‘Go back into that room and tell the nurse you’ll take your husband for a drive,’ he suggested.
‘I can’t.’
‘Oh, yes.’
Once more Luella looked at him, and knew that she would obey. With the conviction that her spirit was broken at last, she took up her suitcase and walked back through the hall.
V
The nature of the curious influence that Doctor Moon exerted upon her, Luella could not guess. But as the days passed she found herself doing many things that had been repugnant to her before. She stayed at home with Charles; and when he grew better, she went out with him sometimes to dinner, or the theatre, but only when he expressed a wish. She visited the kitchen every day, and kept an unwilling eye on the house, at first with a horror that it would go wrong again, then from habit. And she felt that it was all somehow mixed up with Doctor Moon – it was something he kept telling her about life, or almost telling her, and yet concealing from her, as though he were afraid to have her know.
With the resumption of their normal life, she found that Charles was less nervous. His habit of rubbing his face had left him, and if the world seemed less gay and happy to her than it had before, she experienced a certain peace, sometimes, that she had never known.
Then, one afternoon, Doctor Moon told her suddenly that he was going away.
‘Do you mean for good?’ she demanded with a touch of panic.
‘For good.’
For a strange moment she wasn’t sure whether she was glad or sorry.
‘You don’t need me any more,’ he said quietly. ‘You don’t realize it, but you’ve grown up.’
He came over and, sitting on the couch beside her, took her hand.
Luella sat silent and tense – listening.
‘We make an agreement with children that they can sit in the audience without helping to make the play,’ he said, ‘but if they still sit in the audience after they’re grown, somebody’s got to work double time for them, so that they can enjoy the light and glitter of the world.’
‘But I want the light and glitter,’ she protested. ‘That’s all there is in life. There can’t be anything wrong in wanting to have things warm.’
‘Things will still be warm.’
‘How?’
‘Things will warm themselves from you.’
Luella looked at him, startled.
‘It’s your turn to be the centre, to give others what was given to you for so long. You’ve got to give security to young people and peace to your husband, and a sort of charity to the old. You’ve got to let the people who work for you depend on you. You’ve got to cover up a few more troubles than you show, and be a little more patient than the average person, and do a little more instead of a little less than your share. The light and glitter of the world is in your hands.’
He broke off suddenly.
‘Get up,’ he said, ‘and go to that mirror and tell me what you see.’
Obediently, Luella got up and went close to a purchase of her honeymoon, a Venetian pier-glass on the wall.
‘I see new lines in my face here,’ she said, raising her finger and placing it between her eyes, ‘and a few shadows at the sides that might be – that are little wrinkles.’
‘Do you care?’
She turned quickly. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Do you realize that Chuck is gone? That you’ll never see him any more?’
‘Yes.’ She passed her hands slowly over her eyes. ‘But that all seems so vague and far away.’
‘Vague and far away,’ he repeated; and then: ‘And are you afraid of me now?’
‘Not any longer,’ she said, and she added frankly, ‘now that you’re going away.’
He moved toward the door. He seemed particularly weary tonight, as though he could hardly move about at all.
‘The household here is in your keeping,’ he said in a tired whisper. ‘If there is any light and warmth in it, it will be your light and warmth; if it is happy, it will be because you’ve made it so. Happy things may come to you in life, but you must never go seeking them any more. It is your turn to make the fire.’
‘Won’t you sit down a moment longer?’ Luella ventured.
‘There isn’t time.’ His voice was so low now that she could scarcely hear the words. ‘But remember that whatever suffering comes to you, I can always help you – if it is something that can be helped. I promise nothing.’
He opened the door. She must find out now what she most wanted to know, before it was too late.
‘What have you done to me?’ she cried. ‘Why have I no sorrow left for Chuck – for anything at all? Tell me; I almost see, yet I can’t see. Before you go – tell me who you are!’
‘Who am I? –’ His worn suit paused in the doorway. His round, pale face seemed to dissolve into two faces, a dozen faces, a score, each one different yet the same – sad, happy, tragic, indifferent, resigned – until threescore Doctor Moons were ranged like an infinite series of reflections, like months stretching into the vista of the past.
‘Who am I?’ he repeated; ‘I am five years.’
The door closed.
At six o’clock Charles Hemple came home, and as usual Luella met him in the hall. Except that now his hair was dead white, his long illness of two years had left no mark upon him. Luella herself was more noticeably changed – she was a little stouter, and there were those lines around her eyes that had come when Chuck died one evening back in 1921. But she was still lovely, and there was a mature kindness about her face at twenty-eight, as if suffering had touched her only reluctantly and then hurried away.
‘Ede and her husband are coming to dinner,’ she said. ‘I’ve got theatre tickets, but if you’re tired, I don’t care whether we go or not.’
‘I’d like to go.’
She looked at him.
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘I really would.’
‘We’ll see how you feel after dinner.’
He put his arm around her waist. Together they walked into the nursery where the two children were waiting up to say goodnight.
The Dance
All my life I have had a rather curious horror of small towns: not suburbs; they are quite a different matter – but the little lost cities of New Hampshire and Georgia and Kansas, and upper New York. I was born in New York City, and even as a little girl I never had any fear of the streets or the strange foreign faces – but on the occasions when I’ve been in the sort of place I’m referring to, I’ve been oppressed with the consciousness that there was a whole hidden life, a whole series of secret implications, significances and terrors, just below the surface, of which I knew nothing. In the cities everything good or bad eventually comes out, comes out of people’s hearts, I mean. Life moves about, moves on, vanishes. In the small towns – those between 5,000 and 25,000 people – old hatreds, old and unforgotten affairs, ghostly scandals and tragedies, seem unable to die, but live on all tangled up with the ebb and flow of outward life.
Nowhere has this sensation come over me more insistently than in the south. Once out of Atlanta and Birmingham and New Orleans, I often have the feeling that I can no longer communicate with the people around me. The men and the girls speak a language wherein courtesy is combined with violence, fanatic morality with corn-drinking recklessness, in a fashion which I can’t understand. In Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain described some of those towns perched along the Mississippi River, with their fierce feuds and their equally fierce revivals – and some of them haven’t fundamentally changed beneath their new surface of flibbers and radios. They are deeply uncivilized to this day.
I speak of the South because it was in a small southern city of this type that I once saw the surface crack for a minute and something savage, uncanny and frightening rear its head. Then the surface closed again – and when I have gone back there since, I’ve been surprised to find myself as charmed as ever by the magnolia trees and the singing darkies in the street and the sensuous warm nights. I
have been charmed, too, by the bountiful hospitality and the languorous easy-going outdoor life and the almost universal good manners. But all too frequently I am the prey of a vivid nightmare that recalls what I experienced in that town five years ago.
Davis – that is not its real name – has a population of about 20,000 people, one-third of them coloured. It is a cotton-mill town, and the workers of that trade, several thousand and gaunt and ignorant ‘poor whites’, live together in an ill-reputed section known as ‘Cotton Hollow’. The population of Davis has varied in its seventy-five years. Once it was under consideration for the capital of the State, and so the older families and their kin form a little aristocracy, even when individually they have sunk to destitution.
That winter I’d made the usual round in New York until about April, when I decided I never wanted to see another invitation again. I was tired and I wanted to go to Europe for a rest; but the baby panic of 1921 hit father’s business, and so it was suggested that I go South and visit Aunt Musidora Hale instead.
Vaguely I imagined that I was going to the country, but on the day I arrived the Davis Courier published a hilarious old picture of me on its society page, and I found I was in for another season. On a small scale, of course: there were Saturday-night dances at the little country-club with its nine-hole golf-course, and some informal dinner parties and several attractive and attentive boys. I didn’t have a dull time at all, and when after three weeks I wanted to go home, it wasn’t because I was bored. On the contrary I wanted to go home because I’d allowed myself to get rather interested in a young man named Charley Kincaid, without realizing that he was engaged to another girl.
We’d been drawn together from the first because he was almost the only boy in town who’d gone North to college, and I was still young enough to think that America revolved around Harvard and Princeton and Yale. He liked me too – I could see that; but when I heard that his engagement to a girl named Marie Bannerman had been announced six months before, there was nothing for me except to go away. The town was too small to avoid people, and though so far there hadn’t been any talk, I was sure that – well, that if we kept meeting, the emotion we were beginning to feel would somehow get into words. I’m not mean enough to take a man away from another girl.
Marie Bannerman was almost a beauty. Perhaps she would have been a beauty if she’d had any clothes, and if she hadn’t used bright pink rouge in two high spots on her cheeks and powdered her nose and chin to a funereal white. Her hair was shining black; her features were lovely; and an affection of one eye kept it always half-closed and gave an air of humourous mischief to her face.
I was leaving on a Monday, and on Saturday night a crowd of us dined at the country-club as usual before the dance. There was Joe Cable, the son of a former governor, a handsome dissipated and yet somehow charming young man; Catherine Jones, a pretty, sharp-eyed girl with an exquisite figure, who under her rouge might have been any age from eighteen to twenty-five; Marie Bannerman; Charley Kincaid; myself and two or three others.
I loved to listen to the genial flow of bizarre neighbourhood anecdote at this kind of party. For instance, one of the girls, together with her entire family, had that afternoon been evicted from her house for non-payment of rent. She told the story wholly without self-consciousness, merely as something troublesome but amusing. And I loved the banter which presumed every girl to be infinitely beautiful and attractive, and every man to have been secretly and hopelessly in love with every girl present from their respective cradles.
‘We liked to die laughin” … ‘– said he was fixin’ to shoot him without he stayed away.’ The girls ‘clared to heaven’; the men ‘took oath’ on inconsequential statements. ‘How come you nearly about forgot to come by for me –’ and the incessant Honey, Honey, Honey, Honey, until the word seemed to roll like a genial liquid from heart to heart.
Outside, the May night was hot, a still night, velvet, soft-pawed, splattered thick with stars. It drifted heavy and sweet into the large room where we sat and where we would later dance, with no sound in it except the occasional long crunch of an arriving car on the drive. Just at that moment I hated to leave Davis as I never had hated to leave a town before – I felt that I wanted to spend my life in this town, drifting and dancing forever through these long, hot, romantic nights.
Yet horror was already hanging over that little party, was waiting tensely among us, an uninvited guest, and telling off the hours until it could show its pale and blinding face. Beneath the chatter and laughter something was going on, something secret and obscure that I didn’t know.
Presently the coloured orchestra arrived, followed by the first trickle of the dance crowd. An enormous red-faced man in muddy knee boots and with a revolver strapped around his waist, clumped in and paused for a moment at our table before going upstairs to the locker-room. It was Bill Abercrombie, the sheriff, the son of Congressman Abercrombie. Some of the boys asked him half-whispered questions, and he replied in an attempt at an undertone.
‘Yes … He’s in the swamp all right; farmer saw him near the crossroads store … Like to have a shot at him myself.’
I asked the boy next to me what was the matter.
‘Nigger case,’ he said, ‘over in Kisco, about two miles from here. He’s hiding in the swamp, and they’re going in after him tomorrow.’
‘What’ll they do to him?’
‘Hang him, I guess.’
The notion of the forlorn darky crouching dismally in a desolate bog waiting for dawn and death depressed me for a moment. Then the feeling passed and was forgotten.
After dinner Charley Kincaid and I walked out on the veranda – he had just heard that I was going away. I kept as close to the others as I could, answering his words but not his eyes – something inside me was protesting against leaving him on such a casual note. The temptation was strong to let something flicker up between us here at the end. I wanted him to kiss me – my heart promised that if he kissed me, just once, it would accept with equanimity the idea of never seeing him any more; but my mind knew it wasn’t so.
The other girls began to drift inside and upstairs to the dressing-room to improve their complexions, and with Charley still beside me, I followed. Just at that moment I wanted to cry – perhaps my eyes were already blurred, or perhaps it was my haste lest they should be, but I opened the door of a small card-room by mistake and with my error the tragic machinery of the night began to function. In the card-room, not five feet from us, stood Marie Bannerman, Charley’s fiancée, and Joe Cable. They were in each other’s arms, absorbed in a passionate and oblivious kiss.
I closed the door quickly and without glancing at Charley opened the right door and ran upstairs.
A few minutes later Marie Bannerman entered the crowded dressing-room. She saw me and came over, smiling in a sort of mock despair, but she breathed quickly, and the smile trembled a little on her mouth.
‘You won’t say a word, honey, will you?’ she whispered.
‘Of course not.’ I wondered how that could matter, now that Charley Kincaid knew.
‘Who else was it that saw us?’
‘Only Charley Kincaid and I.’
‘Oh!’ She looked a little puzzled; then she added: ‘He didn’t wait to say anything, honey. When we came out he was just going out the door. I thought he was going to wait and romp all over Joe.’
‘How about his romping all over you?’ I couldn’t help asking.
‘Oh, he’ll do that.’ She laughed wryly. ‘But, honey, I know how to handle him. It’s just when he’s first mad that I’m scared of him – he’s got an awful temper.’ She whistled reminiscently. ‘I know, because this happened once before.’
I wanted to slap her. Turning my back, I walked away on the pretext of borrowing a pin from Katie, the Negro maid. Catherine Jones was claiming the latter’s attention with a short gingham garment which needed repair.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Dancing-dress,’ she answ
ered shortly, her mouth full of pins. When she took them out, she added: ‘It’s all come to pieces – I’ve used it so much.’
‘Are you going to dance here tonight?’
‘Going to try.’
Somebody had told me that she wanted to be a dancer – that she had taken lessons in New York.
‘Can I help you fix anything?’
‘No, thanks – unless – can you sew? Katie gets so excited Saturday night that she’s no good for anything except fetching pins. I’d be everlasting grateful to you, honey.’
I had reasons for not wanting to go downstairs just yet, and so I sat down and worked on her dress for half an hour. I wondered if Charley had gone home, if I would ever see him again – I scarcely dared to wonder if what he had seen would set him free, ethically. When I went down finally he was not in sight.
The room was now crowded; the tables had been removed and dancing was general. At that time, just after the war, all Southern boys had a way of agitating their heels from side to side, pivoting on the ball of the foot as they danced, and to acquiring this accomplishment I had devoted many hours. There were plenty of stags, almost all of them cheerful with corn-liquor; I refused on an average at least two drinks a dance. Even when it is mixed with a soft drink, as is the custom, rather than gulped from the neck of a warm bottle, it is a formidable proposition. Only a few girls like Catherine Jones took an occasional sip from some boy’s flask down at the dark end of the veranda.
I liked Catherine Jones – she seemed to have more energy than these other girls, though Aunt Musidora sniffed rather contemptuously whenever Catherine stopped for me in her car to go to the movies, remarking that she guessed ‘the bottom rail had gotten to be the top rail now’. Her family were ‘new and common’, but it seemed to be that perhaps her very commonness was an asset. Almost every girl in Davis confided in me at one time or another that her ambition was to ‘get away to New York’, but only Catherine Jones had actually taken the step of studying stage dancing with that end in view.
The Fantasy and Mystery Stories of F Scott Fitzgerald Page 18