Mrs. King and Louise arrived for the prom. Mrs. King was a gray woman, with a cold, severe face, not harsh, but watchful, alert. It was as though Jarrod saw Louise, too, for the first time. Until then he had not been aware that he was conscious of the beyond-looking quality. It was only now that he saw it by realizing how it had become tenser, as though it were now both dread and desire; as though with the approach of summer she were approaching a climax, a crisis. So he thought that she was ill.
“Maybe we ought to be married right away,” he said to Mrs. King. “I don’t want a degree, anyway.” They were allies now, not yet antagonists, though he had not told her of the two Saint Louis expeditions, the one he knew of and the one he suspected. It was as though he did not need to tell her. It was as though he knew that she knew; that she knew he knew she knew.
“Yes,” she said. “At once.”
But that was as far as it got, though when Louise and Mrs. King left New Haven, Louise had his ring. But it was not on her hand, and on her face was that strained, secret, beyond-looking expression which he now knew was beyond him too, and the effigy and shape which the oil wells and Yale had made. “Till July, then,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll write. I’ll write you when to come.”
And that was all. He went back to his clubs, his classes; in psychology especially he listened. “It seems I’m going to need psychology,” he thought, thinking of the dark, small house in Saint Louis, the blank, dark door through which, running, she had disappeared. That was it: a man he had never seen, never heard of, shut up in a little dingy house on a back street on Christmas eve. He thought, fretfully, “And me young, with money, a Yale man. And I don’t even know his name.”
Once a week he wrote to Louise; perhaps twice a month he received replies—brief, cold notes mailed always at a different place—resorts and hotels—until mid-June, within a week of Commencement and his degree. Then he received a wire. It was from Mrs. King. It said Come at once and the location was Cranston’s Wells, Mississippi. It was a town he had never heard of.
That was Friday; thirty minutes later his roommate came in and found him packing. “Going to town?” the roommate said.
“Yes,” Jarrod said.
“I’ll go with you. I need a little relaxation myself, before facing the cheering throngs at the Dean’s altar.”
“No,” Jarrod said. “This is business.”
“Sure,” the roommate said. “I know a business woman in New York, myself. There’s more than one in that town.”
“No,” Jarrod said. “Not this time.”
“Beano,” the roommate said.
The place was a resort owned by a neat, small, gray spinster who had inherited it, and some of the guests as well, from her father thirty years ago—a rambling frame hotel and a housed spring where old men with pouched eyes and parchment skin and old women dropsical with good living gathered from the neighboring Alabama and Mississippi towns to drink the iron-impregnated waters. This was the place where Louise had been spending her summers since she was born; and from the veranda of the hotel where the idle old women with their idle magazines and embroidery and their bright shawls had been watching each summer the comedy of which he was just learning, he could see the tips of the crepe myrtle copse hiding the bench on which the man whom he had come to fear, and whose face he had not even seen, had been sitting all day long for three months each summer for more than fifteen years.
So he stood beside the neat, gray proprietress on the top step in the early sunlight, while the old women went to and fro between house and spring, watching him with covert, secret, bright, curious looks, “Watching Louise’s young man compete with a dead man and a horse,” Jarrod thought.
But his face did not show this. It showed nothing at all, not even a great deal of intelligence as, tall, erect, in flannels and a tweed jacket in the Mississippi June, where the other men wore linen when they wore coats at all, he talked with the proprietress about the man whose face he had not seen and whose name he had just learned.
“It’s his heart,” the proprietress said to Jarrod. “He has to be careful. He had to give up his practice and everything. He hasn’t any people and he has just enough money to come down here every summer and spend the summer sitting on his bench; we call it Doctor Martino’s bench. Each summer I think it will be the last time; that we shan’t see him again. But each May I get the message from him, the reservation. And do you know what I think? I think that it is Louise King that keeps him alive. And that Alvina King is a fool.”
“How a fool?” Jarrod said.
The proprietress was watching him—this was the morning after his arrival; looking down at her he thought at first, “She is wondering how much I have heard, how much they have told me.” Then he thought, “No. It’s because she stays busy. Not like them, those others with their magazines. She has to stay too busy keeping them fed to have learned who I am, or to have been thinking all this time what the others have been thinking.”
She was watching him. “How long have you known Louise?”
“Not long. I met her at a dance at school.”
“Oh. Well, I think that the Lord has taken pity on Doctor Martino and He is letting him use Louise’s heart, somehow. That’s what I think. And you can laugh if you want to.”
“I’m not laughing,” Jarrod said. “Tell me about him.”
She told him, watching his face, her air bright, birdlike, telling him about how the man had appeared one June, in his crumpled linen and panama hat, and about his eyes. (“They looked like shoe-buttons. And when he moved it was as slow as if he had to keep on telling himself, even after he had started moving, ‘Go on, now; keep on moving, now.’ ”) And about how he signed the book in script almost too small to read: Jules Martino, Saint Louis, Missouri. And how after that year he came back each June, to sit all day long on the bench in the crepe myrtle copse, where the old Negro porter would fetch him his mail: the two medical journals, the Saint Louis paper, and the two letters from Louise King—the one in June saying that she would arrive next week, and the one in late August saying that she had reached home. But the proprietress didn’t tell how she would walk a little way down the path three or four times a day to see if he were all right, and he not aware of it; and watching her while she talked, Jarrod thought, “What rivers has he made you swim, I wonder?”
“He had been coming here for three years,” the proprietress said, “without knowing anybody, without seeming to want to know anybody, before even I found out about his heart. But he kept on coming (I forgot to say that Alvina King was already spending the summer here, right after Louise was born) and then I noticed how he would always be sitting where he could watch Louise playing, and so I thought that maybe he had lost his child. That was before he told me that he had never married and he didn’t have any family at all. I thought that was what attracted him to Louise. And so I would watch him while he watched Louise growing up. I would see them talking, and him watching her year after year, and so after a while I said to myself. ‘He wants to be married. He’s waiting for Louise to grow up.’ That’s what I thought then.” The proprietress was not looking at Jarrod now. She laughed a little. “My Lord, I’ve thought a lot of foolishness in my time.”
“I don’t know that that was so foolish,” Jarrod said.
“Maybe not. Louise would make anybody a wife to be proud of. And him being all alone, without anybody to look after him when he got old.” The proprietress was beyond fifty herself. “I reckon I’ve passed the time when I believe it’s important whether women get married or not. I reckon, running this place single-handed this way, I’ve come to believe it ain’t very important what anybody does, as long as they are fed good and have a comfortable bed.” She ceased. For a time she seemed to muse upon the shade-dappled park, the old women clotting within the marquee above the spring.
“Did he make her do things, then?” Jarrod said.
“You’ve been listening to Alvina King,” the propr
ietress said. “He never made her do anything. How could he? He never left that bench. He never leaves it. He would just sit there and watch her playing, until she began to get too old to play in the dirt. Then they would talk, sitting on the bench there. How could he make her do things, even if he had wanted to?”
“I think you are right,” Jarrod said. “Tell me about when she swam the river.”
“Oh, yes. She was always afraid of water. But one summer she learned to swim, learned by herself, in the pool. He wasn’t even there. Nor at the river either. He didn’t know about that until we knew it. He just told her not to be afraid, ever. And what’s the harm in that, will you tell me?”
“None,” Jarrod said.
“No,” the proprietress said, as though she were not listening, had not heard him. “So she came in and told me, and I said, ‘With the snakes and all, weren’t you afraid?’ And she said:
“ ‘Yes. I was afraid. That’s why I did it.’
“ ‘Why you did it?’ I said. And she said:
“ ‘When you are afraid to do something you know that you are alive. But when you are afraid to do what you are afraid of you are dead.’
“ ‘I know where you got that,’ I said. ‘I’ll be bound he didn’t swim the river too.’ And she said:
“ ‘He didn’t have to. Every time he wakes up in the morning he does what I had to swim the river to do. This is what I got for doing it: see?’ And she took something on a string out of the front of her dress and showed it to me. It was a rabbit made out of metal or something, about an inch tall, like you buy in the ten-cent stores. He had given it to her.
“ ‘What does that mean?’ I said.
“ ‘That’s my being afraid,’ she said. ‘A rabbit: don’t you see? But it’s brass now; the shape of being afraid, in brass that nothing can hurt. As long as I keep it I am not even afraid of being afraid.’
“ ‘And if you are afraid,’ I said, ‘then what?’
“ ‘Then I’ll give it back to him,’ she said. And what’s the harm in that, pray tell me? even though Alvina King always has been a fool. Because Louise came back in about an hour. She had been crying. She had the rabbit in her hand. ‘Will you keep this for me?’ she said. ‘Don’t let anybody have it except me. Not anybody. Will you promise?’
“And I promised, and I put the rabbit away for her. She asked me for it just before they left. That was when Alvina said they were not coming back the next summer. ‘This foolishness is going to end,’ she said. ‘He will get her killed; he is a menace.’
“And, sure enough, next summer they didn’t come. I heard that Louise was sick, and I knew why. I knew that Alvina had driven her into sickness, into bed. But Doctor Jules came in June. ‘Louise has been right sick,’ I told him.
“ ‘Yes,’ he said; ‘I know.’ So I thought he had heard, that she had written to him. But then I thought how she must have been too sick to write, and that that fool mother of hers anyway …” The proprietress was watching Jarrod. “Because she wouldn’t have to write him.”
“Wouldn’t have to?”
“He knew she was sick. He knew it. She didn’t have to write him. Now you’ll laugh.”
“I’m not laughing. How did he know?”
“He knew. Because I knew he knew; and so when he didn’t go on back to Saint Louis, I knew that she would come. And so in August they did come. Louise had grown a lot taller, thinner, and that afternoon I saw them standing together for the first time. She was almost as tall as he was. That was when I first saw that Louise was a woman. And now Alvina worrying about that horse that Louise says she’s going to ride.”
“It’s already killed one man,” Jarrod said.
“Automobiles have killed more than that. But you ride in an automobile, yourself. You came in one. It never hurt her when she swam that river, did it?”
“But this is different. How do you know it won’t hurt her?”
“I just know.”
“How know?”
“You go out there where you can see that bench. Don’t bother him; just go and look at him. Then you’ll know too.”
“Well, I’d want a little more assurance than that,” Jarrod said.
He had returned to Mrs. King. With Louise he had had one interview, brief, violent, bitter. That was the night before; to-day she had disappeared. “Yet he is still sitting there on that bench,” Jarrod thought. “She’s not even with him. They don’t even seem to have to be together: he can tell all the way from Mississippi to Saint Louis when she is sick. Well, I know who’s in the blind spot now.”
Mrs. King was in her room. “It seems that my worst competitor is that horse,” Jarrod said.
“Can’t you see he is making her ride it for the same reason he made her swim that snake-filled river? To show that he can, to humiliate me?”
“What can I do?” Jarrod said. “I tried to talk to her last night. But you saw where I got.”
“If I were a man, I shouldn’t have to ask what to do. If I saw the girl I was engaged to being ruined, ruined by a man, any man, and a man I never saw before and don’t even know who he is—old or not old; heart or no heart …”
“I’ll talk to her again.”
“Talk?” Mrs. King said. “Talk? Do you think I sent you that message to hurry down here just to talk to her?”
“You wait, now,” Jarrod said. “It’ll be all right. I’ll attend to this.”
He had to do a good bit of waiting, himself. It was nearly noon when Louise entered the empty lobby where he sat. He rose. “Well?”
They looked at each other. “Well?”
“Are you still going to ride that horse this afternoon?” Jarrod asked.
“I thought we settled this last night. But you’re still meddling. I didn’t send for you to come down here.”
“But I’m here. I never thought, though, that I was being sent for to compete with a horse.” She watched him, her eyes hard. “With worse than a horse. With a damned dead man. A man that’s been dead for twenty years; he says so himself, they tell me. And he ought to know, being a doctor, a heart specialist. I suppose you keep him alive by scaring him—like strychnine, Florence Nightingale.” She watched him, her face quite still, quite cold. “I’m not jealous,” he went on. “Not of that bird. But when I see him making you ride that horse that has already killed …” He looked down at her cold face. “Don’t you want to marry me, Louise?”
She ceased to look at him. “It’s because we are young yet. We have so much time, all the rest of time. And maybe next year even, this very day next year, with everything pretty and warm and green, and he will be … You don’t understand. I didn’t at first, when he first told me how it was to live day after day with a match box full of dynamite caps in your breast pocket. Then he told me one day, when I was big enough to understand, how there is nothing in the world but living, being alive, knowing you are alive. And to be afraid is to know you are alive, but to do what you are afraid of, then you live. He says it’s better even to be afraid than to be dead. He told me all that while he was still afraid, before he gave up the being afraid and he knew he was alive without living. And now he has even given that up, and now he is just afraid. So what can I do?”
“Yes. And I can wait, because I haven’t got a match box of dynamite caps in my shirt. Or a box of conjuring powder, either.”
“I don’t expect you to see. I didn’t send for you. I didn’t want to get you mixed up in it.”
“You never thought of that when you took my ring. Besides, you had already got me mixed up in it, the first night I ever saw you. You never minded then. So now I know a lot I didn’t know before. And what does he think about that ring, by the way?” She didn’t answer. She was not looking at him; neither was her face averted. After a time he said, “I see. He doesn’t know about the ring. You never showed it to him.” Still she didn’t answer, looking neither at him nor away. “All right,” he said “I’ll give you one more chance.”
She looked at him. ??
?One more chance for what?” Then she said, “Oh. The ring. You want it back.” He watched her, erect, expressionless, while she drew from inside her dress a slender cord on which was suspended the ring and a second object which he recognized in the flicking movement which broke the cord, to be the tiny metal rabbit of which the proprietress had told him. Then it was gone, and her hand flicked again, and something struck him a hard, stinging blow on the cheek. She was already running toward the stairs. After a time he stooped and picked up the ring from the floor. He looked about the lobby. “They’re all down at the spring,” he thought, holding the ring on his palm. “That’s what people come here for: to drink water.”
They were there, clotting in the marquee above the well, with their bright shawls and magazines. As he approached, Mrs. King came quickly out of the group, carrying one of the stained tumblers in her hand. “Yes?” she said. “Yes?” Jarrod extended his hand on which the ring lay. Mrs. King looked down at the ring, her face cold, quiet, outraged. “Sometimes I wonder if she can be my daughter. What will you do now?”
Jarrod, too, looked down at the ring, his face also cold, still. “At first I thought I just had to compete with a horse,” he said. “But it seems there is more going on here than I knew of, than I was told of.”
“Fiddlesticks,” Mrs. King said. “Have you been listening to that fool Lily Cranston, to these other old fools here?”
“Not to learn any more than everybody else seems to have known all the time. But then, I’m only the man she was engaged to marry.” He looked down at the ring. “What do you think I had better do now?”
“If you’re a man that has to stop to ask advice from a woman in a case like this, then you’d better take the advice and take your ring and go on back to Nebraska or Kansas or wherever it is.”
“Oklahoma,” Jarrod said sullenly. He closed his hand on the ring. “He’ll be on that bench,” he said.
“Why shouldn’t he?” Mrs. King said. “He has no one to fear here.”