I said. …” He could see a nimbus of light in her hair and the shape of her, but her face he could not see. He rose. She did not move as he sat beside her. The divan sank luxuriously beneath his weight, sensuously enfolding him. She did not move, her hand lay palm up between them, but he ignored it. “Why don’t you ask me how much I heard?”
“Heard? When?” Her whole attitude expressed ingenuous interest.
He knew that in her examination of his face there was calm speculation and probably contempt. He considered moving beyond her so that she must face the light and leave his own face in shadow. … The light in her hair, caressing the shape of her cheek. Her hand between them, naked and palm upward, grew to be a monstrous size: it was the symbol of her body. His hand a masculine body for hers to curl inside. Browning, is it? seeing noon become afternoon, becoming gold and slightly wearied among leaves like the limp hands of women. Her hand was a frail, impersonal barrier, restraining him.
“You attach a lot of importance to a kiss, don’t you?” she asked at length. He shaped her unresponsive hand to his and she continued lightly: “That’s funny, in you.”
“Why, in me?”
“You’ve had lots of girls crazy about you, haven’t you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. The way you—everything about you.” She could never decide exactly about him. The feminine predominated so in him, and the rest of him was feline: a woman with a man’s body and a cat’s nature.
“I expect you are right. You are an authority regarding your own species yourself.” He released her hand saying, “Excuse me,” and lit his pipe again. Her hand remained lax, impersonal between them: it might have been a handkerchief. He pushed the dead match through the screen and said:
“What makes you think I attach so much importance to a kiss?”
Light in her hair was the thumbed rim of a silver coin, the divan embraced her quietly and light quietly followed the long slope of her limbs. A wind came among leaves without the window, stroking them together. Noon was past.
“I mean, you think that whenever a woman kisses a man or tells him something, that she means something by it.”
“She does mean something by it. Of course it never is what the poor devil thinks she means, but she means something.”
“Then you certainly don’t blame the woman if the man chooses to think she meant something she didn’t at all mean, do you?”
“Why not? It would be the devil of a chaotic world if you never could count on whether or not people mean what they say. You knew damn well what I meant when you let me kiss you that day.”
“But I don’t know that you meant anything, any more than I did. You are the one who—”
“Like hell you didn’t,” Jones interrupted roughly. “You knew what I meant by it.”
“I think we are getting personal,” she told him, with faint distaste.
Jones sucked his pipe. “Certainly, we are. What else are we interested in except you and me?”
She crossed her knees. “Never in my life—”
“In God’s name, don’t say it. I have heard that from so many women. I had expected better of someone as vain as I am.”
He would be fairly decent looking, she thought, if he were not so fat—and could dye his eyes another color. After a while, she spoke.
“What do you think I mean when I do either of them?”
“I couldn’t begin to say. You are a fast worker, too fast for me. I doubt if I could keep up with the men you kiss and lie to, let alone with what you mean in each case. I don’t think you can yourself.”
“So you cannot imagine letting people make love to you and saying things to them without meaning anything by it?”
“I cannot. I always mean something by what I say or do.”
“For instance?” her voice was faintly interested, ironical.
Again he considered moving, so that her face would be in light and his in shadow. But then he would no longer be beside her. He said roughly: “I meant by that kiss that some day I intend to have your body.”
“Oh,” she said sweetly, “it’s all arranged, then? How nice. I can now understand your success with us. Just a question of will power, isn’t it? Look the beast in the eye and he—I mean she—is yours. That must save a lot of your valuable time and trouble, I imagine?”
Jones’ stare was calm, bold and contemplative, obscene as a goat’s. “You don’t believe I can?” he asked.
She shrugged delicately, nervously, and her lax hand between them grew again like a flower: it was as if her whole body became her hand. The symbol of a delicate, bodyless lust. Her hand seemed to melt into his yet remain without volition, her hand unawaked in his and her body also yet sleeping, crushed softly about with her fragile clothing. Her long legs, not for locomotion, but for the studied completion of a rhythm carried to its nth: compulsion of progress, movement; her body created for all men to dream after. A poplar, vain and pliant, trying attitude after attitude, gesture after gesture—“a girl trying gown after gown, perplexed but in pleasure.” Her unseen face nimbused with light and her body, which was no body, crumpling a dress that had been dreamed. Not for maternity, not even for love: a thing for the eye and the mind. Epicene, he thought, feeling her slim bones, the bitter nervousness latent in her flesh.
“If I really held you close you’d pass right through me like a ghost, I am afraid,” he said and his clasp was loosely about her.
“Quite a job,” she said coarsely. “Why are you so fat?”
“Hush,” he told her, “you’ll spoil it.”
His embrace but touched her and she, with amazing tact, suffered him. Her skin was neither warm nor cool, her body in the divan’s embrace was nothing, her limbs only an indication of crushed texture. He refused to hear her breath as he refused to feel a bodily substance in his arms. Not an ivory carving: this would have body, rigidity; not an animal that eats and digests—this is the heart’s desire purged of flesh. “Be quiet,” he told himself as much as her, “don’t spoil it.”
The trumpets in his blood, the symphony of living, died away. The golden sand of hours bowled by day ran through the narrow neck of time into the corresponding globe of night, to be inverted and so flow back again. Jones felt the slow, black sand of time marking life away. “Hush,” he said, “don’t spoil it.”
The sentries in her blood lay down, but they lay down near the ramparts with their arms in their hands, waiting the alarm, the inevitable stand-to, and they sat clasped in the vaguely gleamed twilight of the room, Jones a fat Mirandola in a chaste Platonic nympholepsy, a religio-sentimental orgy in gray tweed, shaping an insincere, fleeting articulation of damp clay to an old imperishable desire, building himself a papier-mâché Virgin: and Cecily Saunders wondering what, how much, he had heard, frightened and determined. What manner of man was this? she thought alertly, wanting George to be there and put an end to this situation, how she did not know; wondering if the fact of his absence were significant.
Outside the window leaves stirred and cried soundlessly. Noon was past. And under the bowled pale sky, trees and grass, hills and valleys, somewhere the sea, regretted him, with relief.
No, no, he thought, with awakened despair, don’t spoil it. But she had moved and her hair brushed his face. Hair. Everyone, anyone, has hair. (To hold it, to hold it.) But it was hair and here was a body in his arms, fragile and delicate it might be, but still a body, a woman: something to answer the call of his flesh, to retreat pausing, touching him tentatively, teasing and retreating, yet still answering the call of his flesh. Impalpable and dominating. He removed his arm.
“You little fool, don’t you know you had me?”
Her position had not changed. The divan embraced her in its impersonal clasp. Light like the thumbed rim of a coin about her indistinct face, her long legs crushed to her dress. Her hand, relaxed, lay slim and lax between them. But he ignored it.
“Tell me what you heard,” she said.
He rose. “Goodbye,” he said. “Thanks for lunch, or dinner, or whatever you call it.”
“Dinner,” she told him. “We are common people.” She rose also and studiedly leaned her hip against the arm of a chair. His yellow eyes washed over her warm and clear as urine, and he said, “God damn you.” She sat down again leaning back into the corner of the divan and as he sat beside her, seemingly without moving, she came to him.
“Tell me what you heard.”
He embraced her, silent and morose. She moved slightly and he knew that she was offering her mouth.
“How do you prefer a proposal?” he asked.
“How?”
“Yes. What form do you like it in? You have had two or three in the last few days, haven’t you?”
“Are you proposing?”
“That was my humble intention. Sorry I’m dull. That was why I asked for information.”
“So when you can’t get your women any other way, you marry them, then?”
“Dammit, do you think all a man wants of you is your body?” She was silent and he continued: “I am not going to tell on you, you know.” Her tense body, her silence, was a question. “What I heard, I mean.”
“Do you think I care? You have told me yourself that women say one thing and mean another. So I don’t have to worry about what you heard. You said so yourself.” Her body became a direct challenge, yet she had not moved. “Didn’t you?”
“Don’t do that,” he said sharply. “What makes you so beautiful and disturbing and so goddammed dull?”
“What do you mean? I am not used—”
“Oh, I give up. I can’t explain to you. And you wouldn’t understand, anyway. I know I am temporarily a fool, so if you tell me I am, I’ll kill you.”
“Who knows? I may like that.” Her soft, coarse voice was quiet.
Light in her hair, her mouth speaking and the vague, crushed shape of her body. “Atthis,” he said.
“What did you call me?”
He told her. “ ‘For a moment, an aeon, I pause plunging above the narrow precipice of thy breast’ and on and on and on. Do you know how falcons make love? They embrace at an enormous height and fall locked, beak to beak, plunging: an unbearable ecstasy. While we have got to assume all sorts of ludicrous postures, knowing our own sweat. The falcon breaks his clasp and swoops away swift and proud and lonely, while a man must rise and take his hat and walk out.”
She was not listening, hadn’t heard him. “Tell me what you heard,” she repeated. Where she touched him was a cool fire; he moved but she followed like water. “Tell me what you heard.”
“What difference does it make, what I heard? I don’t care anything about your jelly-beans. You can have all the Georges and Donalds you want. Take them all for lovers if you like. I don’t want your body. If you can just get that through your beautiful thick head, if you will just let me alone, I will never want it again.”
“But you have proposed to me. What do you want of me?”
“You wouldn’t understand, if I tried to tell you.”
“Then if I did marry you, how would I know how to act toward you? I think you are crazy.”
“That’s what I have been trying to tell you,” Jones answered in a calm fury. “You won’t have to act anyway toward me. I will do that. Act with your Donalds and Georges, I tell you.”
She was like a light globe from which the current has been shut. “I think you’re crazy,” she repeated.
“I know I am.” He rose abruptly. “Goodbye. Shall I see your mother, or will you thank her for lunch for me?”
Without moving she said: “Come here.”
In the hall, he could hear Mrs. Saunders’ chair as it creaked to her rocking, through the front door he saw trees, the lawn and the street. She said Come here again. Her body was a vague white shape as he entered the room again and light was the thumbed rim of a coin about her head. He said:
“If I come back, you know what it means.”
“But I can’t marry you. I am engaged.”
“I wasn’t talking about that.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“Goodbye,” he repeated. At the front door he could hear Mr. and Mrs. Saunders talking but from the room he had left came a soft movement, louder than any other sound. He thought she was following him, but the door remained empty and when he looked into the room again she sat as he had left her. He could not even tell if she were looking at him.
“I thought you had gone,” she remarked.
After a time he said: “Men have lied to you a lot, haven’t they?”
“What makes you say that?”
He looked at her a long moment. Then he turned to the door again. “Come here,” she repeated quickly.
She made no movement, save to slightly avert her face as he embraced her. “I’m not going to kiss you,” he told her.
“I’m not so sure of that.” Yet his clasp was impersonal.
“Listen. You are a shallow fool, but at least you can do as you are told. And that is, let me alone about what I heard. Do you understand? You’ve got that much sense, haven’t you? I’m not going to hurt you: I don’t even want to see you again. So just let me alone about it. If I heard anything I have already forgotten it—and it’s damn seldom I do anything this decent. Do you hear?”
She was cool and pliant as a young tree in his arms and against his jaw she said: “Tell me what you heard.”
“All right then,” he said savagely. His hand cupped her shoulder, holding her powerless and his other hand ruthlessly brought her face around. She resisted, twisting her face against his fat palm.
“No, no; tell me first.”
He dragged her face up brutally and she said in a smothered whisper: “You are hurting me!”
“I don’t give a damn. That might go with George, but not with me.”
He saw her eyes go dark, saw the red print of his fingers on her cheek and chin. He held her face where the light could fall on it, examining it with sybaritish anticipation. She exclaimed quickly, staring at him: “Here comes daddy! Stop!”
But it was Mrs. Saunders in the door, and Jones was calm, circumspect, lazy and remote as an idol.
“Why, it’s quite cool in here, isn’t it? But so dark. How do you keep awake?” said Mrs. Saunders, entering. “I nearly went to sleep several times on the porch. But the glare is so bad on the porch. Robert went off to school without his hat: I don’t know what he will do.”
“Perhaps they haven’t a porch at the school house,” murmured Jones.
“Why, I don’t recall. But our school is quite modern. It was built in—when was it built, Cecily?”
“I don’t know, mamma.”
“Yes. But it is quite new. Was it last year or the year before, darling?”
“I don’t know, mamma.”
“I told him to wear his hat because of the glare, but of course, he didn’t. Boys are so hard to manage. Were you hard to manage when you were a child, Mr. Jones?”
“No, ma’am,” answered Jones, who had no mother that he could name and who might have claimed any number of possible fathers, “I never gave my parents much trouble. I am of a quiet nature, you see. In fact, until I reached my eleventh year, the only time I ever knew passion was one day when I discovered beneath the imminent shadow of our annual picnic that my Sunday school card was missing. At our church they gave prizes for attendance and knowing the lesson, and my card bore forty-one stars, when it disappeared.” Jones grew up in a Catholic orphanage, but like Henry James, he attained verisimilitude by means of tediousness.
“How dreadful. And did you find it again?”
“Oh, yes. I found it in time for the picnic. My father had used it to enter a one-dollar bet on a racehorse. When I went to my father’s place of business to prevail on him to return home, as was my custom, just as I passed through the swinging doors, one of his business associates there was saying. ‘Whose card is this?’ I recognized my forty-one stars immediately, and claimed it, collecting twenty-two dollars, by the way. Since then I have been a firm believer in Christianity.”
“How interesting,” Mrs. Saunders commented, without having heard him. “I wish Robert liked Sunday school as much as that.”
“Perhaps he would, at twenty-two to one.”
“Pardon me?” she said. Cecily rose, and Mrs. Saunders said: “Darling, if Mr. Jones is going, perhaps you had better lie down. You look tired. Don’t you think she looks tired, Mr. Jones?”
“Yes, indeed. I had just commented on it.”
“Now, mamma,” said Cecily.
“Thank you for lunch.” Jones moved doorward and Mrs. Saunders replied conventionally, wondering why he did not try to reduce. (But perhaps he is trying, she added, with belated tolerance.) Cecily followed him.
“Do come again,” she told him staring at his face. “How much did you hear?” she whispered, with fierce desperation. “You must tell me.”
Jones bowed fatly to Mrs. Saunders, and again bathed the girl in his fathomless, yellow stare. She stood beside him in the door and the afternoon fell full upon her slender fragility. Jones said:
“I am coming tonight.”
She whispered, “What?” and he repeated.
“You heard that?” Her mouth shaped the words against her blanched face. “You heard that?”
“I say that.”
Blood came beneath her skin again and her eyes became opaque, cloudy. “No, you aren’t,” she told him. He looked at her calmly, and her knuckles whitened on his sleeve. “Please,” she said, with utter sincerity. He made no answer, and she added: “Suppose I tell daddy?”
“Come in again, Mr. Jones,” Mrs. Saunders said. Jones’ mouth shaped You don’t dare. Cecily stared at him in hatred and bitter desperation, in helpless terror and despair. “So glad to have you,” Mrs. Saunders was saying. “Cecily, you had better lie down: you don’t look at all well. Cecily is not very strong, Mr. Jones.”
“Yes, indeed. One can easily see she isn’t strong,” Jones agreed, politely. The screen door severed them and Cecily’s mouth, elastic and mobile as red rubber, shaped Don’t.
But Jones made no reply. He descended wooden steps and walked beneath locust trees in which bees were busy. Roses were slashed upon green bushes, roses red as the mouths of courtesans, red as Cecily’s mouth, shaping Don’t.
She watched his fat, lazy, tweed back until he reached the gate and the street, then she turned to where her mother stood in impatient anticipation of her freed stout body. The light was behind her and the older woman could not see her face, but there was something in her attitude, in the relaxed hopeless tension of her body that caused the other to look at her in quick alarm.
“Cecily?”
The girl touched her and Mrs. Saunders put her arm around her daughter. The older woman had eaten too much, as usual, and she breathed heavily, knowing her corsets, counting the minutes until she would be free of them.
“Cecily?”
“Where is daddy, mamma?”
“Why, he’s gone to town. What is it, baby?” She asked, quickly, “what’s the matter?”
Cecily clung to her mother. The other was like a rock, a panting rock: something imperishable, impervious to passion and fear. And heartless.
“I must see him,” she answered. “I have just got to see him.”
The other said: “There, there. Go to your room and lie down a while.” She sighed heavily. “No wonder you don’t feel well. Those new potatoes at dinner! When will I learn when to stop eating? But if it isn’t one thing, it’s another, isn’t it? Darling, would you mind coming in and unlacing me? I think I’ll lie down a while before I dress to go to Mrs. Coleman’s.”
“Yes, mamma. Of course,” she answered, wanting her father, George, anyone, to help her.
III
George Farr, lurking along a street, climbed a fence swiftly when the exodus from the picture show came along. Despite himself, he simply could not act as though he were out for a casual stroll, but must drift aimlessly and noticeably back and forth along the street with a sort of skulking frankness. He was too nervous to go somewhere else and time his return; he was too nervous to conceal himself and stay there. So he gave up and became frankly skulking, climbing a fence smartly when the exodus from the picture show began.
Nine-Thirty
People sat on porches rocking and talking in low tones, enjoying the warmth of April, people passing beneath dark trees along the street, old and young, men and women, making comfortable, unintelligible sounds, like cattle going to barn and bed. Tiny red eyes passed along at mouth-height and burning tobacco lingered behind sweet and pungent. Spitting arc lights, at street corners, revealed the passersby, temporarily dogging them with elastic shadows. Cars passed under the lights and he recognized friends: young men and the inevitable girls with whom they were “going”—coiffed or bobbed hair and slim young hands fluttering forever about it, keeping it in place. … The cars passed on into darkness, into another light, into darkness again.
Ten O’Clock
Dew on the grass, dew on small unpickable roses, making them sweeter, giving them an odor. Otherwise, they had no odor, except that of youth and growth, as young girls have no particular attributes, save the kinship of youth and growth. Dew on the grass, the grass assumed a faint luminousness as if it had stolen light from day and the moisture of night were releasing it, giving it back to the world again. Tree frogs shrilled in the trees, insects droned in the grass. Tree frogs are poison, negroes had told him. If they spit on you, you’ll die. When he moved they fell silent (getting ready to spit, perhaps), when he became still again, they released the liquid flute-like monotony swelling in their throats, filling the night with the imminence of summer. Spring, like a girl loosing her girdle. … People passed in belated ones and twos. Words reached him in meaningless snatches. Fireflies had not yet come.
Ten-Thirty
Rocking blurs on the verandas of houses rose and went indoors, entering rooms, and lights went off here and there, beyond smoothly descending shades. George Farr stole across a deserted lawn to a magnolia tree. Beneath it, fumbling in a darkness so inky that the rest of the world seemed quite visible in comparison, he found a water tap. Water gushed, filling his incautious shoe, and a mockingbird flew darkly and suddenly out. He drank, wetting his dry hot mouth, and returned to his post. When he was still again, the frogs and insects teased at silence gently, not to break it completely. As the small odorless roses unfolded under the dew their scent grew as though they, too, were growing, doubling in size.
Eleven O’Clock
Solemnly the clock on the courthouse, staring its four bland faces across the town, like a kind and sleepless god, dropped eleven measured golden bells of sound. Silence carried them away, silence and dark that passing along the street like a watchman, snatched scraps of light from windows, palming them as a pickpocket palms snatched handkerchiefs. A belated car passed swiftly. Nice girls must be home by eleven. The street, the town, the world, was empty for him.
He lay on his back in a slow consciousness of relaxing muscles, feeling his back and thighs and legs luxuriously. It became so quiet that he dared to smoke, though being careful not to expose the match unduly. Then he lay down again, stretching, feeling the gracious earth through his clothing. After a while his cigarette burned down and he spun it from two fingers and sickled his knee until he could reach his ankle, scratching. Life of some sort was also down his back, or it felt like it, which was the same thing. He writhed his back against the earth and the irritation ceased. … It must be eleven-thirty by now. He waited for what he judged to be five minutes, then he held his watch this way and that, trying to read it. But it only tantalized him: he could have sworn to almost any hour or minute you could name. So he cupped another cautious match. It was eleven-fourteen. Hell.
He lay back again cradling his head in his clasped arms. From this position the sky became a flat plane, flat as the brass-studded lid of a dark-blue box. Then, as he watched, it assumed depth again, it was as if he lay on the bottom of the sea while seaweed, clotting blackly, lifted surfaceward unshaken by any current, motionless; it was as if he lay on his stomach, staring downward into water into which his gorgon’s hair, clotting blackly, hung motionless. Eleven-thirty.
He had lost his body. He could not feel it at all. It was as though vision were a bodiless Eye suspended in dark-blue space, an Eye without Thought, regarding without surprise an antic world where wanton stars galloped neighing like unicorns in blue meadows. … After a while, the Eye, having nothing in or by which to close itself, ceased to see, and he waked, thinking that he was being tortured, that his arms were being crushed and wrung from his body. He dreamed that he had screamed, and finding that to move his arms was an agony equaled only by that of letting them stay where they were, he rolled writhing, chewing his lip. His whole blood took fire: the pain became a swooning ecstasy that swooned away. Yet they still felt like somebody else’s arms, even after the pain had gone. He could not even take out his watch, he was afraid he would not be able to climb the fence.
But he achieved this, knowing it was midnight, because the street lamps had been turned off, and in the personal imminent desertion of the street he slunk, feeling, though there was none to see him, more like a criminal than ever, now that his enterprise was really under way. He walked on trying to bolster his moral courage, trying not to look like a sneaking nigger, but, in spite of him, it seemed that every dark quiet house stared at him, watching him with blank and lightless eyes, making his back itch after he had passed. But what if they do see me? What am I doing, that anyone should not do? Walking along a deserted street after midnight. That’s all. But this did not stop the prickling of hair on the back of his neck.
His gait faltered, not quite stopping altogether: near the trunk of a tree, he discerned movement, a thicker darkness. His first impulse was to turn back, then he cursed himself for an excitable fool. Suppose it were someone. He had as much right to the street as the other had—more, if the other were concealing himself. He strode on no longer skulking, feeling on the contrary quite righteous. As he passed the tree, the thicker darkness shifted slowly. Whoever it was did not wish to be seen. The other evidently feared him more than he did the other, so he passed on boldly. He looked back once or twice, but saw nothing.
Her house was dark, but remembering the shadow behind the tree, and for the sake of general precaution, he passed steadily on. After a block or so he halted, straining his ears. Nothing save the peaceful, unemphatic sounds of night. He crossed the street and stopped again, listening. Nothing. Frogs and crickets, and that was all. He walked in the grass beside the pavement, stealing quiet as a shadow to the corner of her lawn. He climbed the fence and, crouching, stole along beside a hedge until he was opposite the house, where he stopped again. The house was still, unlighted, bulking huge and square in slumber and he sped swiftly from the shadow of the hedge to the shadow of the veranda at the place where a French window gave upon it. He sat down in a flower bed, leaning his back against the wall.
The turned flower bed filled the darkness with the smell of fresh earth, something friendly and personal in a world of enormous vague formless shapes of greater and lesser darkness. The night, the silence, was complete and profound: a formless region filled with the smell of fresh earth and the measured ticking of the watch in his pocket. After a time, he felt soft damp earth through his trousers upon his thighs and he sat in a slow physical content, a oneness with the earth, waiting a sound from the dark house at his back. He heard a sound after a while but it was from the street. He sat still and calm. With the inconsistency of his kind, he felt safer here, where he had no business being, than on the street to which he had every right. The sound, approaching, became two vague figures, and Tobe and the cook passed along the drive toward their quarters, murmuring softly to each other. … Soon the night was again vague and vast and empty.
Again he became one with the earth, with dark and silence, with his own body … with her body, like a little silver water sweetly dividing … turned earth and hyacinths along a veranda, swinging soundless bells. … How can breasts be as small as yours, and yet be breasts … the dull gleam of her eyes beneath lowered lids, of her teeth beneath her lip, her arms rising like two sweet wings of a dream. … Her body like.
He took breath into himself, holding it. Something came slow and shapeless across the lawn toward him, pausing opposite. He breathed again, held his breath again. The thing moved and came directly toward him and he sat motionless until it had almost reached the flower bed in which he sat. Then he sprang to his feet and before the other could raise a hand he fell upon the intruder, raging silently. The man accepted battle and they fell clawing and panting, making no outcry. They were at such close quarters, it was so dark, that they could not damage each other, and intent on battle, they were oblivious of their surroundings until Jones hissed suddenly beneath George Farr’s armpit:
“Look out! Somebody’s coming!”
They paused mutually and sat clasping each other like the first position of a sedentary dance. A light had appeared suddenly in a lower window and with one accord they rose and hurled themselves into the shadow of the porch, plunging into the flower bed as Mr. Saunders stepped through the window. Crushing themselves against the brick wall, they lay in a mutual passion for concealment, hearing Mr. Saunders’ feet on the floor above their heads. They held their breath, closing their eyes like ostriches and the man came to the edge of the veranda, and standing directly over them, he shook cigar ashes upon them and spat across their prone bodies … after years had passed, he turned and went away.
After a while Jones heaved and George Farr released his cramped body. The light was off again and the house bulked huge and square, sleeping among the trees. They rose and stole across the lawn and after they had passed the frogs and crickets resumed their mild monotonies.
“What—” began George Farr, once they were on the street again.
“Shut up,” Jones interrupted. “Wait until we are farther away.”
They walked side by side, and George Farr, seething, decided upon what he considered a safe distance. Stopping, he faced the other.
“What in hell were you doing there?” he burst out.
Jones had dirt on his face and his collar had burst. George Farr’s tie was like a hangman’s noose under his ear and he wiped his face with his handkerchief.
“What were you doing there?” Jones countered.
“None of your damn business,” he answered hotly. “What I ask is, what in hell do you mean, hanging around that house?”
“Maybe she asked me to. What do you think of that?”
“You lie,” said George Farr, springing upon him. They fought again in the darkness, beneath the arching silence of elms. Jones was like a bear and George Farr, feeling his soft enveloping hug, kicked Jones’ legs from under him. They fell, Jones uppermost, and George lay gasping, with breath driven from his lungs, while Jones held him upon his back.
“How about it?” Jones asked, thinking of his shin. “Got enough?”
For reply, George Farr heaved and struggled, but the other held him down, thumping his head rhythmically upon the hard earth. “Come on, come on. Don’t act like a child. What do we want to fight for?”
“Take back what you said about her, then,” he panted. Then he lay still and cursed Jones. Jones, unmoved, repeated:
“Got enough? Promise?”
George Farr arched his back, writhing, trying vainly to cast off Jones’ fat enveloping bulk. At last he promised in weak rage, almost weeping, and Jones removed his soft weight. George sat up.
“You better go home,” Jones advised him, rising to his feet. “Come on, get up.” He took George’s arm and tugged at it.
“Let go, you bastard!”
“Funny how things get around,” remarked Jones mildly, releasing him. George got slowly to his feet and Jones continued: “Run along, now. You have been out late enough. Had a fight and everything.”
George Farr, panting, rearranged his clothes. Jones bulked vaguely beside him. “Good night,” said Jones, at last.
“Good night.”
They faced each other and after a time Jones repeated:
“Good night, I said.”
“I heard you.”
“What’s the matter? Not going in now?”
“Hell, no.”
“Well, I am.” He turned away. “See you again.” George Farr followed him, doggedly. Jones, slow and fat, shapeless, in the darkness, remarked: “Do you live down this way now? You’ve moved recently, haven’t you?”
“I live wherever you do tonight,” George told him, stubbornly.
“Thanks, awfully. But I have only one bed and I don’t like to sleep double. So I can’t ask you in. Some other time.”
They walked slowly beneath dark trees, in dogged intimacy. The clock on the courthouse struck one and the stroke died away into silence. After a while Jones stopped again. “Look here, what are you following me for?”
“She didn’t ask you to come there tonight.”
“How do you know. If she asked you, she would ask someone else.”
“Listen,” said George Farr, “if you don’t let her alone, I’ll kill you. I swear I will.”
“Salut,” murmured Jones. “Ave Caesar. … Why don’t you tell her father that? Perhaps he’ll let you set up a tent on the lawn to protect her. Now, you go on and let me alone, do you hear?” George held his ground stubbornly. “You want me to beat hell out of you again?” Jones suggested.
“Try it,” George whispered with dry passion. Jones said:
“Well, we’ve both wasted this night, anyway. It’s too late, now—”
“I’ll kill you! She never told you to come at all. You just followed me. I saw you behind that tree. You let her alone, do you hear?”
“In God’s name, man! Don’t you see that all I want now is sleep? Let’s go home, for heaven’s sake.”
“You swear you are going home?”
“Yes, yes. I swear. Good night.”
George Farr watched the other’s shapeless fading figure, soon it became but a thicker shadow among shadows. Then he turned homeward himself in cooled anger and bitter disappointment and desire. That blundering idiot had interfered this time, perhaps he would interfere every time. Or perhaps she would change her mind, perhaps, since he had failed her tonight. … Even Fate envied him this happiness, this unbearable happiness, he thought bitterly. Beneath trees arching the quiet sky, spring loosing her girdle languorous … her body, like a narrow pool, sweetly. … I thought I had lost you, I found you again, and now he. … He paused, sharply struck by a thought, an intuition. He turned and sped swiftly back.
He stood near a tree at the corner of the lawn and after a short time he saw something moving shapeless and slow across the faint grass, along a hedge. He strode out boldly and the other saw him and paused, then that one, too, stood erect and came boldly to meet him. Jones joined him, murmuring, “Oh, hell,” and they stood in static dejection, side by side.
“Well?” challenged George Farr, at last.
Jones sat down heavily on the sidewalk. “Let’s smoke a while,” he suggested, in that impersonal tone which people sitting up with corpses use.
George Farr sat beside him and Jones held a match to his cigarette, then lit his own pipe. He sighed, clouding his head with an unseen pungency of tobacco. George Farr sighed also, resting his back against a tree. The stars swam on like the masthead lights of squadrons and squadrons on a dark river, going on and on. Darkness and silence and a world turning through darkness toward another day. … The bark of the tree was rough, the ground was hard. He wished vaguely that he were fat like Jones, temporarily. …
… Then, waking, it was about to be dawn. He no longer felt the earth and the tree save when he moved. It seemed to him that his thighs must be flattened like a tabletop and that his back had assumed depressions into which the projections of the tree trunk fitted like the locked rims of wheels.
There was a rumor of light eastward, somewhere beyond her house and the room where she lay in the soft familiar intimacy of sleep, like a faintly blown trumpet; soon perspective returned to a mysterious world, and instead of being a huge portentous shadow among lesser shadows, Jones was only a fat young man in baggy tweed, white and pathetic and snoring on his back.
George Farr, waking, saw him so, saw earth stains on him and a faint incandescence of dew. George Farr bore earth stains himself and his tie was a hangman’s knot beneath his ear. The wheel of the world, slowing through the hours of darkness, passed the dead center point and gained momentum. After a while Jones opened his eyes, groaning. He rose stiffly, stretching and spitting, yawning.
“Good time to go in, I think,” he said. George Farr, tasting his own sour mouth, moved and felt little pains, like tiny red ants, running over him. He, too, rose and they stood side by side. They yawned again.
Jones turned fatly, limping a little.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night.”
The east grew yellow, then red, and day had really come into the world, breaking the slumber of sparrows.
IV
But Cecily Saunders was not asleep. Lying on her back in her bed, in her dark room she, too, heard the hushed sounds of night, smelled the sweet scents of spring and dark and growing things: the earth, watching the wheel of the world, the terrible calm, inevitability of life, turning through the hours of darkness, passing its dead center point and turning faster, drawing the waters of dawn up from the hushed cistern of the east, breaking the slumber of sparrows.
V
“May I see him,” she pleaded hysterically, “may I? Oh, may I, please?”
Mrs. Powers, seeing her face, said: “Why, child! What is it? What is it, darling?”
“Alone, alone. Please. May I? May I?”
“Of course. What—”
“Thank you, thank you.” She sped down the hall and crossed the study like a bird.
“Donald, Donald! It’s Cecily, sweetheart. Cecily. Don’t you know Cecily?”
“Cecily,” he repeated mildly. Then she stopped his mouth with hers, clinging to him.
“I will marry you, I will, I will. Donald, look at me. But you cannot, you cannot see me, can you? But I will marry you, today, any time: Cecily will marry you, Donald. You cannot see me, can you, Donald? Cecily? Cecily?”
“Cecily?” he repeated.
“Oh, your poor, poor face, your blind, scarred face! But I will marry you. They said I wouldn’t, that I mustn’t, but yes, yes, Donald my dear love!”
Mrs. Powers, following her, raised her to her feet, removing her arms. “You might hurt him, you know,” she said.