“Really, I am afraid not. Not in this case,” Mr. Talliaferro replied smugly. “Though I am distressed—”
Mrs. Maurier sighed. “These women! Mr. Talliaferro is perfectly terrible with women,” she informed Gordon. “But you will come, won’t you?”
The niece had drifted up to them and stood rubbing the calf of one leg against the other shin. Gordon turned to her. “Will you be there?”
Damn their little souls, she whispered on a sucked breath. She yawned. “Oh, yes. I eat. But I’m going to bed darn soon.” She yawned again, patting the broad pale oval of her mouth with brown fingers.
“Patricia!” her aunt exclaimed in shocked amazement. “Of course you will do nothing of the kind. The very idea! Come, Mr. Gordon.”
“No, thanks. I am engaged myself,” he answered stiffly. “Some other time, perhaps.”
“I simply won’t take No for an answer. Do help me, Mr. Talliaferro. He simply must come.”
“Do you want him to come as he is?” the niece asked.
Her aunt glanced briefly at the undershirt, and shuddered. But she said bravely, “Of course, if he wishes. What are clothes, compared with this?” She described an arc with her hand; diamonds glittered on its orbit. “So you cannot evade it, Mr. Gordon. You must come.”
Her hand poised above his arm, pouncing. He eluded it brusquely. “Excuse me.” Mr. Talliaferro avoided his sudden movement just in time, and the niece said wickedly:
“There’s a shirt behind the door, if that’s what you are looking for. You won’t need a tie, with that beard.”
He picked her up by the elbows, as you would a high narrow table, and set her aside. Then his tall controlled body filled and emptied the door and disappeared in the darkness of the hallway. The niece gazed after him. Mrs. Maurier stared at the door, then to Mr. Talliaferro in quiet amazement. “What in the world—” Her hands clashed vainly among her various festooned belongings. “Where is he going?” she said at last.
The niece said suddenly, “I like him.” She too gazed at the door through which, passing, he seemed to have emptied the room. “I bet he doesn’t come back,” she remarked.
Her aunt shrieked. “Doesn’t come back?”
“Well, I wouldn’t, if I were him.” She returned to the marble, stroking it with slow desire. Mrs. Maurier gazed helplessly at Mr. Talliaferro.
“Where—” she began.
“I’ll go see,” he offered, breaking his own trance. The two women regarded his vanishing neat back.
“Never in my life—Patricia, what did you mean by being so rude to him? Of course he is offended. Don’t you know how sensitive artists are? After I have worked so hard to cultivate him, too!”
“Nonsense. It’ll do him good. He thinks just a little too well of himself as it is.”
“But to insult the man in his own house. I can’t understand you young people at all. Why, if I’d said a thing like that to a gentleman, and a stranger . . . I can’t imagine what your father can mean, letting you grow up like this. He certainly knows better than this—”
“I’m not to blame for the way he acted. You are the one, yourself. Suppose you’d been sitting in your room in your shimmy, and a couple of men you hardly knew had walked in on you and tried to persuade you to go somewhere you didn’t want to go, what would you have done?”
“These people are different,” her aunt told her coldly. “You don’t understand them. Artists don’t require privacy as we do: it means nothing whatever to them. But anyone, artist or no, would object—”
“Oh, haul in your sheet,” the niece interrupted coarsely. “You’re jibbing.”
Mr. Talliaferro reappeared panting with delicate repression. “Gordon was called hurriedly away. He asked me to make his excuses and to express his disappointment over having to leave so unceremoniously.”
“Then he’s not coming to dinner.” Mrs. Maurier sighed, feeling her age, the imminence of dark and death. She seemed not only unable to get new men any more, but to hold to the old ones, even . . . Mr. Talliaferro, too . . . age, age. . . . She sighed again. “Come, darling,” she said in a strangely chastened tone, quieter, pitiable in a way. The niece put both her firm tanned hands on the marble, hard, hard. O beautiful, she whispered in salutation and farewell, turning quickly away.
“Let’s go,” she said, “I’m starving.”
Mr. Talliaferro had lost his box of matches: he was desolated. So they were forced to feel their way down the stairs, disturbing years and years of dust upon the rail. The stone corridor was cool and dank and filled with a suppressed minor humming. They hurried on.
Night was fully come and the car squatted at the curb in patient silhouette; the Negro driver sat within with all the windows closed. Within its friendly familiarity Mrs. Maurier’s spirits rose again. She gave Mr. Talliaferro her hand, sugaring her voice again with a decayed coquetry.
“You will call me, then? But don’t promise: I know how completely your time is taken up”—she leaned forward, tapping him on the cheek—“Don Juan!”
He laughed deprecatingly, with pleasure.
The niece from her corner said:
“Good evening, Mr. Tarver.”
Mr. Talliaferro stood slightly inclined from the hips, frozen. He closed his eyes like a dog awaiting the fall of the stick, while time passed and passed . . . he opened his eyes again, after how long he knew not. But Mrs. Maurier’s fingers were but leaving his cheek and the niece was invisible in her corner: a bodiless evil. Then he straightened up, feeling his cold entrails resume their proper place.
The car drew away and he watched it, thinking of the girl’s youngness, her hard clean youngness, with fear and a troubling unhappy desire like an old sorrow. Were children really like dogs? Could they penetrate one’s concealment, know one instinctively?
Mrs. Maurier settled back comfortably. “Mr. Talliaferro is perfectly terrible with women,” she informed her niece.
“I bet he is,” the niece agreed, “perfectly terrible.”
4
Mr. Talliaferro had been married while quite young by a rather plain faced girl whom he was trying to seduce. But now, at thirty-eight, he was a widower these eight years. He had been the final result of some rather casual biological research conducted by two people who, like the great majority, had no business producing children at all. The family originated in northern Alabama and drifted slowly westward ever after, thus proving that a certain racial impulse in the race, which one Horace Greeley summed up in a slogan so excruciatingly apt that he didn’t have to observe it himself, has not yet died away. His brothers were various and they attained their several milieus principally by chance; milieus ranging from an untimely heaven via someone else’s horse and a rope and a Texas cottonwood. through a classical chair in a small Kansas college, to a state legislature via someone else’s votes. This one got as far as California. They never did know what became of Mr. Talliaferro’s sister.
Mr. Talliaferro had got what is known as a careful raising: he had been forced while quite young and pliable to do all the things to which his natural impulses objected, and to forgo all the things he could possibly have had any fun doing. After a while nature gave up and this became a habit with him. Nature surrendered him without a qualm: even disease germs seemed to ignore him.
His marriage had driven him into work as drouth drives the fish down stream into the larger—waters, and things had gone hard with them during the years during which he had shifted from position to position, correspondence course to correspondence course, until he had an incorrect and impractical smattering of information regarding every possible genteel method of gaining money, before finally and inevitably gravitating into the women’s clothing section of a large department store.
Here he felt that he had at last come into his own (he always got along much better with women than with men)
and his restored faith in himself enabled him to rise with comfortable ease to the coveted position of wholesale buyer. He knew women’s clothes and, interested in women, it was his belief that knowledge of the frail intimate things they preferred gave him an insight which no other man had into the psychology of women. But he merely speculated on this, for he remained faithful to his wife, although she was bedridden: an invalid.
And then, when success was in his grasp and life had become smooth at last for them, his wife died. He had become habituated to marriage, sincerely attached to her, and readjustment came slowly. Yet in time he became accustomed to the novelty of mature liberty. He had been married so young that freedom was an unexplored field to him. He took pleasure in his snug bachelor quarters in the proper neighborhood, in his solitary routine of days: of walking home in the dusk for the sake of his figure, examining the soft bodies of girls on the street, knowing that if he cared to take one of them, that there was none save the girls themselves to say him nay; to his dinners alone or in company with an available literary friend.
Mr. Talliaferro did Europe in forty-one days, gained thereby a worldly air and a smattering of esthetics and a precious accent, and returned to New Orleans feeling that he was Complete. His only alarm was his thinning hair, his only worry was the fact that someone would discover that he had been born Tarver, not Talliaferro.
But long since celibacy had begun to oppress him.
5
Handling his stick smartly he turned into Broussard’s. As he had hoped, here was Dawson Fairchild, the novelist, resembling a benevolent walrus too recently out of bed to have made a toilet, dining in company with three men. Mr. Talliaferro paused diffidently in the doorway and a rosy-cheeked waiter, resembling a studious Harvard undergraduate in an actor’s dinner coat, assailed him courteously. At last he caught Fairchild’s eye and the other greeted him across the small room, then said something to his three companions that caused them to turn half about in their chairs to watch his approach. Mr. Talliaferro, to whom entering a restaurant alone and securing a table was an excruciating process, joined them with relief. The cherubic waiter spun a chair from an adjoining table deftly against Mr. Talliaferro’s knees as he shook Fairchild’s hand.
“You’re just in time,” Fairchild told him, propping his fist and a clutched fork on the table. “This is Mr. Hooper. You know these other folks, I think.”
Mr. Talliaferro ducked his head to a man with iron-gray hair and an orotund humorless face like that of a thwarted Sunday school superintendent, who insisted on shaking his hand, then his glance took in the other two members of the party—a tall, ghostly young man with a thin evaporation of fair hair and a pale prehensile mouth, and a bald Semitic man with a pasty loose-jowled face and sad quizzical eyes.
“We were discussing—” began Fairchild when the stranger interrupted with a bland and utterly unselfconscious rudeness.
“What did you say the name was?” he asked, fixing Mr. Talliaferro with his eye. Mr. Talliaferro met the eye and knew immediately a faint unease. He answered the question, but the other brushed the reply aside. “I mean your given name. I didn’t catch it today.”
“Why, Ernest,” Mr. Talliaferro told him with alarm.
“Ah, yes: Ernest. You must pardon me, but traveling, meeting new faces each Tuesday, as I do—” He interrupted himself with the same bland unconsciousness. “What are your impressions of the get-together today?” Ere Mr. Talliaferro could have replied, he interrupted himself again. “You have a splendid organization here,” he informed them generally, compelling them with his glance, “and a city that is worthy of it. Except for this Southern laziness of yours. You folks need more Northern blood, to bring out all your possibilities. Still, I won’t criticize: you boys have treated me pretty well.” He put some food into his mouth and chewed it down hurriedly, forestalling anyone who might have hoped to speak.
“I was glad that my itinerary brought me here, to see the city and be with the boys today, and that one of your reporters gave me the chance to see something of your bohemian life by directing me to Mr. Fairchild here, who, I understand, is an author.” He met Mr. Talliaferro’s expression of courteous amazement again. “I am glad to see how you boys are carrying on the good work; I might say, the Master’s work, for it is only by taking the Lord into our daily lives—” He stared at Mr. Talliaferro once more. “What did you say the name was?”
“Ernest,” suggested Fairchild mildly.
“—Ernest. People, the man in the street, the breadwinner, he on whom the heavy burden of life rests, does he know what we stand for, what we can give him in spite of himself—forgetfulness of the trials of day by day? He knows nothing of our ideals of service, of the benefits to ourselves, to each other, to you”—he met Fairchild’s burly quizzical gaze—“to himself. And, by the way,” he added coming to earth again, “there are a few points on this subject I am going to take up with your secretary tomorrow.” He transfixed Mr. Talliaferro again. “What were your impressions of my remarks today?”
“I beg pardon?”
“What did you think of my idea for getting a hundred percent church attendance by keeping them afraid they’d miss something good by staying away?”
Mr. Talliaferro turned his stricken face to the others, one by one. After a while his interrogator said in a tone of cold displeasure, “You don’t mean to say you do not recall me?”
Mr. Talliaferro cringed. “Really, sir—I am distressed—” The other interrupted heavily.
“You were not at lunch today?”
“No,” Mr. Talliaferro replied with effusive gratitude. “I take only a glass of buttermilk at noon. I breakfast late, you see.” The other man stared at him with chill displeasure, and Mr. Talliaferro added with inspiration, “You have mistaken me for someone else, I fear.”
The stranger regarded Mr. Talliaferro for a cold moment. The waiter placed a dish before Mr. Talliaferro and he fell upon it in a flurry of acute discomfort.
“Do you mean—” began the stranger. Then he put his fork down and turned his disapproval coldly upon Fairchild. “Didn’t I understand you to say that this—gentleman was a member of Rotary?”
Mr. Talliaferro suspendedhis fork and he too looked at Fairchild in shocked unbelief. “I a member of Rotary?” he repeated.
“Why, I kind of got the impression he was,” Fairchild admitted. “Hadn’t you heard that Talliaferro was a Rotarian?” he appealed to the others. They were noncommittal and he continued: “I seem to recall somebody telling me you were a Rotarian. But then, you know how rumors get around. Maybe it is because of your prominence in the business life of our city. Talliaferro is a member of one of our largest ladies’ clothing houses,” he explained. “He is just the man to help you figure out some way to get God into the mercantile business. Teach Him the meaning of service, hey, Talliaferro?”
“No: really, I—” Mr. Talliaferro objected with alarm. The stranger interrupted again.
“Well, there’s nothing better on God’s green earth than Rotary. Mr. Fairchild had given me to understand that you were a member,” he accused with a recurrence of cold suspicion. Mr. Talliaferro squirmed with unhappy negation. The other stared him down, then he took out his watch: “Well, well. I must run along. I run my day to schedule. You’d be astonished to learn how much time can be saved by cutting off a minute here and a minute there,” he informed them. “And—”
“What do you do with them?” Fairchild asked.
“I beg pardon?”
“When you’ve cut off enough minutes here and there to make up a sizable mess, what do you do with them?”
“—Setting a time limit to everything you do makes a man get more punch into it; makes him take the hills on high, you might say.” A drop of nicotine on the end of the tongue will kill a dog, Fairchild thought, chuckling to himself. He said aloud:
“Our forefathers re
duced the process of gaining money to proverbs. But we have beaten them; we have reduced the whole of existence to fetishes.”
“To words of one syllable that look well in large red type,” the Semitic man corrected.
The stranger ignored them. He half turned in his chair. He gestured at the waiter’s back, then he snapped his fingers until he had attracted the waiter’s attention. “Trouble with these small second-rate places,” he told them. “No pep, no efficiency, in handling trade. Check, please;” he directed briskly. The cherubic waiter bent over them.
“You found the dinner nice?” he suggested.
“Sure, sure, all right. Bring the bill, will you, George?” The waiter looked at the others, hesitating.
“Never mind, Mr. Broussard,” Fairchild said quickly. “We won’t go right now. Mr. Hooper here has got to catch a train. You are my guest,” he explained to the stranger. The other protested conventionally: he offered to match coins for it, but Fairchild repeated: “You are my guest tonight. Too bad you must hurry away.”