‘Why, Eunice! It’s perfect.”
“No’m, it ain’t up to de mark,” Eunice insisted. But she beamed, gravely diffident, and for a few minutes the two of them talked amicably while Narcissa pried into cupboards and boxes.
Then she returned to the house and mounted to her room. The dressing table was bare of its intimate silver and crystal, and the drawers were empty, and the entire room with its air of still and fading desolation, reproached her. Chill, too; there had been no fire in the grate since last spring, arid on the table beside the bed, in a blue vase, was a small faded bunch of flowers, forgotten and withered and dead. Touching them, they crumbled in her fingers, leaving a stain, and the water in the vase smelled of rank decay. She opened a window and threw them out.
The room was too chill to stop in long, and she decided to ask Eunice to build a fire on the hearth, for the sake of that part of her which still lingered here, soberly and a little sorrowful in the chill and reproachful desolation. At her chest of drawers she paused again and remembered those letters, fretfully and with a little brooding alarm, deprecating anew her carelessness in not destroying them. But maybe she had, and so entered again into the closed circle of her first fear and bewilderment, trying to remember what she had done with them. But she was certain she had left them in the drawer with her under-things, positive that she had put them there. Yet she had never been able to find them, nor had Eunice nor Horace seen them. The day she had missed them was the day before her wedding, when she packed her things. That day she had missed them, finding in their stead one in a different handwriting, which she did not remember having received. The gist of it was plain enough, although she had not understood some of it literally. But on that day, she read it with tranquil detachment: it and all it implied was definitely behind her now. And lacking even this, she would not have been shocked if she had comprehended it. Curious, a little perhaps, at some, of the words, but that is all,
But what she had done with those other letters she could not remember, and not being able to gave her moments of definite fear when she considered the possibility that people might learn that someone had thought such things about her and put them into words. Well, they were gone; there was nothing to do save hope that she had destroyed them as she had the last one, or if she had not, to trust that they would never be found. Yet that brought back the original distaste and dread: the possibility that the intactness of her deep and heretofore inviolate serenity might be the sport of circumstance; that she must trust to chance against the eventuality of a stranger casually raising a stray bit of paper from the ground...
But she would put this firmly aside, for the time being, at least. This should be Horace’s day, and her -own too; a surcease from that ghost-ridden dream to which she clung, waking. She descended the stairs. There was a fire in the living room. It had burned down to embers, however, and she put coal on it and punched it to a blaze. That would be the first thing he’d see when he entered; perhaps he’d wonder; perhaps he’d know before he entered, having sensed her presence. Then she considered ‘phoning him, and she mused indecisively for a moment before the fire; then decided to let it be a surprise. But supposing he didn’t come home to dinner. She considered this, and pictured him walking along a street in the rain, and immediately and with instinctive foreknowledge of what she would find, she went to the closet beneath the stairs and opened the door. It was as she had known: his overcoat and raincoat both hung there; the chances were he didn’t even have an umbrella, and again irritation and exasperation and untroubled affection for him welled in her, and it was as it had been of old again, and all that had since happened to them rolled away.
Heretofore her piano had always been moved into the living room when cold weather came. But this year it stood yet in the smaller alcove. There was a fireplace here, but no fire had been lighted yet, and the room was chilly. Beneath her hands the cold keys gave forth a sluggish chord, accusing, reproving too; and she returned to the fire again and stood before it where she could see through the window the drive beneath its sombre, dripping trees. The small clock on the mantel behind her chimed twelve, and she went to the window and stood with her nose touching the chill glass and her-breath misting it over. Soon, now: he was erratic in his hours, but never tardy, and every time an umbrella came into sight, her heart leaped a little. But it was not he, and she followed the bearer’s plodding passage until he shifted the umbrella enough for her to see who it was and so did not see Horace until he was half way up the drive. His hat was turned down around his face and his coat collar was hunched to his ears, and as she had known, he didn’t even have an umbrella.
“Oh, you idiot,” she said and ran to the door and through the curtained glass she saw his shadowy shape come leaping up the steps. He flung the door open and entered, whipping his sodden hat against his leg, and so did not see her until she stepped forth. “You idiot,” she said. “Where’s your raincoat?”
For a moment he stared at her with his wild and diffident repose, then he said “Narcy!” and his face lighted and he swept her into his wet arms.
“Don’t!” she cried. “You’re wet!” But he swung her from the floor, against his sodden chest, repeating Narcy, Narcy; then his cold nose was against her face and she tasted rain.
“Narcy,” he said again, tagging her, and she ceased trying to free herself and clung to him. Then abruptly he released her and jerked his head up and stared at her with sober intensity.
“Narcy,” he said, still staring at her, “has that surly black-guard...?”
“No, of course not,” she answered sharply. “Have you gone crazy?” Then she clung to. him again, wet clothes and all, as though she would never let him go. “Oh, Horry,” she said, “I’ve been a beast to you!”
“I was hoping” he said—they had eaten the chocolate pie and Horace now stood before the living-room fire, his coffee cup on the mantel, striking matches to his pipe, “that you might have come home for good! That they had sent you back.”
“No,” she answered. “I wish…”
“What?”
But she only said: “You’ll be having somebody, soon.” And then: “When is it to be, Horry?”
He sucked intently at his pipe; in his eyes little twin match flames rose and fell. “I don’t know. Next spring, I suppose. Whenever she will.”
“You don’t want to,” she stated quietly. “Not after what it’s all got to be now.”
“She’s in Reno now,” he added, puffing at his pipe, his face averted a little. “Little Belle wrote me a letter about mountains.”
She said: “Poor Harry.” She sat with her chin in her palms, gazing into the fire.
“He’ll have little Belle,” he reminded her. “He cares more for her than be does for Belle, anyway.”
“You don’t know,” she told him soberly. “You just say that because you want to believe it”
“Don’t you think he’s well off, rid of a-woman who doesn’t want him, who doesn’t even love his child very much?”
“You don’t know,” she repeated. “People can’t—can’t—You can’t play fast and loose with the way things ought to go on, after they’ve started off.”
“Oh, people.” He raised the cup and drained it, and sat down. “Barging around through a lifetime, clotting for no reason, breaking apart for no reason still. Chemicals. No need to pity a chemical.”
“Chemicals,” she mused, her serene face rosy in the firelight. “Chemicals. Maybe that’s the reason so many of the things people do smell bad.”
“Well, I don’t know that I ever thought of it in exactly that way,” he answered gravely. “But I daresay you’re right, having femininity on your side.” He brooded himself, restlessly. “But I suppose it’s all sort of messy: living and seething corruption glossed over for a while by smoothly colored flesh; all foul, until the clean and. naked bone.” He mused again, she quietly beside him. “But it’s something there, something you go after; must; driven. Not always swine. A plan somew
here, I suppose, known to Whoever first set the fermentation going. Perhaps ifs just too big to be seen, like a locomotive is a porous mongrel substance without edges to the grains of sand that give it traction on wet rails. Or perhaps He has forgotten Himself what the plan was.”
“But do you like to think of a woman who’ll willingly give up her child in order to marry another man a little sooner?”
“Of course I don’t. But neither do I like to remember that I have exchanged you for Belle, or that she has red hair and is going to be fat someday, or that she has lain in another pan’s arms and has a child that isn’t mine, even though she did voluntarily give it up. Yet there are any number of virgins who love children walking the world today, some of whom look a little like you, probably, and a modest number of which I allow myself to believe, without conceit, that I could marry. And yet...” He struck another match to his pipe, but he let it go out again and sat forward in his chair, the pipe held loosely in his Joined hands. “That may be the secret, after all. Not any subconscious striving after what we believed will be happiness, contentment; but a sort of gadfly urge after the petty, ignoble impulses which man has tried so vainly to conjure with words out of himself. Nature, perhaps, watching him as he tries to wean himself away from the rank and richly foul old mire that spawned him, biding her time and flouting that illusion of purifaction which he has foisted upon himself and calls his soul. But it’s something there, something you—you—” He brooded upon the fire, holding his cold pipe. She put her hand out and touched his, and he clasped it and looked at her with his groping and wid6 intensity. But she was gazing into the fire, her cheek in her palm, and she drew his hand to her and stroked it on her face.
“Poor Horry,” she said.
“Not happiness,” he repeated. “I’m happier now than I’ll ever be again. You don’t find that, when you suddenly swap the part of yourself which you want least, for the half of someone else that he or she doesn’t want. Do you? Did you find it?”
But she only said “Poor Horry” again. She stroked his hand slowly against her cheek as she stared into the shaling ruby of the coals. The clock chimed again, with blent small silver bells. She spoke without moving. “
“Aren’t you going back to the office this afternoon?”
“No.” His tone was again the grave, lighter casual one which he employed with her. “Tin taking a holiday, Next time you come, I may have a “case and cant.”
“You never have cases: you have functions,” she answered. “But I don’t think you ought to neglect your business,” she added with grave reproof.
“Neither do I,” he agreed. “But whatever else is business for, then?”
“Don’t besilly...Put on some coal, Horry.”
But later he reverted again to his groping and tragic premonitions. They had spent the afternoon sitting before the replenished fire; later she had gone to the kitchen and made tea. The day still dissolved ceaselessly and monotonously without, and they sat and talked in a sober and happy isolation from their acquired ghosts, and again their feet chimed together upon the dark road and, their faces turned inward to one another’s the sinister and watchful trees were no longer there. But the road was in reality two roads become parallel for a brief mile and soon to part again, and now and then their feet stumbled.
“It’s having been younger once,” he said. “Being dragged by time out of a certain day like a kitten from a tow sack, being thrust into another sack with shreds of the first one sticking to your claws. Like the burro that the prospector keeps on loading down with a rock here and a rock there until it drops, leaving him in the middle of his desert, surrounded by waiting buzzards,” he added, musing in metaphors. “Plunder. That’s all it is. If you could just be translated every so often, given a blank, fresh start, with nothing to remember, Dipped in Lethe every decade or so…”
“Or every year,” she added. “Or day.”
“Yes.” The rain dripped and dripped, thickening the twilight; the room grew shadowy. The fire had burned down again; its steady fading glow fell upon. their musing faces and brought the tea things on the low table beside them, out of the obscurity in quiet rotund gleams; and they sat hand in hand in the fitful shadows and the silence, waiting for something. And at last it came: a thundering knock at the door, and they knew then what it was they waited for, and through the window they saw the carriage curtains gleaming in the dusk and the horses stamping and steaming on the drive, in the ceaseless rain.
3
Horace had seen her on the street twice, his attention caught by the bronze splendor of her hair and by an indefinable something in her air, her carriage. It was not boldness and not arrogance (exactly, but a sort of calm, lazy contemptuousness that left him seeking in his mind after an experience lost somewhere within the veils of years that swaddled his dead childhood; an experience so sharply felt at the time that the recollection of it lingered yet somewhere just beneath his consciousness although the motivation of its virginal clarity was lost beyond recall The wakened ghost of it was so strong that during the rest of the day he roused from periods of abstraction to find that he had been searching for it a little fearfully among the crumbled and long unvisited corridors of his mind, and later as he sat before his fire at home, with a book. Then, as he lay in bed thinking of Belle and waiting for sleep, he remembered it.
He was five years old and his father had taken him to his first circus, and dinging to the man’s hard, reassuring hand in a daze of blaring sounds and sharp cries and scents that tightened his small entrails with a sense of fabulous and unimaginable imminence and left him a little sick, he raised his head and found a tiger watching him with yellow and lazy contemplation; and while his whole small body was a tranced and soundless scream, the animal gaped and flicked its lips with an unbelievably pink tongue. It was an old tiger and toothless, and it had doubtless gazed through these same bars at decades and decades of Horaces, yet in him a thing these many generations politely dormant waked shrieking, and again for a red moment he dangled madly by his hands from the lowermost limb of a tree.
That was it^ and though that youthful reaction was dulled now by the years, he found himself watching her on the street somewhat as a timorous person is drawn with delicious revulsions to gaze into a window filled with knives. He found himself thinking of her often, wondering who she was. A stranger, he had never seen her in company with anyone who might identify her. She was always alone and always definitely going somewhere; not at all as a transient, a visitor idling about the streets. And always that air of hers, lazy, predatory and coldly contemptuous. The sort of woman men stare after on the street and who does not even do them the honor of ignoring them.
The third time he saw her he was passing a store, a newly opened department store, just as she emerged at that free, purposeful gait he had come to know. In the center of the door all was a small iron ridge onto which the double doors locked, and she caught the heel of her slipper on this ridge and emerged stumbling in. a cascade of small parcels, and swearing. It was a man’s bold swearing, and she caught her balance and stamped her foot and kicked one of her dropped parcels savagely into the gutter. Horace retrieved it and turning saw her stooping for the others, and together they gathered them up and rose, and she glanced at him briefly with level eyes of a thick, dark brown and shot with golden lights somehow paradoxically cold.
“Thanks,” she said, without emphasis, taking the packages from him. “They ought to be jailed for having a mantrap like that in the door.” Then she looked at him again, a level stare without boldness or rudeness. “You’re Horace Benbow, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, that is my name. But I don’t believe—”
She was counting her packages. “One more yet,” she said, glancing about her feet. “Must be in the street.” He followed her to the curb, where she had already picked up the other parcel, and she regarded its muddy side and swore again. “Now I’ll have to have it rewrapped.”
“Yes, too bad, isn’t it?
” he agreed. “If you’ll allow me—”
“I’ll have it done at the drug store. Come along, if you’re not too busy. I want to talk to you.”
She seemed to take it for granted that he would follow, and he did so, with curiosity and that feeling stronger than ever of a timorous person before a window of sharp knives. When he drew abreast of her she looked at him again (she was almost as tall as he) from beneath her level brows. Her face was rather thin, with broad nostrils. Her mouth was flat though full, and there was in the ugly distinction of her face in indescribable something; a something boding and leashed, yet untamed. Carnivorous, he thought. A lady tiger in a tea gown; and remarking something of his thoughts in his face, she said: “I forgot: of course you don’t know who I am; I’m Belle’s sister.”
“Oh, of course. You’re Joan. I should have known.”
“How? Nobody yet ever said we look alike. And you never saw me before.”
“No,” he agreed, “but I’ve been expecting for the last three months that some of Belle’s kinfolks would be coming here to see what sort of animal I am.”
“They wouldn’t have sent me, though,” she replied. “You can be easy on that.” They went on long the street. Horace responded to greetings, but he strode on with that feline poise of hers; he was aware that men turned to look after her, but in her air there was neither awareness nor disregard of it, conscious or otherwise. And again he remembered that tiger yawning with bored and lazy contempt while round and static eyes stared down its cavernous pink gullet. “I want to stop here “ she said, as they reached the drug store. “Do you have to go back to the store, or whatever it is?”
“Office,” he corrected. “Not right away.”
“That’s right,” she agreed, and he swung the door pen for her, “you’re a dentist, aren’t you? Belle told me.”.