And now I like to think about Dr Blount. Cant you hear him telling himself “it’s for the city, the citizens; I will derive nothing from it, not one jot more than any dweller in a tenement.” But the very fact that he had to argue the question with himself was an indication. Maybe it was partly because he could not tell the truth about it, yet he could not let the town believe a lie; maybe sometimes he believed it had been a dream, that he had dreamed the irrevocable words; perhaps now and then during that spring he could persuade himself so, thinking How could I have said yes? How could I? He had the stuff in him, you see, the old blood, the old sense of honor dead everywhere else in America except in the south and kept alive here by a few old ladies who acquiesced in ’65 but never surrendered.
So one evening—it was the day upon which the matter became incontrovertible, when upon the proposed site the metal sign unveiled its fresh lettering: … “Blount Memorial Art Gallery. Windham and Healy, Architects …” he went to call upon one of them who had for fifteen years been consulting him almost every time she raised a window. They had the stuff too, you see. Not that she advised him to do what he did; she probably laughed at him, with a little sympathy and a little contempt; perhaps that was what he couldn’t stand— So that evening he came to see Martin. He had aged ten years, Martin said, standing in the floor—he wouldn’t sit—and stating his errand baldly too: “I must ask you to let me withdraw from our agreement.”
“You mean—?” Martin said.
“Yes. Completely. On your part and my own.”
“The contract is let and the ground ready to be broken,” Martin said.
Blount made a short gesture. “I know.” From his inside pocket he took a sheaf of papers. “I have here bonds in the amount of fifty thousand dollars; they are all my own.” He came and laid them on the table at Martin’s hand. “If that is not enough, perhaps you would take my note for whatever the difference will be.”
Martin did not look at the bonds. “No,” he said.
Blount stood beside the table, his face lowered. “I dont think I have made myself clear. I mean—”
“You mean, whether I agree or not, you will take her name offen the ball list?” Blount did not answer. He stood beside the table. “You cant do that. If you did that, I’d have to explain hit all to the contractor, maybe to the newspapers. You hadn’t thought of that, had you?”
“Yes,” Blount said. “Yes, I had thought of that.”
“Then I dont know as there’s ere a thing we can do about hit. Do you?”
“No,” Blount said. He had picked up something from the table, then he put it down and turned, moving toward the door. He looked about the room. “Nice place you have here,” he said.
“Hit suits us,” Martin said. Blount went on toward the door, Martin watching him. “You done forgot your bonds,” he said. Blount turned. He came back and took up the bonds and put them carefully into his coat again.
“I wish I could make my position clear to you,” he said. “But if I could, you would not be you and it would not be necessary. And I would not be I, and it would not matter.”
He went out then, with the negro butler—who knew who he was—closing the door behind him, and Martin sitting in his sock feet in the cavern of a drawing room surrounded by the soundless and exultant chorting of his shades.
He was sitting that way in his office the next morning when I entered. “That was news, this morning,” I said.
“What was news?” he said. “I aint seen ere a paper yet.”
“What? You haven’t heard that Doctor Blount killed himself last night?”
“Doctor Blount? Well, I’ll be durned. So he lost that money, did he?”
“What money? He cant lose any money; their estate is managed by a lawyer.”
“What’d he kill himself for, then?” Martin said.
“That’s what a hundred thousand people have said since eight oclock this morning.”
“Well, I’ll be durned,” he said. “The pore, durn fool.”
There was no connection in his mind, you see. With his peasant’s innate and abashless distrust of all women, even his own, he could not imagine any man being concerned over the presence of one woman more or less anywhere, and as for a matter of personal honor.… But he had his own. Or maybe he was simply carrying out his part of the bargain. Anyway, work on the art gallery went on; by November, when the Sentinel published the yearly list of debutantes’ names, his daughter’s among them, the serene Attic shape of it stood outwardly complete against the sere foliage of the park.
And so two weeks ago he had read his daughter’s name where his conviction, his delusion, had printed it ten years ago, and he now sat in the single chair behind the desk, motionless as Govelli had left him, until the telephone rang. Still without changing his position he reached his hand and drew it to him and lifted the receiver. It was Govelli.
“Yes.… He’s out? and the car too? … Send it on out to my house and then you tell him what I said.” He put the receiver back. “Durn them wops,” he said. “I am a good mind.” He looked at the telephone, motionless. “I am yet,” he said. “Be durn if I aint.” He opened the drawer and took out the tin of snuff, the same tin that could have been found in ten thousand overalls within a ten mile radius of the city, and uncapped it and tilted a careful and meagre measure into the cap and thence into his outdrawn lower lip and replaced the tin, his lower lip bulged faintly like ten thousand others whose owners squatted on the gnawed verandas of lost country stores about the land.
He was still sitting there when the detective, the plain-clothes man, came in with the ticket, the summons. “It was one of them rookies,” the detective said. “He ought to known better. I told Hickey he ought to be fired for not knowing that yellow car, and if he hadn’t been learnt to know it, him and Hickey ought to both be fired.” From his shiny sloven serge coat he took a greasy bill fold and extracted the summons and laid it on the desk. “But the damn fool went on and wrote the ticket and made the pinch because she wouldn’t take it. He brought her in to the station, with her telling him all the time who she was. So Hickey jumped on him with both feet. But the ticket was already made out, and with them two reporters still hanging around there that come in with Popeye, and all these damn women yelling corruption and all.”
Martin looked down at the ticket, not touching it. That was the only thing she ever did that annoyed him. He hated clumsiness, you see, since notoriety always follows clumsiness, even if it’s just running past the stop lights. But every now and then she would do it, and I suppose that traffic cop was the only man in town that didn’t know that lemon roadster. He would tell her again and again that petty laws are the only ones that cannot be broken with impunity. Not in those words, of course. He probably preached her homilies on law observance which would not have been out of place in the Sunday School journals. But still she’d do it. Not often, but too often for him who, now that his ambition had been attained, could probably not understand how she could have the need to do anything at all save vegetate until that day in December had come and passed.
So he sat musing above the summons while the detective draped his thigh on the desk edge as Govelli had done, and removed his derby hat and took from the crown of it a half cigar and relit it. Since the south waked up about twenty-five years ago, our cities have been aping Chicago and New York. And we’ve done it, better than we thought. But we are blind; we dont realise that you can ape only the vices of your model, that virtue is accidental even with those who practise it. But there is still a kind of hearty clumsiness to our corruption, a kind of chaotic and exasperating innocence, and as he sat musing over the ticket he was probably thinking how much time he had to spend keeping the corruption running smooth, when they both heard the swift heels in the corridor and they looked up as the door opened and the daughter herself entered.
The detective slid from the desk and removed the cigar and lifted his hat. “Morning, Miss Wrennie,” he said. The girl looked at him once,
a glance swift, combative, alert, and came on to the desk and around it on the opposite side. Martin picked up the summons.
“Well,” he said, “that’s all. You can tell Hickey I’ll see to it.”
“I’ll tell him,” the detective said. “If it was just us, the little lady could run over all the lights, red, green, blue or purple. But you know how them reformers are when they get a chance to howl. If the women would just stay at home where they belong, they could find plenty to keep them out of mischief, I always say. But you know how they are, and then the newspapers get started.”
“Yes. I’ll see to it. Much obliged.” The detective went out. Martin laid the summons on the desk again and sat back. “I told you before,” he said, “that I wont have it. Why must you keep on doing it? You got time to stop for them.”
The girl stood beside the chair. “It changed while I was in the middle of the crossing. I.…” He was watching her. “I was in a hurry.…” He could watch her mind, anticipate her words as she cast swiftly here and there behind her little painted mask, her eyes too like darting mice.
“Where were you going in all that rush?”
“I—we—It was a luncheon party at the Gayoso. We were late.”
“We?”
“Yes. Jerry Sandeman.”
“He is in Birmingham now. The paper says so.”
“He came back last night.” She spoke in the light, swift, dry voice in which a child lies. “The luncheon was for him.”
He looked at her through that blindness, that stupidity which success gets upon itself. “Was it about the ball he came to see you?”
“The ball?” She looked at him across a gulf of something very like despair, harried, motionless, like a hunted animal at its last resource. “I dont want to go to it!” she cried in a thin faint voice. “I dont want to!”
“Now, now,” he said. He looked at the ticket again. “Them lights. It’s for your good too. Suppose you were to run over somebody. Suppose you were walking, shopping, and somebody run past it and run you down. You must remember there’s good in laws as well as bad. They work two ways, if you’d stop to think.”
“I will. I’ll be careful. I wont again.”
“See you dont, then.”
She leaned down and kissed his cheek. He did not move. He watched her cross the room, tap-tapping on her brittle heels, in her bright dress, her clashing beads. The door banged behind her. He wiped his cheek with his handkerchief and examined quietly the faint scarlet smear on the linen. Then he tore the ticket in two and dropped the pieces into the spittoon.
He was still sitting there a half hour later, motionless save for the slow thrust of his lower lip, when the telephone rang again. Again it was Govelli.
“What?” Martin said. “If it’s that durn hop-head again—”
“Wait,” Govelli said. “It’s a jam. Bad. He ran down a woman on the street. He was on the way out to your house with that stuff and she was in the street while the cop was helping her change a tire, and he caught her between the two cars. The cop that was helping her made the pinch right there.” Gripping the receiver, Martin cursed steadily while the faint voice went on: “… hurt pretty bad … ambulance … if they get to him and he talks.…”
“You stay right with him,” Martin said. “Dont let him open his mouth.” He clapped the receiver back and went swiftly to the safe and opened it and drew out a second telephone. He did not need to give a number. “One of Govelli’s boys just ran down a woman on the street. He’s at the station. Get him out of town at once.”
The wire hummed for a moment. Then the voice said: “It wont be easy this time. The papers are already—”
“Do you want the papers after you, or do you want me?”
Again there was silence for a moment. “All right. I’ll fix it.”
“And let me know. At once.”
He hung up, but he did not set the telephone down. He stood before the open safe, holding the telephone in his hand, motionless save for the slow movement of his chin, for almost twenty minutes. Then it rang.
“It’s fixed,” the voice said. “They got him out of town before he talked.”
“Good. What about the woman?”
“She’s at the Charity Hospital. I’ll let you know soon as I get a report.”
“Good.”
He put the telephone back in the safe and shut it. Then he opened it again and took out a bottle of whiskey and a tumbler. As he was pouring the drink he remembered the two cases which were to have been delivered to his house, now in Popeye’s car at the Police Station. “Durn them wops,” he said. He drank and returned to the desk and reached for the telephone there. As he did so it rang under his hand. It continued to ring for a long time while he waited, his hand poised above it, his lower lip thrusting slowly against his gums. Then it ceased and he lifted the receiver to his ear. It was the Charity Hospital, telling him that the girl had died without having regained consciousness, and that—
“The girl?” I said.
“The one Popeye ran over,” Don said. He looked at me. “Didn’t I tell you? It was his daughter.”
Dull Tale
I
Seated behind his bare, neat desk, Dr Blount looked at his caller. He saw a thick, broad man, a little bald, with a gray, impassive face and muddy eyes, in a cheap suit of unpressed serge and a slovenlytied cravat, carrying in his hand a stained hat of black felt. “You wanted to see me?” Blount said.
“You’re Dr Blount,” the other said.
“Yes,” Blount said. He looked at the man, his face interrogative and astonished. He glanced swiftly to both sides like a man seeking a weapon or an escape. “Will you sit down?”
The caller took the single straight-backed chair beyond the desk, his hat in his hand. They looked at one another; again Blount’s head made that quick, aside-jerking movement. “I reckon you dont know who I am,” the caller said.
“No,” Blount said. He sat rigid in his own chair, erect, watching the caller. “I cant—?”
“My name is Martin.” Blount made no sign, watching the caller. “Dal Martin.”
“Oh,” Blount said. “I remember the name now. In the newspapers. You are the politician. But I am afraid you have wasted your time in calling on me. I do not do any more general practice. You will have to—”
“I aint sick,” the caller said. He looked at Blount, thick, immobile, overflowing the narrow hard chair on which he sat. “I didn’t come for that. I reckon I know more about you than you do about me.”
“What did you come for?”
The caller did not cease to look at him, yet for the first time Blount let himself go easy in his chair, sitting easily, though he still watched the man with alert curiosity. “What do you want with me?”
“You are the president—” he said, presi-dent, like a countryman—” of this here Nonconnah soldier—”
“Oh. The Guards. Yes. I hold that office.” He watched the caller; his eyes narrowed, went blank with thought. “Yes. I remember now. You were concerned some way with the paving of Beauregard Avenue. You have come to me about our new armory. I will have to disappoint you; we—”
“It aint that,” Martin said.
“Not?” They looked at one another.
The caller talked in a slow, level, idiomatic voice, watching Blount steadily, his own face impassive. “I got money. I reckon you know that. It aint a secret. I got a daughter. She’s a good girl. But my wife is dead and we haint no kin in Memphis, no women to look out for her. Fix it for her to know the right folks and not know the wrong folks, like a woman could. Because I want her to get ahead. I give her a better start than I had, and I want her children to have a better start still. So I got to do the best I can.”
“Yes?” Blount said. He did not stiffen exactly, yet he began slowly to sit back and up in the chair, watching the gray face of the man opposite him across the desk. The caller talked, without haste, without emphasis.
“She’s right popular. Going out ever
y night, to balls at West End and them dance-houses on the edge of town. But that aint what I want for her.”
“What do you want for her?”
“The Nonconnah—”
“—Guards.”
“—Guards gives a ball every winter. Where the girls go, the dib—dib—”
“Debutantes,” Blount said.
“Debutantes. Yes. That’s what she called them, with their pictures in the paper. The ones whose folks lived in Memphis a long time, with the streets named after them. And the men too. Boys and young men. She is a good girl, even if I aint lived in Memphis all her life and aint got a street named Martin Avenue—not yet. But she lives in a house as fine as any of them. And I can build a street named Martin Avenue.”
“Ah,” Blount said.
“Yes. I can do anything in this town.”
“Ah,” Blount said.
“I aint bragging. I’m just telling you. Other folks in Memphis will tell you.”
“I dont doubt that,” Blount said. “I begin to remember more about you, now. One of your monuments is out near my home.”
“One of my monuments?”
“A street. It was laid three years ago and it lasted one year. Then they had to dig it up and lay it again.”
“Oh,” Martin said. “Wyatt Street. Them crooks. I fixed them. I burned them.”