Collected Stories

  “Nothing! Jump!”

  “Nothing?” the man on the ladder wailed in a fading, outraged shriek. “Nothing?” Again the airplane was dragging the ladder irrevocably past the car, approaching the end of the field, the fences, the long barn with its rotting roof. Suddenly we saw Captain Warren beside us; he was using words we had never heard him use.

  “He’s got the stick between his knees,” Captain Warren said. “Exalted suzerain of mankind; saccharine and sacred symbol of eternal rest.” We had forgot about the pilot, the man still in the airplane. We saw the airplane, tilted upward, the pilot standing upright in the back seat, leaning over the side and shaking both hands at the man on the ladder. We could hear him yelling now as again the man on the ladder was dragged over the car and past it, shrieking:

  “I won’t do it! I won’t do it!” He was still shrieking when the airplane zoomed; we saw him, a diminishing and shrieking spot against the sky above the long roof of the barn: “I won’t do it! I won’t do it!” Before, when the speck left the airplane, falling, to be snubbed up by the ladder, we knew that it was a living man; again, when the speck left the ladder, falling, we knew that it was a living man, and we knew that there was no ladder to snub him up now. We saw him falling against the cold, empty January sky until the silhouette of the barn absorbed him; even from here, his attitude froglike, outraged, implacable. From somewhere in the crowd a woman screamed, though the sound was blotted out by the sound of the airplane. It reared skyward with its wild, tearing noise, the empty ladder swept backward beneath it. The sound of the engine was like a groan, a groan of relief and despair.

  IV

  CAPTAIN WARREN told us in the barber shop on that Saturday night.

  “Did he really jump off, onto that barn?” we asked him.

  “Yes. He jumped. He wasn’t thinking about being killed, or even hurt. That’s why he wasn’t hurt. He was too mad, too in a hurry to receive justice. He couldn’t wait to fly back down. Providence knew that he was too busy and that he deserved justice, so Providence put that barn there with the rotting roof. He wasn’t even thinking about hitting the barn; if he’d tried to, let go of his belief in a cosmic balance to bother about landing, he would have missed the barn and killed himself.”

  It didn’t hurt him at all, save for a long scratch on his face that bled a lot, and his overcoat was torn completely down the back, as though the tear down the back of the helmet had run on down the overcoat. He came out of the barn running before we got to it. He hobbled right among us, with his bloody face, his arms waving, his coat dangling from either shoulder.

  “Where is that secretary?” he said.

  “What secretary?”

  “That American Legion secretary.” He went on, limping fast, toward where a crowd stood about three women who had fainted. “You said you would pay a hundred dollars to see me swap to that car. We pay rent on the car and all, and now you would—”

  “You got sixty dollars,” some one said.

  The man looked at him. “Sixty? I said one hundred. Then you would let me believe it was one hundred and it was just sixty; you would see me risk my life for sixty dollars.…” The airplane was down; none of us were aware of it until the pilot sprang suddenly upon the man who limped. He jerked the man around and knocked him down before we could grasp the pilot. We held the pilot, struggling, crying, the tears streaking his dirty, unshaven face. Captain Warren was suddenly there, holding the pilot.

  “Stop it!” he said. “Stop it!”

  The pilot ceased. He stared at Captain Warren, then he slumped and sat on the ground in his thin, dirty garment, with his unshaven face, dirty, gaunt, with his sick eyes, crying. “Go away,” Captain Warren said. “Let him alone for a minute.”

  We went away, back to the other man, the one who limped. They had lifted him and he drew the two halves of his overcoat forward and looked at them. Then he said: “I want some chewing gum.”

  Some one gave him a stick. Another offered him a cigarette. “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t burn up no money. I ain’t got enough of it yet.” He put the gum into his mouth. “You would take advantage of me. If you thought I would risk my life for sixty dollars, you fool yourself.”

  “Give him the rest of it,” some one said. “Here’s my share.”

  The limping man did not look around. “Make it up to a hundred, and I will swap to the car like on the handbill,” he said.

  Somewhere a woman screamed behind him. She began to laugh and to cry at the same time. “Don’t …” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. “Don’t let …” until they led her away. Still the limping man had not moved. He wiped his face on his cuff and he was looking at his bloody sleeve when Captain Warren came up.

  “How much is he short?” Warren said. They told Warren. He took out some money and gave it to the limping man.

  “You want I should swap to the car?” he said.

  “No,” Warren said. “You get that crate out of here quick as you can.”

  “Well, that’s your business,” the limping man said. “I got witnesses I offered to swap.” He moved; we made way and watched him, in his severed and dangling overcoat, approach the airplane. It was on the runway, the engine running. The third man was already in the front seat. We watched the limping man crawl terrifically in beside him. They sat there, looking forward.

  The pilot began to get up. Warren was standing beside him. “Ground it,” Warren said. “You are coming home with me.”

  “I guess we’d better get on,” the pilot said. He did not look at Warren. Then he put out his hand. “Well …” he said.

  Warren did not take his hand. “You come on home with me,” he said

  “Who’d take care of that bastard?”

  “Who wants to?”

  “I’ll get him right, some day. Where I can beat hell out of him.”

  “Jock,” Warren said.

  “No,” the other said.

  “Have you got an overcoat?”

  “Sure I have.”

  “You’re a liar.” Warren began to pull off his overcoat.

  “No,” the other said; “I don’t need it.” He went on toward the machine. “See you some time,” he said over his shoulder. We watched him get in, heard an airplane come to life, come alive. It passed us, already off the ground. The pilot jerked his hand once, stiffly; the two heads in the front seat did not turn nor move. Then it was gone, the sound was gone.

  Warren turned. “What about that car they rented?” he said.

  “He give me a quarter to take it back to town,” a boy said.

  “Can you drive it?”

  “Yes, sir. I drove it out here. I showed him where to rent it.”

  “The one that jumped?”

  “Yes, sir.” The boy looked a little aside. “Only I’m a little scared to take it back. I don’t reckon you could come with me.”

  “Why, scared?” Warren said.

  “That fellow never paid nothing down on it, like Mr. Harris wanted. He told Mr. Harris he might not use it, but if he did use it in his show, he would pay Mr. Harris twenty dollars for it instead of ten like Mr. Harris wanted. He told me to take it back and tell Mr. Harris he never used the car. And I don’t know if Mr. Harris will like it. He might get mad.”

  Elly

  BORDERING THE SHEER DROP of the precipice, the wooden railing looked like a child’s toy. It followed the curving road in thread-like embrace, passing the car in a flimsy blur. Then it flicked behind and away like a taut ribbon cut with scissors.

  Then they passed the sign, the first sign, Mills City. 6 mi and Elly thought, with musing and irrevocable astonishment, ‘Now we are almost there. It is too late now’; looking at Paul beside her, his hands on the wheel, his face in profile as he watched the fleeing road. She said, “Well. What can I do to make you marry me, Paul?” thinking ‘There was a man plowing in that field, watching us when we came out of those woods with Paul carrying the motor-robe, and got back into the car,’ thinking this quietly
, with a certain detachment and inattention, because there was something else about to obliterate it. ‘Something dreadful that I have forgotten about,’ she thought, watching the swift and increasing signs which brought Mills City nearer and nearer. ‘Something terrible that I shall remember in a minute,’ saying aloud, quietly: “There’s nothing else I can do now, is there?”

  Still Paul did not look at her. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing else you can do.”

  Then she remembered what it was she had forgotten. She remembered her grandmother, thinking of the old woman with her dead hearing and her inescapable cold eyes waiting at Mills City, with amazed and quiet despair: ‘How could I have ever forgot about her? How could I have? How could I?’

  She was eighteen. She lived in Jefferson, two hundred miles away, with her father and mother and grandmother, in a biggish house. It had a deep veranda with screening vines and no lights. In this shadow she half lay almost nightly with a different man—youths and young men of the town at first, but later with almost anyone, any transient in the small town whom she met by either convention or by chance, provided his appearance was decent. She would never ride in their cars with them at night, and presently they all believed that they knew why, though they did not always give up hope at once—until the courthouse clock struck eleven. Then for perhaps five minutes longer they (who had been practically speechless for an hour or more) would talk in urgent whispers:

  “You must go now.”

  “No. Not now.”

  “Yes. Now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. I’m tired. I want to go to bed.”

  “I see. So far, and no mother. Is that it?”

  “Maybe.” In the shadow now she would be alert, cool, already fled, without moving, beyond some secret reserve of laughter. And he would leave, and she would enter the dark house and look up at the single square of light which fell upon the upper hallway, and change completely. Wearily now, with the tread almost of an old woman, she would mount the stairs and pass the open door of the lighted room where her grandmother sat, erect, an open book in her hands, facing the hall. Usually she did not look into the room when she passed. But now and then she did. Then for an instant they would look full at one another: the old woman cold, piercing; the girl weary, spent, her face, her dark dilated eyes, filled with impotent hatred. Then she would go on and enter her own room and lean for a time against the door, hearing the grandmother’s light click off presently, sometimes crying silently and hopelessly, whispering, “The old bitch. The old bitch.” Then this would pass. She would undress and look at her face in the mirror, examining her mouth now pale of paint and heavy, flattened (so she would believe) and weary and dulled with kissing, thinking ‘My God. Why do I do it? What is the matter with me?’ thinking of how tomorrow she must face the old woman again with the mark of last night upon her mouth like bruises, with a feeling of the pointlessness and emptiness of life more profound than the rage or the sense of persecution.

  Then one afternoon at the home of a girl friend she met Paul de Montigny. After he departed the two girls were alone. Now they looked at one another quietly, like two swordsmen, with veiled eyes.

  “So you like him, do you?” the friend said. “You’ve got queer taste, haven’t you?”

  “Like who?” Elly said. “I don’t know who you are talking about.”

  “Oh yeah?” the friend said. “You didn’t notice his hair then. Like a knitted cap. And his lips. Blubber, almost.” Elly looked at her.

  “What are you talking about?” Elly said.

  “Nothing,” the other said. She glanced toward the hall, then she took a cigarette from the front of her dress and lit it. “I don’t know anything about it. I just heard it, too. How his uncle killed a man once that accused him of having nigger blood.”

  “You’re lying,” Elly said.

  The other expelled smoke. “All right. Ask your grandmother about his family. Didn’t she used to live in Louisiana too?”

  “What about you?” Elly said. “You invited him into your house.”

  “I wasn’t hid in the cloak closet, kissing him, though.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Elly said. “Maybe you couldn’t.”

  “Not till you got your face out of the way, anyhow,” the other said.

  That night she and Paul sat on the screened and shadowed veranda. But at eleven o’clock it was she who was urgent and tense: “No! No! Please. Please.”

  “Oh, come on. What are you afraid of?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid. Go, please. Please.”

  “Tomorrow, then?”

  “No. Not tomorrow or any time.”

  “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  This time she did not look in when she passed her grandmother’s door. Neither did she lean against her own door to cry. But she was panting, saying aloud against the door in thin exultation: “A nigger. A nigger. I wonder what she would say if she knew about that.”

  The next afternoon Paul walked up onto the veranda. Elly was sitting in the swing, her grandmother in a chair nearby. She rose and met Paul at the steps. “Why did you come here?” she said. “Why did you?” Then she turned and seemed to watch herself walking before him toward the thin old woman sitting bolt upright, sitting bolt and implacably chaste in that secret place, peopled with ghosts, very likely to Elly at any given moment uncountable and unnamable, who might well have owned one single mouth. She leaned down, screaming: “This is Mr. de Montigny, Grandmother!”

  “What?”

  “Mr. de Montigny! From Louisiana!” she screamed, and saw the grandmother, without moving below the hips, start violently backward as a snake does to strike. That was in the afternoon. That night Elly quitted the veranda for the first time. She and Paul were in a close clump of shrubbery on the lawn; in the wild close dark for that instant Elly was lost, her blood aloud with desperation and exultation and vindication too, talking inside her at the very brink of surrender loud as a voice: “I wish she were here to see! I wish she were here to see!” when something—there had been no sound—shouted at her and she made a mad awkward movement of recovery. The grandmother stood just behind and above them. When she had arrived, how long she had been there, they did not know. But there she stood, saying nothing, in the long anti-climax while Paul departed without haste and Elly stood, thinking stupidly, ‘I am caught in sin without even having time to sin.’ Then she was in her room, leaning against the door, trying to still her breathing, listening for the grandmother to mount the stairs and go to her father’s room. But the old woman’s footsteps ceased at her own door. Elly went to her bed and lay upon it without undressing, still panting, the blood still aloud. ‘So,’ she thought, ‘it will be tomorrow. She will tell him in the morning.’ Then she began to writhe, to toss lightly from side to side. ‘I didn’t even have a chance to sin,’ she thought, with panting and amazed regret. ‘She thinks I did and she will tell that I did, yet I am still virgin. She drove me to it, then prevented me at the last moment.’ Then she was lying with the sun in her eyes still fully dressed. ‘So it will be this morning, today,’ she thought dully. ‘My God. How could I. How could I. I don’t want any man, anything.’

  She was waiting in the dining-room when her father came down to breakfast. He said nothing, apparently knew nothing. ‘Maybe it’s mother she told,’ Elly thought. But after a while her mother, too, appeared and departed for town also, saying nothing. ‘So it has not been yet,’ she thought, mounting the stairs. Her grandmother’s door was closed. When she opened it, the old woman was sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper; she looked up, cold, still, implacable, while Elly screamed at her in the empty house: “What else can I do, in this little dead, hopeless town? I’ll work. I don’t want to be idle. Just find me a job—anything, anywhere, so that it’s so far away that I’ll never have to hear the word Jefferson again.” She was named for the grandmother—Ailanthia, though the old woman had not heard her own name or her granddaughter’s or anyone else’s in almost fifteen years save when
it was screamed at her as Elly now screamed: “It hadn’t even happened last night! Won’t you believe me? That’s it. It hadn’t even happened! At least, I would have had something, something …” with the other watching her with that cold, fixed, immobile, inescapable gaze of the very deaf. “All right!” Elly cried. “I’ll get married then! Will you be satisfied then?”

  That afternoon she met Paul downtown. “Was everything all right last night?” he said. “Why, what is it? Did they—”

  “No. Paul, marry me.” They were in the rear of the drugstore, partially concealed by the prescription counter, though anyone might appear behind it at any moment. She leaned against him, her face wan, tense, her painted mouth like a savage scar upon it. “Marry me. Or it will be too late, Paul.”

  “I don’t marry them,” Paul said. “Here. Pull yourself together.”

  She leaned against him, rife with promise. Her voice was wan and urgent. “We almost did last night. If you’ll marry me, I will.”

  “You will, eh? Before or after?”

  “Yes. Now. Any time.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Not even if I will now?”

  “Come on, now. Pull yourself together.”

  “Oh, I can hear you. But I don’t believe you. And I am afraid to try and find out.” She began to cry. He spoke in thin and mounting annoyance:

  “Stop it, I tell you!”

  “Yes. All right. I’ve stopped. You won’t, then? I tell you, it will be too late.”

  “Hell, no. I don’t marry them, I tell you.”

  “All right. Then it’s good-bye. Forever.”

  “That’s O.K. by me, too. If that’s how you feel. If I ever see you again, you know what it will mean. But no marrying. And I’ll see next time that we don’t have any audience.”

  “There won’t be any next time,” Elly said.

  The next day he was gone. A week later, her engagement was in the Memphis papers. It was to a young man whom she had known from childhood. He was assistant cashier in the bank, who they said would be president of it some day. He was a grave, sober young man of impeccable character and habits, who had been calling on her for about a year with a kind of placid formality. He took supper with the family each Sunday night, and when infrequent road shows came to town he always bought tickets for himself and Elly and her mother. When he called on her, even after the engagement was announced, they did not sit in the dark swing. Perhaps he did not know that anyone had ever sat in it in the darkness. No one sat in it at all now, and Elly passed the monotonous round of her days in a kind of dull peace. Sometimes at night she cried a little, though not often; now and then she examined her mouth in the glass and cried quietly, with quiet despair and resignation. ‘Anyway I can live quietly now,’ she thought. ‘At least I can live out the rest of my dead life as quietly as if I were already dead.’