With his wife it had never been like that. She had never excited him, except at first physically. After that he had just accepted her. “There are many women. She is my woman. She is rather nice, does her share of the job”—that sort of an attitude.
When she had died it had left a gaping hole in his life.
“That may be what is the matter with me.”
* * *
“This other woman is a different sort surely. The way she dresses; her ease with people. Such people, having money always, from the first, a secure position in life—they just go along, quite sure of themselves, never afraid.”
His early poverty had, the doctor thought, taught him a good many things he was glad to know. It had taught him other things not so good to know. Both he and his wife had always been a little afraid of people—of what people might think—of his standing in his profession. He had married a woman who also came from a poor family. She was a nurse before she married him. The woman now in the room with him got up from the couch and threw the end of her cigarette into the fireplace. “Let’s walk,” she said.
When they got out into the road and had turned away from the town and her mother’s house, standing on a hill between his cabin and town, another person on the road behind might have thought him the distinguished one. She was a bit too plump—not tall enough—while he had a tall, rather slender figure and walked with a free, easy carriage. He carried his hat in his hand. His thick graying hairs added to his air of distinction.
The road grew more uneven and they walked close to each other. She was trying to tell him something. There had been something he had determined to tell her—on this very evening. What was it?
Something of what the woman in California had tried to tell him in that foolish letter—not doing very well at it—something to the effect that she—this new woman—met while he was off guard, resting—was aloof from himself—unattainable—but that he found himself in love with her.
If she found, by any odd chance, that she wanted him, then he would try to tell her.
After all, it was foolish. More thoughts in the doctor’s head. “I can’t be very ardent. This being in the country—resting—away from my practice—is all foolishness. My practice is in the hands of another man. There are cases a new man can’t understand.
“My wife who died—she didn’t expect much. She had been a nurse, was brought up in a poor family, had always had to work, while this new woman . . .
There had been some kind of nonsense the doctor had thought he might try to put into words. Then he would get back to town, back to his work. “I’d much better light out now, saying nothing.”
* * *
She was telling him something about herself. It was about a man she had known and loved, perhaps.
Where had he got the notion she had had several lovers? He had merely thought—well, that sort of woman—always plenty of money—being always with clever people.
When she was younger she had thought for a time she would be a painter, had studied in New York and Paris.
She was telling him about an Englishman—a novelist.
The devil—how had she known his thoughts?
She was scolding him. What had he said?
She was talking about such people as himself, simple, straight, good people, she called them, people who go ahead in life, doing their work, not asking much.
She, then, had illusions as he had.
“Such people as you get such ideas in your heads—silly notions.”
Now she was talking about herself again.
“I tried to be a painter. I had such ideas about the so-called big men in the arts. You, being a doctor, without a great reputation—I have no doubt you have all sorts of ideas about so-called great doctors, great surgeons.”
Now she was telling what happened to her. There had been an English novelist she had met in Paris. He had an established reputation. When he seemed attracted to her she had been much excited.
The novelist had written a love story and she had read it. It had just a certain tone. She had always thought that above everything in life she wanted a love affair in just that tone. She had tried it with the writer of the story and it had turned out nothing of the sort.
It was growing dark in the road. Laurels and elders grew on a hillside. In the half-darkness he could see faintly the little hurt shrug of her shoulders.
Had all the lovers he had imagined for her, the brilliant, witty men of the great world, been like that? He felt suddenly as he had felt when the drunken country men talked in the road. He wanted to hit someone with his fist, in particular he wanted to hit a novelist—preferably an English novelist—or a painter or musician.
He had never known any such people. There weren’t any about. He smiled at himself, thinking: “When that country man talked I sat still and let him.” His practice had been with well-to-do merchants, lawyers, manufacturers, their wives and families.
Now his body was trembling. They had come to a small bridge over a stream, and suddenly, without premeditation, he put his arm about her.
There had been something he had planned to tell her. What was it? It was something about himself. “I am no longer young. What I could have to offer you would not be much. I cannot offer it to such a one as yourself, to one who has known great people, been loved by witty, brilliant men.”
There had no doubt been something of the sort he had foolishly thought of saying. Now she was in his arms in the darkness on the bridge. The air was heavy with Summer perfumes. She was a little heavy—a real armful. Evidently she liked having him hold her thus. He had thought, really, she might like him but have at the same time a kind of contempt for him.
Now he had kissed her. She liked that too. She moved closer and returned the kiss. He leaned over the bridge. It was a good thing there was a support of some sort. She was sturdily built. His first wife, after thirty, had been fairly plump, but this new woman weighed more.
* * *
And now they were again walking in the road. It was the most amazing thing. There was something quite taken for granted. It was that he wanted her to marry him.
Did he? They walked along the road toward his cabin and there was in him the half-foolish, half-joyful mood a boy feels walking in the darkness the first time, alone with a girl.
A quick rush of memories, evenings as a boy and as a young man remembered.
Does a man ever get too old for that? A man like himself, a physician, should know more about things. He was smiling at himself in the darkness—feeling foolish, feeling frightened, glad. Nothing definite had been said.
It was better at the cabin. How nice it had been of her to have no foolish, conventional fears about coming to see him! She was a nice person. Sitting alone with her in the darkness of the cabin he realized that they were at any rate both mature—grown up enough to know what they were doing.
Did they?
When they had returned to the cabin it was quite dark and he lighted an oil-lamp. It all got very definite very rapidly. She had another cigarette and sat as before, looking at him. Her eyes were gray. They were gray, wise eyes.
She was realizing perfectly his discomfiture. The eyes were smiling—being old eyes. The eyes were saying: “A man is a man and a woman is a woman. You can never tell how or when it will happen. You are a man and, although you think yourself a practical, unimaginative man, you are a good deal of a boy. There is a way in which any woman is older than any man and that is the reason I know.”
Never mind what her eyes were saying. The doctor was plainly fussed. There had been a kind of speech he had intended making. It may have been he had known, from the first, that he was caught.
“O Lord, I won’t get it in now.”
He tried, haltingly, to say something about the life of a physician’s wife. That he had assumed she might marry him, without asking her directly, seemed a bit rash. He was assuming it without intending anything of the sort. Everything was muddled.
The life
of a physician’s wife—a man like himself—in general practice—wasn’t such a pleasant one. When he had started out as a physician he had really thought, some time, he might get into a great position, be some kind of a specialist.
But now—
Her eyes kept on smiling. If he was muddled she evidently wasn’t. “There is something definite and solid about some women. They seem to know just what they want,” he thought.
She wanted him.
What she said wasn’t much. “Don’t be so foolish. I’ve waited a long time for just you.”
That was all. It was final, absolute—terribly disconcerting too. He went and kissed her, awkwardly. Now she had the air that had from the first disconcerted him, the air of worldliness. It might not be anything but her way of smoking a cigarette—an undoubtedly good, although rather bold, taste in clothes.
His other wife never seemed to think about clothes. She hadn’t the knack.
* * *
Well, he had managed again to get her out of his cabin. It might be she had managed. His first wife had been a nurse before he married her. It might be that women who have been nurses should not marry physicians. They have too much respect for physicians, are taught to have too much respect. This one, he was quite sure, would never have too much respect.
* * *
It was all, when the doctor let it sink in, rather nice. He had taken the great leap and seemed suddenly to feel solid ground under his feet. How easy it had been!
They were walking along the road toward her mother’s house. It was dark and he could not see her eyes.
He was thinking—
“Four women in her family. A new woman to be the mother of my son.” Her mother was old and quiet and had sharp gray eyes. One of the younger sisters was a bit boyish. The other one—she was the handsome one of the family—sang Negro songs.
They had plenty of money. When it came to that his own income was quite adequate.
It would be nice, being a kind of older brother to the sisters, a son to her mother. O Lord!
They got to the gate before her mother’s house and she let him kiss her again. Her lips were warm, her breath fragrant. He stood, still embarrassed, while she went up a path to the door. There was a light on the porch.
There was no doubt she was plump, solidly built. What absurd notions he had had!
* * *
Well, it was time to go on back to his cabin. He felt foolishly young, silly, afraid, glad.
“O Lord—I’ve got me a wife, another wife, a new one,” he said to himself as he went along the road in the darkness. How glad and foolish and frightened he still felt! Would he get over it after a time?
A Meeting South
* * *
HE told me the story of his ill fortune—a crack-up in an airplane—with a very gentlemanly little smile on his very sensitive, rather thin, lips. Such things happened. He might well have been speaking of another. I liked his tone and I liked him.
This happened in New Orleans, where I had gone to live. When he came, my friend, Fred, for whom he was looking, had gone away, but immediately I felt a strong desire to know him better and so suggested we spend the evening together. When we went down the stairs from my apartment I noticed that he was a cripple. The slight limp, the look of pain that occasionally drifted across his face, the little laugh that was intended to be jolly, but did not quite achieve its purpose, all these things began at once to tell me the story I have now set myself to write.
“I shall take him to see Aunt Sally,” I thought. One does not take every caller to Aunt Sally. However, when she is in fine feather, when she has taken a fancy to her visitor, there is no one like her. Although she has lived in New Orleans for thirty years, Aunt Sally is Middle Western, born and bred.
However I am plunging a bit too abruptly into my story.
First of all I must speak more of my guest, and for convenience’s sake I shall call him David. I felt at once that he would be wanting a drink and, in New Orleans—dear city of Latins and hot nights—even in Prohibition times such things can be managed. We achieved several and my own head became somewhat shaky but I could see that what we had taken had not affected him. Evening was coming, the abrupt waning of the day and the quick smoky soft-footed coming of night, characteristic of the semi-tropic city, when he produced a bottle from his hip pocket. It was so large that I was amazed. How had it happened that the carrying of so large a bottle had not made him look deformed? His body was very small and delicately built. “Perhaps, like the kangaroo, his body has developed some kind of a natural pouch for taking care of supplies,” I thought. Really he walked as one might fancy a kangaroo would walk when out for a quiet evening stroll. I went along thinking of Darwin and the marvels of Prohibition. “We are a wonderful people, we Americans,” I thought. We were both in fine humor and had begun to like each other immensely.
He explained the bottle. The stuff, he said, was made by a Negro man on his father’s plantation somewhere over in Alabama. We sat on the steps of a vacant house deep down in the old French Quarter of New Orleans—the Vieux Carré—while he explained that his father had no intention of breaking the law—that is to say, in so far as the law remained reasonable. “Our nigger just makes whisky for us,” he said. “We keep him for that purpose. He doesn’t have anything else to do, just makes the family whisky, that’s all. If he went selling any, we’d raise hell with him. I dare say Dad would shoot him if he caught him up to any such unlawful trick, and you bet, Jim, our nigger, I’m telling you of, knows it too.
“He’s a good whisky-maker, though, don’t you think?” David added. He talked of Jim in a warm friendly way. “Lord, he’s been with us always, was born with us. His wife cooks for us and Jim makes our whisky. It’s a race to see which is best at his job, but I think Jim will win. He’s getting a little better all the time and all of our family—well, I reckon we just like and need our whisky more than we do our food.”
* * *
Do you know New Orleans? Have you lived there in the Summer when it is hot, in the Winter when it rains, and through the glorious late Fall days? Some of its own, more progressive, people scorn it now. In New Orleans there is a sense of shame because the city is not more like Chicago or Pittsburgh.
It, however, suited David and me. We walked slowly, on account of his bad leg, through many streets of the Old Town, Negro women laughing all around us in the dusk, shadows playing over old buildings, children with their shrill cries dodging in and out of old hallways. The old city was once almost altogether French, but now it is becoming more and more Italian. It however remains Latin. People live out of doors. Families were sitting down to dinner within full sight of the street—all doors and windows open. A man and his wife quarreled in Italian. In a patio back of an old building a Negress sang a French song.
We came out of the narrow little streets and had a drink in front of the dark cathedral and another in a little square in front. There is a statue of General Jackson, always taking off his hat to Northern tourists who in Winter come down to see the city. At his horse’s feet an inscription—“The Union must and will be preserved.” We drank solemnly to that declaration and the general seemed to bow a bit lower. “He was sure a proud man,” David said, as we went over toward the docks to sit in the darkness and look at the Mississippi. All good New Orleanians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child—something of that sort—gives you the same warm nice feeling, I mean. David is a poet and so in the darkness by the river we spoke of Keats and Shelley, the two English poets all good Southern men love.
All of this, you are to understand, was before I took him to see Aunt Sally.
Both Aunt Sally and myself are Middle Westerners. We are but guests down here, but perhaps we both in some queer way belong to this city. Something of the sort is in the wind. I don’t quite know how it has happened.
A great many Northern men and women come down our way and,
when they go back North, write things about the South. The trick is to write nigger stories. The North likes them. They are so amusing. One of the best-known writers of nigger stories was down here recently and a man I know, a Southern man, went to call on him. The writer seemed a bit nervous. “I don’t know much about the South or Southerners,” he said. “But you have your reputation,” my friend said. “You are so widely known as a writer about the South and about Negro life.” The writer had a notion he was being made sport of. “Now look here,” he said, “I don’t claim to be a highbrow. I’m a business man myself. At home, up North, I associate mostly with business men and when I am not at work I go out to the country club. I want you to understand I am not setting myself up as a highbrow.
“I give them what they want,” he said. My friend said he appeared angry. “About what now, do you fancy?” he asked innocently.
However, I am not thinking of the Northern writer of Negro stories. I am thinking of the Southern poet, with the bottle clasped firmly in his hands, sitting in the darkness beside me on the docks facing the Mississippi.
He spoke at some length of his gift for drinking. “I didn’t always have it. It is a thing built up,” he said. The story of how he chanced to be a cripple came out slowly. You are to remember that my own head was a bit unsteady. In the darkness the river, very deep and very powerful off New Orleans, was creeping away to the gulf. The whole river seemed to move away from us and then to slip noiselessly into the darkness like a vast moving sidewalk.
When he had first come to me, in the late afternoon, and when we had started for our walk together I had noticed that one of his legs dragged as we went along and that he kept putting a thin hand to an equally thin cheek.
Sitting over by the river he explained, as a boy would explain when he has stubbed his toe running down a hill.